Interview
Opening the archives to other voices

Adriana Muñoz is curator for the Americas at the National Museum of World Culture in Sweden. Over the last decade, she has been involved in questions of restitution, practices of decolonisation and access to collections. For this interview, we spoke to her about decolonising data, the incorrect labelling of objects and working with communities.

By Lucy Rowan

Could you tell us a bit about your institution, what you do and your specific role there?

I am working at the National Museum of World Culture. It can be defined as an administration or consortium, inside of which there are four museums - three in Stockholm, the Ethnographic Museum, the East Asian Museum and the Mediterranean Museum. One in Gothenburg - the Museum of World Culture. They were created under a political bill. It was a decision by the Social Democratic Party in 1996. In this administration, all the collections are not European, which happened a lot during the last part of the nineties. It started with a paradox because we needed to talk about world cultures, but we only present collections "defined as non-European". 

I have been working as a curator for the Americas for twenty-six years. I started to work in the former Ethnographic Museum of Gothenburg, which became the Museum of World Culture. When I say non-European collections, it's a little bit tricky because we have Swedish and Russian collections, but they come from the Sami people. So ethnographic museums or this kind of ethnography means at that moment, those are not included in the national estate project. This is going to be very important in the definition of the knowledge that there is inside the databases.

For those not familiar with the term, what does decolonisation of data mean? 

We need to go back to the creation of the museum, which happened in Europe. The modern idea of the museum was that you collect things from areas surrounding you, but also to collect colonial objects, which were being colonised by Europeans - namely in Asia, the Americas and Africa. Also the internal colonial expansion, for example, here in Sweden you have the expansion of the state to the North. They started collections with objects from the Sami people because they were not included in the idea of Sweden. The moment when the National State was created, the idea that you have one country, one language and one nation of people was also created, which of course was very popular during the Nazi period. This is something very modern. It has nothing to do with how it was before. In this situation, these museums were created. 

If we come to the example I know best - in Sweden, everything is going through a catalogue system. You start to organise the nature of objects but also cultures. If you take the examples of collections of the indigenous people in the Americas, they are first catalogued for example as coming from the Americas, then collections arriving before Colombus arrived to the Americas they are catalogued as ‘archaeology’ and after they get the label of ‘ethnography’. 

These kinds of labels (ethnography and archaeology) are still in use, but they are typical colonial labels. How history is told in other parts of the world is by telling stories to your family or through the expression of art. This type of labelling does not exist there. 

Under this label of ethnography, apparently the category of 'art' doesn’t exist like it does in European collections. Instead, you have this prefix: ethno-art, African-art or indigenous-art. Apparently, if you are not familiar with the artist or style then they are not given labels with their names, they are outside of the colonial anthology. These kinds of labels and phrases are still so common in our language. You put non-ethnographic labels when you know the artist. But this is so common that we never reflect. If you place yourself on the other side or in another cosmology, it's really weird because you are being defined by people, who often don't know much about you at all. This is the concept of colonial data that data has been defined not about themselves but by others, often those who colonised them. They put labels on pieces and objects outside of their own culture. 

Why is it important to decolonise data? What is the greater societal impact? 

Some of these labels or prefixes are so common and so ingrained in our language that we never really reflect on them or the impact it has on our attitudes and biases. The core issue is that people believe in museums, they are trustworthy institutions and if there are biases in titles, people will learn those biases in their language, thinking and behaviour. If you repeatedly see that label one hundred times, it's hard to unlearn it. 

I think decolonising data is important not only if we want to have better relationships between institutions and people, but also amongst people in daily life. I have been working with indigenous people from the Americas when curating our collections and you cannot start the conversation believing that everyone is going to act the same simply because they are people and people are individuals, everyone is different. Biases are not facts. 

You can even see differences between the first and second world wars in how collections are labelled or ethnographies are described and this reflects the changing ideas and politics in Europe. We must see and address how impactful this data can be. If we really want to understand these collections, we need to understand that they are formed under a network of connections and data. We have to rethink the voices inside the archives that have been silenced for years and relearn how we approach this data. 

You have spoken about your work with indigenous people of the Americas. How involved is the museum of Gothenburg in working with the Sami people? Is that something that is important to them?

This is a very interesting question because we are a museum of the state, which means we are an instrument of the state. As a national museum, we are directly under the Minister of Culture. So the relationship between the state and the Samis mirrors our relationship with the Samis. We individuals inside the institution have contacts and work directly with them. For example, I have been working with the Samis for almost 16/17 years. But it depends a lot on who is in government, their approach and whether the state needs resources from the Samis. 

In different periods in history, the relationship has been more tense and difficult than others. I don't think it's ever been wonderful, it's certainly not a utopian relationship. The eighties, for example, were probably the best. But then in the nineties, the relationship was rocked again. 

Another important factor is who is the director of the museum, and whether that person wants to improve that relationship. Whilst we can potentially build a good relationship with the Samis, in Sweden especially, we must follow the guidelines. I think for every national museum around the world it's the same. 

What is your current process of decolonising databases? 

If I am very honest, we are in the very beginning of realising how wrong our data is. And when I say we are, we are not so many. Personally, I began rethinking this in 2004 or 2005, when the museum reopened to the public. At the time, I was working with an artist called Fred Wilson and he was really pushing the limits of what we think about this. He really opened my eyes and I started to think about how my education has been limited about these questions.

For the next exhibition project we had, I was involved in the process of collecting boats that travelled from Africa to Europe, in Spanish these are called Pateras. I was in Spain with this exhibition and the interesting thing happened when we needed to register this boat in our database, we realised the limits of our database, particularly in the way we register objects. So the first was the geopolitics - It was registered as the Mediterranean, which it is but it's the crossing over process from Africa to Europe with people who want to immigrate, which is important. The second was that we only have “archaeology” but it was ethnography. It was listed as just a “boat”, the word for that in Spanish is clean, its connotations are simply a way to transport yourself on water. Whereas “Patera" has clear connotations, it's a boat where people attempt to come to Europe by sea, in particular black people trying to come to Europe. So the concept of “Patera” is very strong, but if you look in the database this word only comes up later in the more detailed field about the history. 

When I started to look at other objects over the last one hundred years in the database, I realised that we had been “white-washing” history. Especially the history and labels strongly connected to colonial power. That was when I also noticed a boat from Patagonia that was collected in the middle of the genocide and all that was listed was “boat” and the name of the collector. There was no note to say that this boat was the witness of one of the worst genocides in the area at the beginning of the 20th century. There is no mention of the genocide at all in our database. 

We know so few examples because we are not a big team. This is why I say we are really only at the beginning of our work. 

What evolutions are currently being made to improve these processes and what more needs to be done?

There is an incredible group in Amsterdam run by Professor Ben Wagner - he created a little group of people trying to apply for money from the European community. Horizon is the name of this fund. Europeana had also tried this but we didn’t get the money sadly so we will have to apply again.  
The process is complicated because you can have great ideas but you need economic support, which means you also need politicians behind you that believe in your project. So really you need to be state-supported, otherwise the changes are on a very very small scale. 

What we really need to do is rethink the idea of museums, at least the kind of museums that keep these types of objects they typically label under “ethnographic” collections. Opening up the archives to these voices that have been silenced for so many years is a start. We need to bring plurality to our databases and rethink the labels - gender, age, race, all of these things from another cosmological point of view will probably be different. In different cosmologies age and gender are not fixed ideas. 

How can museums better involve local communities in these processes? 

I think this is a question for the communities, I don’t think activists or indigenous people need museums. I think it has to change so deeply. First, to understand and recognise the principle that communities don't trust museums because often they use communities. They interact with them and use them for a specific project and then they are onto the next one. This is really a political question. 

From my stance as a curator, I try to keep in touch with my contacts and friends, build relationships with them because I do not think of myself as a gatekeeper but as one who can open the door. So there is a lot of trust involved and I’m not sure how trust can be created within national institutions in Latin America for example where there is already a lack of trust in the state, it's a lot more difficult and requires a lot of work. 

Do you have an example of where the community was actively involved in decolonising data? 

Yes, we have a project that started in 2006 when Bolivia got their first indigenous president in the history of Latin America, Evo Morales. There are around 16,000 Bolivian objects in Gothenburg alone and once he came into power, he began asking for them back. It was more like a political statement. When we were looking through the objects, we saw that Bolivia had been almost forgotten for many years. 

They had specifically requested for this one collection called 1970-19/Niño Korin, which was labelled as “archaeology”. But what is funny is that all of the objects in the collection belong to a very active and very much alive medicine group, made up of Kallawaya. 

So in the process of Bolivia claiming this collection back, we invited a group of Kallawaya to Sweden to help us work through the collections. One of the items was a little bag around 10 centimetres that had been classified as a bag to put coca leaves inside. One of the Kallawaya looked at the bag and explained that this was not for coca leaves, it has a specific pattern. Instead, it was a very strong symbol of the Andean area which is almost one thousand years old. The Incas also use this Wiphala. It's a political object used today by indigenous people in Bolivia. This project continued and today, it looks like in the coming months the Swedish government will give back the collection not to the government, but to the Kallawayas.

What’s interesting to see is that the classification was not only incorrect but there was this Western orientalist projection of the Americas as the land of drugs. This thinking was adopted in the 1970s, this idea of the “Shaman” bringing drugs like cocaine or the Kambo frog. In the same way, we take paracetamol, they use coca leaves. 

When the Kallawayas were here in Gothenburg, I was in contact with the Bolivian community here. About 2000 first generation Bolivian people are living here in the city. I asked if anyone could help to translate the specific language of the Andean area and everyone told me no. But when they were here, they were visiting one of the Kallawayas for medicine. Although I am Latina and also a friend of the Bolivians, but in this context, I represented the museum and therefore the Swedish state so they didn’t want to assist me. In this particular case, we were able to use this knowledge to amend the database. 



Adriana Muñoz Born in Argentina but based in Gothenburg, Adriana Muñoz is the curator for the Americas at the National Museums of World Culture in Sweden. For the last few years, she has also been a judge for the EMYA (European Museum of the Year Award). Over the last decade, she has been involved in questions of restitution, practices of decolonization and access to collections.