Decolonizing Material Conservation Practices in an Ethnographic Museum - Éléonore Kissel

Описание: Decolonizing Material Conservation Practices in an Ethnographic Museum: Where to Start, Which Way Forward?
Élénore Kissel
Head of Conservation, Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac
Friday, March 3, 2023

Kissel is doing her research as part of her job in Paris, where she has been head of conservation at the Musée du Quai Branly–Jacques Chirac since 2014. “My own institution recognizes that the research I am doing is important for them, so I am receiving full support while I am here,” she noted. She is researching “all the preservation activities in general such as preventive conservation, conservation treatments, mounting and storage. I’m looking at how they are done here compared with at my home institution.”

There is value in studying how conservation is done on ethnographic collections, she continued. The museum that she works in has very large holdings, including about 370,000 objects and 800,000 photographs, and twelve linear kilometers (about 7.5 miles) of library and archival holdings. There are objects from Asia, Oceania, Africa, and the Americas. These non-Western holdings present challenges that she feels she can better address after looking at how these same type of holdings are dealt with, from a conservation point of view, in North America.

“In the past decades, there have been many links established with the originating communities in the United States and Canada, which are the paradigm of settler societies,” she explained. “The descendants of European settlers are still in the same territory as the Native Americans. For example, if you are a museum in California, you may have objects from more than one hundred Native American tribes, and you may be able to engage in conversations with representatives from these tribes. You are often able to establish direct links with the communities from which the objects originated. That is not the case in France. We have collections from virtually every ecosystem on the planet,” she continued. “I feelthat there are many, many things that we, as a French institution, could learn from what is being done in North America, looking at what would be applicable in our country.”

Read more at https://ioa.ucla.edu/node/1612