Decolonializing a museum of ethnography? A conversation with Carine Ayélé Durand, director of the Museum of Ethnography in Geneva

Carine Ayélé Durand holds a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge, UK (2010). Over the past 20 years, she has worked in various capacities as a curator and researcher in the field of cultural heritage in France, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Spain. She has curated several public exhibitions on contemporary indigenous arts and political movements. Carine was chief curator at the Museum of Ethnography in Geneva (MEG) from 2015 to 2022 and has been director since July 2022. The interview was conducted in Geneva on March 22, 2023.

Peter Bille Larsen (PL): You have recently become the director of the Museum of Ethnography in Geneva, an institution dating back to 1901, with more than 75,000 objects and a recent strategic emphasis on decolonization. Could you share with us the main highlights of your approach, activities, and opportunities that come with a decolonial perspective?

Carine Ayélé Durand (CD): I will start from one word, or two words. In French, we call it co-construction. Ιt's like building together or being assembled: the way that we see decoloniality is putting together as many perspectives as possible on a subject, on an issue. So putting together would be, for example, in the case of an exhibition: the descendants of who made the objects that we take care of in the museum, and then adding their perspective to our perspectives as professionals, or art historians, or anthropologists. Then there is another layer of co-construction with the audience, with the public, too. It's a huge assemblage, I would say, assembling people and things together, things from the past and things from the present, and from this trying to get a broader perspective on historical facts and on what we do and how we shape the museum today and for the future. Co-creating is basically about enabling dialogues and then creating together the museum of today and tomorrow possibly. These are the main key steps, I would say.

We do it through three distinct perspectives. The first is being around the collections, doing provenance research on the way all the items came to be in the museum. It is about trying to follow the biography of things: How did they get there? What happened when they were collected? What was the historical time? When did it happen? Trying to put all these dots together. For example, a very conflictual example, we do have items coming from Namibia from 1905. Instead of just labeling 1905 objects coming from Namibia, from a person coming here from that region, we now stop and ask, “Ok, wait a minute, what happened in 1905 in Namibia?” There was a genocide happening at the time, so it is about trying to bring this information forward and doing as much as possible. It is not always possible, but as much as possible, with our partners in the very countries we talk about. So this is the first, concretely, looking at the history of the collections and how these objects came here. The second is creating exhibitions through co-construction and respecting the principle of free, prior, and informed consent, having consent from the people we write about, and possibly writing with them or letting them write by themselves. This is the second point. The last one is always with the audience, as I told you already. It's very important for us that the audience is not only merely being informed in a kind of passive way. How can we make the audience engaged and involved as well in these issues by listening to their own voices?

PL: What are some of the hands-on challenges you face with decolonizing museums of ethnography?

CD: I would say the first challenge is to reframe what we think we should do as professionals. Just talking about our stance, it involves thinking about the way I write a label, how I write a text for an exhibition, for example, or how I do research in the archives. For the people working in the outreach department, they have to totally reframe the way they used to conceive a tour, because they have always this back and forth. I write my text, and then I make sure that other people have read it, and of course we comment on it, and of course we'll ask for feedback on it. So this is a kind of way of rethinking totally the way we practice our work. This constant redefinition of the way we should practice. For us, decoloniality is not only collaborating with people; it's also deeply changing our own practices as museum professionals. That's a huge challenge.

PL: A major conversation we have been having concerns the sometimes partial nature of decoloniality. To what extent do you perceive that the colonial nature of collections and exhibition practices is something that “remains”? To what extent do you consider museums, in general, and MEG, in particular, as “hostages” to their existing collections, exhibition spaces, and practices?

CD: I'm not sure I'm getting the question right, but what I observe is that … take the example I gave you earlier around Namibia. What I can observe is that the very same object, maybe 50 years back, wasn't at all presented as an object that was acquired in a violent moment—the genocide of Namibia. It was simply presented as iron-bead leggings from the Herrero people. So you are talking about hostages, but I tend to think of that as awareness. These objects are all embedded in a colonial history. I don't want to say that it wasn't at all in the head of the predecessors, but it's coming out more bluntly now. So I don't see us as hostages; I just see it as an opportunity now to talk about these things. Maybe because we are in Switzerland. It wasn't that obvious in the past that collections were so much embedded into colonial history. I think it's slowly starting to come about now. Even if we know that these objects were embedded in colonial history, it wasn't very much presented as such before. Still, already in the 1940s the museum would present some objects as part of the Quinzaine Impériale (an event organized by the Vichy regime during World War II), Annemasse. The objects were supposed to present the colonies, but it was seldom the case when the objects were presented within the museum. We are just starting to research this much more now in terms of how these objects were presented so differently in the 1930s, 1940s, and today. In the 1930s, for instance, the director at the time, Eugène Pittard, would be very much supportive of Ethiopians fighting against the Italian government for their independence. So he organized an exhibition with paintings by contemporary artists, just to make sure that these contemporary artists were given the floor.

So whether the museum has been hostage to its collections is a bit difficult to grasp right now. The more we study this, the more we realize that the same object may have been presented differently in the past. Sometimes, of course, the colonial environment was altogether neglected, or put aside, not even considered.

PL: As an anthropologist, what are your reflections on ideas to renounce or change the name of the Museum of Ethnography to something else?

CD: There's a lot of ambiguity here again! I think that before changing the name of the museum, we need to know where we want to go, and where we want to be. Right now, I can't tell whether it's the right moment to change the name of this museum, because there have been two different trends of discussion around this. The first one, led by Boris Wastiau, the former director of the museum, was very clear when he talked about this. To him, ethnography was totally in the colonial past, the violent past, and ethnographers were in a way embedded in that conversation as ethnographers. This perspective is critical of what ethnography did at the time as a discipline, as a science, so to say. That is one trend, and I respect that. However, I do have another perspective on this. Not because I think anthropologists were not at all involved. I know they were, like teachers, geographers, historians, or archaeologists. So many different disciplines have been part of it. If I had to decide whether to change the name, as the director today, I don't think I would do it on the grounds that ethnography and ethnographers were part of the violent colonial past. It is true, and we know it's quite important to be aware of this and to talk about it. We can't ignore it. But, if I had to change the name, or we as a museum, as the collective, had to change the name, I would do it on different grounds. Today, it's quite difficult to address all the issues we want to address, in terms of societal issues, environmental issues, through the lens of a single discipline, or at least through the lens of a step in anthropology, namely ethnography. It is difficult to address all these broad and intertwined issues of societies in the plural, like human societies, but also the way we are all interdependent as humans and nonhumans. I think we are here now at a moment in history as a museum to describe and establish a dialogue about the complexity of the world as it is now. To me, it's quite difficult to do it while everyone thinks we are only ethnographers because in terms of disciplines we do come from interdisciplinary worlds. I mean, I'm an anthropologist, but I work every day with people who are not anthropologists but come from a wide array of disciplines, such as art history, health and safety management, psychologists, architects by training, and so on. They work at MEG, and our partners are not only anthropologists. The way we look at the world now is as interrelated environments, human beings, and nonhuman beings. Does the word “ethnography” embrace all this? Probably not. How can we talk about interdisciplinarity while we are the Museum of Ethnography? I do have questions from some people wondering whether at the museum we have objects that are more recent than the 1930s, because to them ethnography is something that was collected in the 1930s only. Or when we organize DJ sets, or when we talk about gender issues, or intersectional discrimination, people ask me why an ethnographic museum does such things. When we had the exhibition on environmental injustice, people asked me isn't that the role of the Natural History Museum? These are the kinds of issues that I have more than how this museum relates to a colonial time. This is not even a question. Of course, we relate to a colonial time.

PL: Finally, what is your vision of the decolonial museum and the role of anthropology?

CD: I think decoloniality is totally related to anthropology, in a way. I think anthropologists are in the best place to address decoloniality because as anthropologists you need to unlearn and to be de-centered all the time. This is the very beginning of anthropological thinking. You are always putting into discussion what you think you knew, what you think you heard. And decoloniality to me is this: de-centering all the time and getting to understand what you think you understood before and realizing that you did not get it totally right. You have to re-learn, re-learn, and re-learn all the time. I think this is the essence of anthropology, and decoloniality is a way of feeling uncomfortable and being comfortable in this uncomfortable setting. And this is exactly what decoloniality is. It's a journey, and it's an uncomfortable journey, but I find it fascinating, and anthropology is this, too!. Figure 1.