COLUMN: SPOTLIGHT
BY: FRANCESCA CARANDANG
I teach a Film class, where we recently watched Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). A recurring image in the film was a black everything bagel. I asked my students what the bagel means to them. They answered ‘family, absurdity, trauma…’ the list goes on. A mundane object on its own, but in each students’ eyes, it became something more. Perhaps the directors’ intentions were completely different from my students’ readings, but it does not make their response any less valuable.
As film depends on images to contextualize a story to audiences, museums depend on text and categorization to contextualize histories of artifacts. Curators have the responsibility to guide the audience’s understanding of artifacts. However, the curator’s intentions do not always align with audience readings, especially when working with objects that have questionable pasts. Rather than thinking of museums as holders of knowledge, we can instead use them as spaces for opening conversations between curators and audiences.
When these conversations do not happen, examples such as the Royal Ontario Museum’s (ROM) 1989, The Heart of Africa exhibit are bound to happen. The curator intended to critique 19th-century colonialism, and the exhibit was a collection of artifacts originating from Africa, taken by white Canadian missionaries and soldiers. However, because it centered the stories of missionaries and soldiers rather than the community that the artifacts belonged to, the exhibit instead glorified what it was trying to critique. There was no apology for the exhibit until 2016.
When a barrier is placed between the past and present, it shuts down conversations of how history affects today’s world. Curators have the responsibility to provide context of a historical moment by choosing which objects and information to display. But what happens when only so much context can be provided in the space of the museum? How can these narratives change when affected communities are given the space to speak?
One step forward in allowing cultural objects to have a life outside the museum, especially when the return of artifacts to their respective communities is difficult or impossible, can be to acknowledge history as an ongoing conversation. As a student, over the years, conversations as a way of learning have become more and more prevalent. With conversations, the sharing of knowledge is not through the lens of one person, but multiple people sharing their experiences, their thoughts, and topics that they found most important. Opening conversations about history and artifacts in the museum space not only allows them to exist outside the museum, but also allows members of respective communities to have a choice in representing their culture, sharing experiences, and to be heard.
From my experience of being a Teaching Assistant, I may be the one teaching, but I learn so much just from listening to my students. They have offered me insight into films that I would never have thought of, despite my years of studying film. In institutions that interact with knowledge, such as the museum, conversations are a step towards dismantling the idea that one person or one institution has the power to insert meaning onto an object, an image, or a text. Perhaps you have also learnt something new, simply by having a conversation with a friend, family, co-worker, or even a student. So much knowledge can be found beyond a textbook.
Group of Ontario Emerging Museum Professionals 