Stepping foot inside a museum can often feel like stepping into a space of almost uncanny sanctity and silence. You may imagine this sacred atmosphere emanates purely and naturally from the artworks or artefacts themselves but, of course, all museums and galleries are carefully curated and constructed experiences.
In her newest book, A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonising the Museum (published by Pluto Press), Senior Fellow Researcher and activist Françoise Vergès details how Western museums have worked for the past centuries to cloak themselves with the decoy of universality, preservation and propriety to hide what festers in their basements – centuries of colonial crimes, human remains, riches born of the slave trade and the fruits of extraction, exploitation and dispossession.
In the last few years, talks of reparation and restitution have fueled the debate surrounding museums. Most people understand that Western institutions such as the Louvre, the British Museum and the Met have grown powerful due to artefacts and art stolen from the Global South. Over the last decades, nations have been asking for their looted objects back — 90,000 African objects are stuck in French museums. Europe has started, albeit at a snail’s pace, ineptly and reluctantly, to relinquish a couple of objects to their original birthplaces to appease tensions.
A Programme of Absolute Disorder begins its inquiry by highlighting how the question of restitution is only the tip of the iceberg. Françoise Vergès sees it as a necessary beginning, a threshold that must be crossed. But to her, the real combat, the real act of decolonisation, lies in uncovering the truth of the Western museum, brandishing a mirror to its face, forcing it to acknowledge its crimes, tearing its semblance of civility – its masquerade of universality – apart. Vergès quickly sets the question of restitution aside to raise a bigger imperative: implementing a programme of absolute disorder into the decolonisation of the museum to avoid turning the word into an “empty aesthetic” or “a metaphor”.
The book sets out to explore what a programme of absolute disorder entails and requires by giving concrete examples of decolonial tactics before drawing the sketches of what an anti-racist post-museum space would look like, one that would reject the Western model of exhibition and preservation.
“Working on colonial slavery and colonialism, I was inevitably interested in the visual culture and representations of these two regimes,” Françoise Vergès tells Dazed. “I studied the important role images – paintings, drawings, photography and, later, cinema – play in the process of racialisation and dehumanisation of Black people, Muslim, Asian, Indigenous women, children and men. The museum was a perfect place to explore the ways in which the systemic violence of exploitation and dispossession had been neutralised, how paintings of exotic landscapes, of life in the colony could represent a peaceful life.”
Looting, which was also done for profit, was justified in the name of preserving art for all humanity. The argument was that non-western people had no understanding of preservation and heritage – Françoise Vergès
Vergès locates the crime of the museum in its very birth — an institution born out of 18th century Euro-Enlightenment and its colonial enterprise, only sustained through dispossession, extraction, appropriation, genocide and profits of the slave trade. Vergès shatters the illusion of the civilised and peaceful museum by instead painting it as “a vast tomb whose anonymous dead remain without sepulchres”, a morgue “depriving peoples and communities of their mourning and their riches.”
The Western museum is not only a place where looted artefacts and human remains are exhibited behind glass, it is “a powerful tool of domination (…) which has succeeded in being presented as the sacred Temple of Beauty, a space for meditation, protected from the chaos of the world.” In writing A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonising the Museum, Vergès aims to put an end to the Western museum’s delusion of neutrality by exposing its aim — to “perform the grandeur of the nation-state”, and promote the white European ‘civilising mission’ in which their museums would be best equipped and more legitimate to become “a depository of riches from all cultures” where the ‘history of humanity’ would be preserved.
“Looting, which was also done for profit, was justified in the name of preserving art for all humanity,” she tells me. “The argument was that non-Western people had no understanding of preservation and heritage. Europe gave itself the mission of conservation, preservation and transmission based on a Eurocentered art history and mapping of the world.”
Such European illusion of grandeur and utopian universalism were penned down in the Value of the Universal Museum, a manifesto signed by the biggest Western museums in 2002 following the increased demands for restitution of looted artefacts: “Museums serve not just the citizens of one nation but the people of every nation. (...) Museums are in the service of humanity.” Their other argument lay in the idea that because Europe has preserved these artefacts for hundreds of years it should be able to keep them. But “it is not because a thief has taken care of the object they stole from me that I have to let them keep it”, writes Vergès.
The museum was a perfect place to explore the ways in which the systemic violence of exploitation and dispossession had been neutralised – Françoise Vergès
The book traces the source of Western exceptionalism and universalism to the “greatest museum in the universe, unrivalled in size and prestige” – the Louvre. A chapter is dedicated to its paradox: born out of the French Revolution, it is the fruit of looting carried out by the revolutionary and Napoleonian armies under the guise of freedom. The idea was to justify the dispossession of dozens of countries through the revolutionary dogma of returning to the people Art freed from tyrannical governments.
“Looting and destruction of art are not something from the past, it is happening now,” she reminds us. “Immediately following the Russian invasion, ICOM organised the protection of Ukrainian art, in Gaza, there has been no strong condemnation and protest by Western museums nor offers to save and protect Palestinian art and sites. Yet, as of February 2024, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Culture, out of a total of 320, 207 museums, historical and archaeological sites of extreme importance had been reduced to rubble by Israeli bombing, their collections lost, looted or their fate unknown. Palestinian artists have been killed and their work wiped out.”
Looting and destruction of art are not something from the past, it is happening now – Françoise Vergès
Considering the possibility of decolonised museums existing in the future, Vergès says, “Imagining an anticolonial museum today would mean explaining what anticolonialism is in the current context, making visible the ideology and politics of settler colonialism as they are deployed today and the persisting model of the plantation.” But she is tentatively optimistic. “Currently, there are around the world numerous experiments with forms of ‘museum’ that eschew the Western model of accumulation, toxic conservation and appropriation, reject the injunction to separate the object from its environment and seek to answer the diverse needs of a community and to remain dynamic.”
What can we, as art lovers, do to further this agenda? “The first step for art lovers and those who, like me, visit museums whatever their size and their collection?” she answers. “Fight for social, racial, gender justice in the institution and work collectively to open imagination and experiment with the ‘post-museum’. Don’t forget joy!”
Françoise Vergès’ A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonising the Museum is published by Pluto Press and available in your local independent bookshop now.