July 18, 2024
From July 18th to July 25th, we attended the EASA conference, which was held in Barcelona this time. As part of the research group (Tr)African(t)s, I had the opportunity to participate in the panel “Doing provenance research otherwise. From undoing colonial epistemologies to pluralising knowledge with museum collections.” This panel aimed to reconfigure provenance research beyond Western academic epistemologies and to diversify the production of knowledge on and with collections from colonial contexts.
The presentations were quite diverse, featuring different study methodologies that together led to a very thought-provoking reflection. Duane Jethro’s narrative repositioned all of us and offered a new foundation on which to continue working.
Together with Sarai Martin, we presented the paper “The Paradoxes of Collaboration: Limits and Possibilities of Participatory Techniques in Revisiting the Colonial Legacy in Catalan Museums,” a work that explores research in provenance studies through the Traficants Project. It critiques colonial practices in museums, focusing on the Guinean collection at the Catalan Museum of Ethnology, and examines how collaborative techniques can challenge neocolonial discourses in museums and academia.