# The Repairing Museum

Dominique Poulot

► To cite this version:

Dominique Poulot. The Repairing Museum. MMD Museum Materials and Discussions Journal of Museum Studies, 2 (1), 2025, 10.6092/issn.3034-9699/v2-n1-2025. hal-05106320

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Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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Museum

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Materials

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Discussions

Journal of Museum Studies

Vol. 2/1 - 2025

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# The Repairing Museum

## Edited by: Dominique Poulot
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**MMD** - Museum, materials, discussion. Journal of Museum Studies is an open access academic journal in English, French, and Italian devoted to museology, museography, Cultural Heritage as well as research on audiences and fruition with an international outlook, addressing both the life of museum institutions and collections, and the latest challenges they face in their broad cultural and social dimension. MMD aims at promoting and enhancing the collaboration among researchers from the field of humanities, social sciences, architecture, and Digital Humanities through their complementary perspectives. It is addressed to scholars, students and professionals working in these specific disciplinary fields, but also readers interested in the current evolution of the debate on issues, methods and tools related to the material and immaterial aspects of museology in its relation to history and contemporaneity, and in connection with the progress of public welfare. All published articles are subjected to the double-blind peer-review process.

**Editor-in-Chief:**

Sandra Costa (Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna)

**Associate Editors:**

Anna Rosellini (ENSA Paris-Est, Université Gustave Eiffel)

Paola Cordera (Politecnico di Milano)

**Editorial board:**

Irene Di Pietro (Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna)

Alessandro Paolo Lena (Université Paris1)

Federico M. Giorgi (Politecnico di Milano and Université Paris Cité)

**Advisory board:**

Javier Arnaldo (Atlas Museo, Museo del Prado)

Ruth Baumeister (Aarhus School of Architecture)

Paola Cordera (Department of Design, Politecnico di Milano)

Sandra Costa (Department of Arts, University of Bologna)

Alexander Damianisch (Director Center Focus Research, University of Applied Arts Vienna)

Emilie D'Orgeix (Directrice de recherche EPHE, Université PSL)

Giancarla Periti (Department of the History of Art, Toronto)

Marco Pizzo (Central Museum of the Risorgimento, Rome)

Dominique Poulot (Université Paris1)

Anna Rosellini (École d'architecture de la ville & des territoires Paris Est)

Naoki Sato (University of the Arts, Tokyo)

**Journal Manager:**

Alessandro Paolo Lena

**Graphic design:**

Federico Maria Giorgi

**Cover:**

Photo of the Weltkulturen Museum by Wolfgang Günzel

ISSN 3034-9699

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.3034-9699/v2-n1-2025
dossier.

**09 At the museum: care for visitors, care for collections**
Dominique Poulot

**037 Roundtable: Caring Museums Today**
Jonah Siegel, Nora Sternfeld, Mark O'Neill

**065 Défense et illustration du Musée d'Ethnographie. Repairing Ethnography and exploring the notion of "French" American Collections through museum genealogies**
Susana Stüssi Garcia

**095 Symbol of an era?**
The Guggenheim Bilbao as an epitome of new museum tendencies at the turn of the millennium
Jesus Pedro Lorente

**117 Repairing Canadian art museum collections with equity, diversity and inclusion**
Nada Guzin Lukic

**137 Le musée guérisseur**
Les musées canadiens face à leur passé colonial
Jean-Philippe Uzel

**161 Poetics in Museological Crossroads:**
Nosso Sagrado, enchantment and the passage of time
Pedro Marco Gonçalves, Arantxa Ciafrino

**181 Tirer les ficelles**
Usage et réparation de collections en tension
Noémie Etienne
## sections.

203 **Experience and Publics**

Exploring the Boundaries of Perception:
Interview with Valeria Bottalico

Alessandro Paola Lena

217 **Digital Technologies for Cultural Heritage**

House of Memories di National Museums Liverpool: un approccio integrato alle collezioni digitali per persone malate di Alzheimer

Irene Di Pietro

229 **Architecture and Displays**

Exhibition design and lighting:
Notes on the genesis of the debate between conservation, public emotion, and care

Federico Giorgi

251 **Behind the scenes**

Interview with Clémentine Deliss

## materials.

267 **Unmuting musical instruments held in ethnographic collections: towards a sound**

Louis Petitjean
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dossier.

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«Montréal était la ville où j'avais hâte d'aller. À 18 ans, [en '78] je sortais les fins de semaine et j'allais voir des spectacles à Montréal.»

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"I couldn't wait to go to Montréal. When I was 18, [in '78], I would leave home on the weekends to go see shows in Montréal."

«[En '78], Mom and Dad let me leave on my adventure. They trusted me and I trusted myself, even though I was only 15."

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Tant d'histoires
dans une valise!

So many stories
in a suitcase!
# At the museum: care for visitors, care for collections¹

Dominique Poulot

Keywords:

Museums, Repair, Care, Inclusion, Diversity, Indigenousness, Museology, Therapy.

## ABSTRACT:

The introduction to this issue provides a comprehensive overview of the various interpretations of the restorative museum in recent decades. This novel configuration is part of a broader context of reflections and projects for museums, which have emphasised the values of inclusion, diversity, and, ultimately, care. These diverse concerns manifest in various forms on different continents and across different generations of museums.

L'introduction du numéro fournit un panorama des différentes acceptions du musée réparateur au cours des dernières décennies. Cette nouvelle configuration s'inscrit dans un contexte plus général de réflexions et de projets pour les musées qui a mis en avant les valeurs de l'inclusion, de la diversité, et finalement du care. Ces différentes préoccupations connaissent des formes variables selon les continents et les générations successives d'établissements.

## Opening Picture:

Figure 11. *Montréal, c'est quoi, c'est qui?* Permanent exhibition, Centre des mémoires montréalais, Montreal, 2024.

All photos by Dominique Poulot.

CC BY 4.0 License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
©Dominique Poulot, 2025
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.3034-9699/21586

## Dominique Poulot

Dominique Poulot, Institut d'Histoire moderne et contemporaine, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
The museum is a cultural seismograph that records tremors and major shifts in interest, knowledge, admiration, values, and political commitments. In many traditions, the institution has been understood to participate in an educational process with civic or patriotic pride at its core. Over the last generation, however, the question of the purpose of the museum has been raised with renewed strength. The curatorial world has seen a series of debates about the expectations placed on museums and the responsibilities of those who manage them. The very definition of the museum concept has pitted the national sections of ICOM against each other in an international politics of models and commitments.²

In 1999, the North American museologist Stephen Weil wrote that the museum had gone from being an institution devoted to objects to one devoted to people.³ The bold hyperbole of the claim was not fair to the history of the institution, and might well have overstated the current situation. It ignored pioneers around the world, such as John Cotton Dana, and many museums worldwide, including institutions like the V&A under Henry Cole, and French rural museums at the end of nineteenth century, that began with democratic impulses.⁴ Also, many of those institutions that claim to be visitor-centric today might to various degrees be - as Pierre Bourdieu's sociology has argued -fundamentally elitist, able to make only symbolic efforts towards the communities they claim to serve.⁵ Nevertheless, the procla-

<figure><img src="image_12.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 01:**
*Le Québec, autrement dit. Territoire de rencontres, Permanent exhibition, Musée de la civilisation, Quebec City, 2023.*</figcaption></figure>

Dominique Poulot
At the museum: care for visitors, care for collections
mation of such an inversion was a timely counterpoint to the critical position that held that museum-going was inevitably the privilege of the few. The insistence on the centrality of the public Weil identified, which was intended to represent a modernization as unprecedented as it was decisive, has been taken for granted by museum managers for a generation.⁶ In France, it provided the impetus for the official forward-looking report of 2016-2017, which sought to compile “society’s main expectations of museums”.⁷ The post-pandemic period, with a return to “real” attendance levels and a redoubling of funding requirements, has reinforced, if there were any need to do so, the imperative to clarify the social mission of the institution.⁸

Recent years have seen many museums attempt to fully engage with the implications of the centrality of the public, given new ideas about the various publics towards which the institution might be understood to have a responsibility. The issue of access to the common good as a cultural right⁹ has been joined by the issue of repairing the harm done to individuals, communities and cultural groups - for example through the recovery of their objects. Compensating for material damage, repairing what has been ruined or broken, often leads to the challenge of healing a torn social fabric. This approach may be understood to reflect the replacement of pedagogical democracy with “performative” democracy. In the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, “while the pedagogical model of democracy emphasizes the citizen’s capacity for abstract

reasoning and imagination, the performative model highlights the realm of the embodied and the sensual”.¹⁰

This issue brings together heritage professionals and university curators and museologists from Spain, Italy, France, Germany, the United States, Canada and Brazil, with the aim of providing an account of this turning point in the history of Western museum, from both theoretical perspectives and practical experiences. The opening discussion between Mark O'Neill, Jonah Siegel and Nora Sternfeld outlines the issues and perspectives at stake. Although the authors come from different disciplines and are shaped by their participation in distinct professional, institutional and national contexts, they nonetheless share common convictions about the evolution of the global museum landscape and the present and future tasks of museums. Having inherited the obligation to preserve collections for future generations, and being subject to political and administrative constraints as much as to scholarly standards, museums today also find themselves needing to take into account newly urgent ethical considerations, including the legitimacy of ownership, the identification of provenance, the criteria for purchase, and the place of community voices. Determining the equity or inclusivity offered by the museum also comes to involve reflection on the relevance of visitor experiences, including the democratization of access, the relational values of *care* in the institution, and the violence that might be understood to be inherent in the history of objects and archives or in their acquisition. Georges Perec,
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<figure><img src="image_14.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 02:** *Routes and Camps*, German Center for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM), Berlin, 2017.</figcaption></figure>

<caption>**Fig. 03:** *Forum*, German Center for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM), Berlin, 2017.</caption>
with his emphasis on the infra-ordi-
nary and its political implications,
should be evoked here: he seeks to
capture “what is not noticed, what
has no importance” - or what could
be apprehended as a haunting.¹¹ For
one of its commentators, “it is on
the one hand a rehabilitation of the
small scale in the age of the grandi-
ose, and on the other a considerable
space for contesting the field effects
of government planning”.¹² It is on
these two scales that the sense of
care unfolds, opposed as much to
the architectural grandiose of the
establishments and their panoram-
ic views, as to a geopolitics of mas-
terpieces and their worldwide cir-
culation thanks to a multiplication
of branches.

The place given by museums to the
stories of objects, whatever they
may be, is in any case a prerequisite
for guaranteeing and consolidating
the trust of specific audiences. Nev-
ertheless, the fact remains that the
horizon of care remains difficult
to identify, distorted as it is by the
contradictions inherent in a site,
in which an economy of objects in
exile generates emotions ranging
from panic to the desire for limitless
accumulation. The round table con-
cluded with the need to preserve
the achievements of previous gen-
erations of critics, while guarding
against forms of critique that nei-
ther reform the institution nor im-
prove its workings.

The remedial exhibition

When, in January 2025, the presi-
dent-director of the Musée du Lou-
vre made headlines in the French
press with a memo to the Ministry

of Culture calling for new resources
she not only pointed out the dan-
ger posed to specific works of art
by various conservation faults, she
deplored “the inadequacy of the
services offered to the public”. “Vis-
iting the Louvre,” she declared, “is a
physical ordeal; access to the works
takes time and is not always easy;
visitors have no space in which to
take a break”.13 This recent inter-
vention goes beyond the specific
case of the Parisian palace, which
was faced longstanding challenges
that the Peï pyramid of 1993 was
ultimately unable to resolve. The
President-Director’s words testify
to the pursuit of a quality visit as an
ongoing concern, after the museum
reached a peak figure in 2018 of 10.2
million visitors. However, while the
individual experience of the place
has become the reference point for
managers, such an emphasis no
longer leaves out another pressing
question, with which it is more and
more connected in recent thought,
concern for the objects in the collec-
tion themselves.

In the past, the drives for improve-
ments in the treatment of objects
and people have typically been kept
separate in. This is no longer the
case. The material turn in art history,
the emergence of multidisciplinary
provenance studies, justified where
necessary by projects for restitution
or at least for justice, and finally
the triumph of an anthropological
perspective that has become almost
hegemonic in the field of museum
studies, have certainly brought the
concern for artefacts to the fore. Far
from arguing for a return to the pre-
vious situation – the exclusive prior-
ity of collections to the detriment of
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public policies (for example, in the name of a higher respect for art) – the point is to emphasise the need to repair the previous failure to articulate, and to demand an obligation of cross-care.

Some museums are committed to repairing the world in line with their ethical and professional aspirations or specific missions¹⁴ (Figure 1). Sometimes they have been given a specific mandate to do so, like the International Museum of the Red Cross and Red Crescent in Geneva,¹⁵ or they integrate the approach into their treatment of contemporary history, focusing on humanitarian interventions, or reconciliation processes¹⁶ (Figure 2). In France, a terrorism memorial museum devoted to the judicial, political and cultural invention of the status of victim is planned for 2027: it is part of the museology of human rights, or of sites of conscience¹⁷ (Figure 3). Other types of museums, such as the

Hygiene Museum in Dresden, which hosted the *Fake* exhibition in 2022, are fighting disinformation and conspiracy in the name of civic and scientific values, to restore truth to the public sphere.¹⁸ Still others evoke the prospect of personal healing, or even sacrifice themselves to individual hedonism.¹⁹ These may all be understood as incarnations of the idea of using the museum to heal difficult or even dangerous emotions by mobilising the trust that public museums have earned over the past two centuries (Figure 4).

A museum's confidence in its objects, like that of its visitors, varies over the course of its history according to the expectations it has raised, the disappointments it has experienced, and the aesthetic or scholarly controversies it has provoked by its exhibitions.²⁰ While, in most cases, a museum is built in relation to the heritage of an area, its owners and

**Fig. 04:**
*City.history. afresh: Eight questions. In the past, today and tomorrow, Kölnisches Stadtmuseum, Cologne, 2024.*
its context, within any institution
works and objects are given a new
meaning beyond or distinct from
their original purpose or location.

The invention of the revolutionary
museum was a key moment in this
respect. In the 1790s, what came to
be seen as the unjust confiscation
of masterpieces by tyranny - roy-
al, aristocratic and religious - was
to be rectified in order to return
these prized objects to the whole of
humanity and ensure the progress
of the arts and sciences. Thanks to
the regeneration undertaken, the
new era would benefit from the
works inherited from the past. But,
in many cases, this new use called
for a fundamental dissociation be-
tween the artist and his original
sponsors. Even if they are master-
pieces, monuments from the past
are nonetheless evidence of bad
government. Conversely, hitherto
neglected works might reflect the
contempt in which truth and beauty
have been held: their very obscurity
is likely to reveal a talent that has
gone unrecognized, or has been sti-
fled. Restoration work is then sup-
posed to eliminate the ravages of
this ancient malevolence.

Regarding the libraries of the Old
Regime, Abbé Grégoire explains that
“guides to the peerage, genealogical
treatises, works in which despot-
ism has recorded its extravagances
and fury, have almost always been
bound in Morocco, while immortal
books [...] have only escaped the
compass of censorship, the pursuits
of the inquisition of the courts, by
taking refuge in unknown corners,
under a modest parchment cover”.²¹
The museum was understood to jus-

tify its glory by repairing the works
both materially and morally, remov-
ing them beyond culpable ignorance
and blameworthy alterations. At the
Louvre, new values were asserted
through the restoration of the paint-
ings on display, which were as much
evidence of revolutionary energy as
they were of skill or ingenuity. The
success of confidence in the muse-
um was based on the exaltation of
French patriotism.²²

Museography as a remedy

Such a celebration inevitably pro-
voked a reaction: as soon as the
decade was over, a radical *museo-*
*phobia* called for the closure of the
revolutionary museums. The most
vulnerable, the Museum of French
Monuments, was dispersed under
the Second Restoration because it
was the legacy of vandalism, having
brought together monuments tak-
en from Parisian churches that had
been suppressed. Later, Napoleon
III's dynastic museum, the "museum
of sovereigns" that Zola compared
to a "royal thrift shop", was closed
when the regime collapsed.²³ In the
course of contemporary history,
changes in regime or ideological or
philosophical condemnations have
led to proposals for the outright
abolition of museums in the name
of a *damnatio memoriae*, though
these are rarely carried out. There
is no lack of literary translations, in
the form of allegories. In Siegfried
Lenz's novel *Heimatmuseum*, the de-
struction of the institution seems to
be the only way out when you can't
get rid of objects that are thought
to poison the present and even con-
taminate the future.²⁴ On the other
hand, the opening of new museums
on an *ad hoc* basis is a convenient
<figure><img src="image_16.png" /></figure>

solution: the historical museum of the citadel in Spandau²⁵ collects the condemned statues of Prussian militarism, Nazism and Stalinism, with a view to repairing German history (Figure 5).

However, consolidating or renewing trust in an institution more commonly involves repairing its exhibitions, with contrasting results. When what visitors see is precisely what needs to be repaired, the exhibition strategy must call on a variety of museographies - short of simply making the exhibits disappear. The effect of such processes of re-signification of images and artefacts can be uncertain, even counter-productive: the articulation between the visible and the legible is in any case crucial. At the beginning of the 1990s, interventions by curators at the Museum of Natural History in New York led to new arrangements of objects, display cases and texts. For the critic and artist Mieke Bal,

who observed the repairs, “certain labels succeeded better than others in suggesting a different approach to the metamuseum, in other words an approach that integrates the transmission of knowledge about the object with an understanding of the construction of this object by subjects. There are parts of the exhibition where the text panels do not contradict the visual displays. There are also displays whose visual persuasiveness is such that no panel can counter their rhetoric. Finally, there are areas where the objects on display benefit fully from the critical light shed by the textual accompaniments”.²⁶

The 1989 exhibition *Into the Heart of Africa* at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto was no less exemplary of such discrepancies. The professional skills of those in charge were worthy of the best specialists on the subject, the quality and significance of the pieces presented in the coun-

<caption>Fig. 05: *Unveiled. Berlin and its monuments. 1849-1986, Proviant Magazine, Spandau Zitadelle.*</caption>
try's most famous institution were indisputable, and the institution's postcolonial and multicultural commitment was obvious. But the event was taken as an affront by many in the communities concerned; it prevented the Canadian museum from attempting the same exercise for decades, and its memory still weighs heavily on the institution. Caught off-guard by its audiences, the exhibition seemed to support and propagate precisely what it set out to denounce.²⁷ Everything seemed to indicate that, in this case, the cure could be worse than the disease - if those administering the cure don't work with the audiences and/or do formative evaluation to find out if their curatorial intentions will be effectively communicated.

The new “museography” that arose during the inter-war period sought to use museums to serve political projects as much as purely artistic or scientific ones. A generation of curators and architects were mobilizing museums for communication purposes, if not propaganda, while at the same time seeking to use them to promote individual development. Federico Maria Giorgi highlights the first studies carried out in the early 1940s to scientifically identify ‘pleasant’ light and visual comfort.²⁸ The pursuit of visual ‘satisfaction’ was taken up again and developed further at the beginning of the 21st century, when lighting in museums was regulated according to physiological and psychological constraints, but also considering visual memories specific to the cultivated *habitus* - what some call the eye of an era.²⁹ From this point of view, Paul Valéry's comments in

1923, when he deplored the fact that the cane had been banned from the museum - he was stripped of it at the entrance - testify to the malaise of the bourgeoisie. Indeed, for him, this initial gesture was the prelude to a growing unease about the accumulation of works and a didactic purpose that prevented him from exercising his aesthetic eye in the course of a comfortable stroll through the collection.³⁰ In contrast, the *Association populaire des amis des musées* [APAM], founded in 1936, sought a few years later to “revive the museum” for the benefit of popular education.³¹ The uneasy articulation of these perspectives, within a widespread desire to repair the museum, demonstrates the complexity of the relationship between the feelings of an amateur - or the pure spirit of Valery's *Monsieur Teste* - and the pursuit of a democratisation project through schools or similar mechanisms.

The avenues opened by the meetings and publications of curators' associations springing up all over the world, as well as the international cooperation structures developed within the League of Nations lead to new foundations or restorative redevelopments. Susana Stüssi discusses the ways in which scholarly research was translated into exhibition practice, and how the enhancement of Amerindian and pre-Columbian collections played a key role in museum reform. The aim was to ensure the best possible publicity for the progress of Americanist studies in France, which was tantamount to a demonstration of the privileged status of French science *tout court*. The story continued
<figure><img src="image_17.png" /></figure>

with subsequent moves, starting
with the founding of the *Musée de
l'Homme* - which replaced the old
Trocadéro in 1937. The episode il-
lustrates some of the characteristics
of the modernization of Europe-
an museums in the first half of the
twentieth century, which combined
social adaptations and scientific
improvements, minor repairs and

maintenance, and sometimes even
the relocation of collections.

Writing in 1930 in the avant-garde
magazine *Documents*, Georges Ba-
taille defined the museum as fun-
damentally a social space: "[...] the
rooms and the works of art are only
a container whose content is formed
by the visitors: it is the content that

**Fig. 06:** Granville, Illustration of the chapter “Le Louvre des marionnettes”, *Un autre monde*, Paris, Fournier, 1844. Source: Wikipédia Commons
<figure><img src="image_18.png" /></figure>

distinguishes a museum from a private collection. A museum is like the lungs of a great city: every Sunday the crowds rush into the museum like blood and come out purified and fresh. Paintings are nothing more than dead surfaces, and it's in the crowd that the interplay, the sparkle and the trickle of light take place, which are technically described by authorised critics".³² It should be noted that Georges Bataille accompanied his article with an illustration by Granville entitled *Le Louvre des Marionnettes* (The Puppet Louvre) - dedicated to transforming visitors into real puppets in the encounter between objects and people, in a reversal that was provocative at the time, but can be heard differently today (Figure 6).

<caption>**Fig. 07:** Humboldt Forum, Berlin, 2021.</caption>

Writing for the artists and ethnographers who read *Documents*, Georges Bataille insists on the collective, socialised, urban character

of this apparatus, a clear reflection of the new socio-economic conditions of the first twentieth century, in other words of an unprecedented urban civilisation. Visitors to the museum perform a ritual essential to the equilibrium of the social body, like the movement of bodily fluids, a process illustrated above all by the circulation of blood. Bataille suggested that the main benefit of visiting a museum is the regular purification of the body. Each visitor participates in a series of exchanges with the collections in which even the pedagogic mission of the museums is simple part of a more material social process. In 1939, Georges Salles, curator at the Louvre, in *Le Regard*, a work much celebrated by Walter Benjamin stated that “the museum has invaded the street”.³³ Even if the idea that the museum contributes to urban prosperity, through its power to attract tourists, culture and politics, is a commonplace in specialist liter-
ature, a phrase such as Salles' suggests the institution's entry into the realm of urbanism and the politics of the body, a development which itself may call for repairs in order to fully participate in a process of a broader social replenishment.

## Social revitalisation

At the end of the twentieth century, museums were built into the urban fabric on a variety of scales, sometimes in the form of new constructions, sometimes as inventive restorations of existing buildings. In Berlin, the transfer of two of Dahlem's museums to the new Humboldt Forum was tantamount to an attempt to repair the recreated building, perhaps to attenuate its normative force, and at the very least to invent a convenient and indisputable utility for this empty form of an imaginary past.³⁴ The colonial history of their collections was a contributing factor in the initial debates about the legitimacy of rebuilding the palace, which, as far as its opponents were concerned, risked becoming a concentrate of historical criminalities³⁵ (Figure 7). In Nantes, after several decades of legal disputes with its neighbours, the Musée Dobrée is now fully integrated into the urban landscape, opening its garden and redesigning the sensitive landscape of the neighbourhood. The success of this latest project is characteristic of a more general trend, which sees programs to repair not just museums, but their entire neighborhoods, with a view to revitalizing the area, often from a political, economic and social perspective.³⁶

On the theme of urban ornamentation, Jesus Pedro Lorente looks at the revitalisation of a neighbourhood in Bilbao thanks to carefully-labeled installations, which allow passers-by to become aware of the museum's role in the invention of a 'distinguished' cultural landscape. The relevance of this development, he argues, lies in a "fourth place", in reference to the typology of sociologist Ray Oldenburg.³⁷ Oldenburg distinguished three kinds of place: the first are homes, the second workplaces or schools, while the "third places" fulfil different roles that are essential to local democracy and, beyond that, to the vitality of any community. Today, an unprecedented hybridity of cultural establishments - such as libraries and museums - that have become, on occasion and for a time at least, medialabs or workshops, poses fresh questions about their role in carrying out other social functions.³⁸

In fact, thinking about museums and collections, whether documentary or otherwise, has never ceased to take an interest in the most favorable arrangements to introduce into them - just as thinking about justice has never ceased to weigh on the architecture and furnishings of judicial courts or political assemblies.³⁹ An emblematic place in this respect is the famous laboratory imagined by Warburg in Hamburg: an “arena of science [Arena der Wissenschaft]” – at once a reading room, an exhibition space and a conference venue.⁴⁰ But contemporary critics take a different approach to work on museum collections: the aim is often to bring to light their suspect provenance, or even to
<figure><img src="image_19.png" /></figure>

identify the violence inherent in objects that have not been typically seen from that point of view - like Fred Wilson's work in 1992.⁴¹ Such an approach treats museum collections as a virtually involuntary resource from which to extract items to redress the injustices of the past and the inequalities of the present, while ensuring future sustainability.⁴² These endeavors, which might bring together artists and researchers, philosophers, architects and design specialists, and which often include structured engagement with potential users will require us to rethink the way the museum space is arranged and used.

Curator Clémentine Deliss, who ran the Frankfurt Museum of Cultures from 2010 to 2015, drew inspiration from the university and art school there. In 2013, she curated *Object*

Atlas, a manifestation of artistic engagement with ethnographic artefacts housed in the collection.⁴³ Her 'metabolic museum' designs an institution engaged in research based on the collections to be explored, thanks to a specially designed arrangement of rooms and furniture. The arrangement of the metabolic museum in favor of productive uses is reminiscent of a domestic utopia of modernity, such as that of Apollinaire, who professed that "in order to work well, one would need a flat furnished in the futuristic manner of pneumatic furniture that one would inflate and deflate after use. In the moment of inspiration, all the furniture would be flat and perched on the ceiling by means of pulleys. The field would become free for intellectual work and the walking that is its necessary complement".⁴⁴ For Clémentine Deliss, furniture is not intended to fit in with the ar-

<caption>**Fig. 08: Voie libre,**
permanent space,
Musée de la civi-
lisation, Québec.</caption>
<figure><img src="image_20.png" /></figure>

chitecture of an exhibition, or to
accommodate the regulated paths
of visitors, but to allow fruitful ex-
tractions.

As Manuel Borja-Villel points out, “reading, working, chatting and resting are performative acts that museums generally try to suppress”<sup>45</sup> but Clémentine Deliss mobilises the logistics of her ideal museum for these very purposes, making collections and storerooms, tables and comfortable chairs available. She imagines visitors individually projecting images between the works, to “spam the display” - less as a form of piracy than as a way of repairing or complementing the official collection. Such proposals establish the museum as a space for precarious experiments, serving the object, the artist and often diasporic communities.

The “Resonant Museum” proposal
launched in 2024 by the Musée du
Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac pro-
vides a material instance of these

kinds of conceptual aspirations,
while nevertheless respecting the
more conventional itinerary of the
museum visit⁴⁶. As Louis Petitjean
points out, the parisian museum
wants to give a voice back to its
collections, particularly of musi-
cal instruments, while at the same
time remedying colonial erasure,
through collaborations with art-
ists⁴⁷. New installations will enable
sounds (whether music, voices or
environmental noises) to enrich the
experience of dissonant heritages.
An artist's sound residency - in this
case Youmna Saba's project, with
the emblematic title “La Réserve des
non-dits” - illustrates the challenges
of this remediation. The initiative is
part of a context in which museums
are asking questions, as the Geneva
Museum has done in its temporary
exhibition *Tuning in - Acoustics of
Emotion*: “What voices are we pre-
serving, and why? Who speaks, who
has the right to be heard? (...) What
kinds of emotional links can be con-
veyed by the voice? (...) How can we
hear a voice that does not produce
sound?”.⁴⁸

**Fig. 09:**
*To All the Un-named Women,*
temporary exhi-
bition, curated by
Michaëlle Ser-
gile, Montréal,
McCord Stewart
museum, septem-
ber 2024 - janu-
ary 2025.
## Post-colonial treatment

Within the reparative turn embodied in multiple practices around the world, Nada Guzic identifies, in North America, “a series of interrelated themes and issues, including restorative justice, healing and well-being, restitution and repatriation, decolonisation in its many forms, and the demand for more caring institutions” (Figure 8). The multiple meanings and challenges of reparation touch on issues as varied as inclusive purchasing policies, the treatment of collections and exhibitions, indigenous rights, and the challenge of *re-enacting* intangible cultural heritage - whether on the initiative of a guest artist curator or that of source communities (Figure 9). All these practices aim, in some measure, to “repair the living”⁴⁹ by establishing new relationships to objects on display.

In Canada, the museum has played a role in diversity policies from the adoption of multiculturalism in the 1970s to the latest Equity, Diversity

and Inclusion (EDI) policies. Initiatives have focused on both accessibility and the promotion of indigenous institutions, with the aim of redressing inequalities of an ideological, physical or cultural nature. Both the development of collections and their documentation have been marked by a triptych of resolutions: the modification of acquisition criteria to reflect the aspiration to model diversity within museums, the change of terminology to represent the plurality of identities of visitors, and a revision of the discourse on objects to make room for the expression of emotions and promote new narratives (Figure 10). Collection management, with a view to EDI, must therefore bridge the gaps in representation to compensate for the invisibility of certain communities. Identifying artists and works in indigenous languages, in exhibition titles and object descriptions, is one of the most notable requirements.

The museum is seen as a potentially restorative institution, in both

<figure><img src="image_21.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 10: *Sur paroles. Le son du rap queb, Temporary exhibition, Québec, Musée de la civilisation, november 2023 - september 2024.*</figcaption></figure>

10
material and symbolic terms, one
which should aim to “encourage the
emergence of a representative, just
and equitable society”.⁵⁰ As Thierry
Ruddel has pointed out in relation
to the various “civilising” museums
in the country, this decision will
have to face several challenges.⁵¹
Nada Guzic stresses the “contradic-
tion between policies aimed at es-
tablishing a national collection that
is supposed to reflect the country’s
identity and the fragmentation of
that identity, as manifested in po-
litical demands for the inclusion of
under-represented groups identi-
fied by their country of origin” (Fig-
ure 11). The play of nomenclatures
and classifications specific to the
different types of museums weighs
particularly heavily on this pro-
gram. Compared with museums of
society or ethnology, art museums
are clearly out of step, even though
some of them, which according
to the available surveys are very
much in the minority, “have begun
to incorporate cultural categories,
attempting to segment identities in
the same way as databases of cul-
tural objects”. Inventories of collec-
tions, for example at the *Musée d'art
contemporain de Montréal*, provide
“a breakdown of artists by gender,
cultural origin, year of birth and re-
gional distribution”.

Jean-Philippe Uzel shows that in re-
cent years there has been a shift in
the demands of the First Nations,
from reconciliation to decolonisa-
tion, leading to new debates and
new oppositions. The first period
saw the introduction of a policy of
including “indigenous voices” - to
varying degrees of effectiveness,
depending on the museum - thanks

to the new care taken in the way ob-
jects are discussed, from their origin
to their final treatment. A second
era was characterized by an empha-
sis on the genocidal nature of the co-
lonial project, leading to an empha-
sis “between post-trauma medicine
and social justice”, to collaborate in
“healing” through “reconciliation”.
From 2017 onwards, the abandon-
ment of this vocabulary, deemed
unsuitable, has led to an increasing
adoption of the postcolonial per-
spective, drawing on a tradition be-
gun a generation earlier.

The Canadian Aboriginal move-
ment's approach to “coloniality”
aims to create a museum that is not
so much reconciling as healing fol-
lowing the national trauma of the
discovery, in May 2021, of the hid-
den remains of children who had
died at residential schools. Some
institutions, at the forefront of rec-
onciliation processes in their early
days, do acknowledge their colonial
origins. But, when no concrete con-
clusions are drawn, the reference
to decolonisation risks becoming
merely metaphorical, and even to-
kenistic. Some museums have be-
gun to call for real indigenous in-
tervention in at least some of their
spaces in the name of the principle,
affirmed by David Garneau in 2022,
that “museums are non-colonial,
indigenous, when they place the
needs of living people before the
goods conserved”.⁵²

Such an alternative is found in many
contemporary museums, which are
confronted with the questionable
provenance of their objects, from
colonial looting to police raids. In
Canada process of confiscation was
<figure><img src="image_22.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 12:**
*Art sur ordonnance*, MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain.</figcaption></figure>

set in motion after the potlatch was banned, leading to the seizure of property now being kept in museums in Western Canada, and then, depending on circumstances, to restitution or repair.⁵³ In Brazil, the five hundred or so pieces confiscated by the police at the end of the nineteenth century as part of social and religious repression were first placed in a museum of “black magic” but were later transferred to the *Museu da República* in Rio de Janeiro.

Pedro Marco Gonçalves and Arantxa Ciafrino retrace the successive episodes in a demonstration of decolonial museology. Today, their conservation is part of a process of reparation for Afro-Brazilian religious traditions and their memory. In concrete terms, the custody of the collection, because of its specific characteristics, is in the hands of the Afro-Brazilian temples, commonly known as *terreiros*, with the museum providing them with its
support. This partnership, theorised
by a particularly inventive new Bra-
zilian museology, aims to respond to
the gesture of faith without depend-
ing/insisting on the scientificity in-
scribed in previous repressions. As
museologist Bruno Brulon Soares
writes, “uncertainty about collec-
tions is never an easy burden for
museums to bear, but it is a funda-
mental part of any ritual in a ter-
reiro. Understanding these objects
in their process of objectification,
rather than attached to fixed and
stable classification systems, can
free the museum from its own colo-
nial methods and procedures”.⁵⁴

Caring for others

This is the beginning of new ways
of treating objects, opposed to the
longstanding views of conserva-
tion-restoration, and aimed at creat-
ing a framework in which fairness is
newly valorized.⁵⁵ A new horizon of
practices is taking shape, that of the

bientraitance of objects, according
to a recent neologism⁵⁶ which toler-
ates certain material deteriorations,
if not losses.⁵⁷ From this perspective,
Noémie Etienne defends the idea of
an “active and polyphonic conser-
vation” in museums devoted to the
display of puppets. Rejecting the
classic paradigm of heritage protec-
tion, these establishments illustrate
the possibility of a social partici-
pation in the management of their
collections, in forms of negotiation
between museum professionals and
puppeteers invested in their games.
Like art libraries, or museums of re-
ligion or music, which allow some
of their artefacts to be used in pri-
vate practices or in collective cere-
monies, these collections willingly
sacrifice parts of their mission (pro-
tection or conservation) to the de-
mands encouraged by the recogni-
tion of intangible cultural heritage.
In this way, these museums fall into
the category of popular spectacle,
somewhere between community at-

<figure><img src="image_23.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 13:
*Un mile dans mes souliers,*
Temporary ex-
hibition, Centre
des mémoires
montréalaises,
Montréal, febru-
ary 2024 - august
2025.</figcaption></figure>

13
tachment and folk tourism.

To guarantee the documentary value of the material, the involvement of conservators is crucial at every stage of the process, as is the choice of the people who take temporary charge of the objects. The practices permitted are subject to very precise limits in terms of the original condition of the instruments, which must be guaranteed. They also depend on the legitimate players - and, in the case of ethno-logical collections, the source communities - respecting the practices. However, this last condition may prove impossible to achieve. Anthropologist Carole Delamour has defended the principle of returning to the Innu Indians of Mashteuiatsh the drums they can no longer play because they have lost their skills.⁵⁸ “This is perfectly understandable in a given situation,” remarks Joelle le Marec, “but it is difficult for the organisations responsible for investigating claims for restitution to take into account: how can you justify the quality of a relationship with the objects claimed by claiming that they have not been used?”.⁵⁹ To accept this weakness, on the part of the museum, would be to acknowledge that people can see their know-how disappear, without calling into question their properties: after all, owning musical instruments that you don't use but are attached to is a commonplace phenomenon. As a French historian once wrote about the social classes of the 19th century, the bourgeoisie is defined by the presence of a piano in its interior.⁶⁰

Restorative museology is a necessary result of the politics of care

when brought to the cultural field.⁶¹ Almost a generation ago, in an article co-authored with Berenice Fisher, Joan Tronto suggested that “care should be seen as a generic activity that includes everything we do to maintain, perpetuate and repair our ‘world’, so that we can live in it as well as possible. This world includes our bodies, ourselves and our environment, all of which we seek to link into a complex network in support of life”.⁶² The response in museums, in the form of care for the public through the collections, has been remarkable. This trend is part of a wider context, illustrated since the 1960s by specific proposals such as “bibliotherapy”.⁶³ This is the case at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, with the opening of a pavilion dedicated to art therapy,⁶⁴ and free tickets on prescription.⁶⁵ Since this pioneering initiative in 2018, the movement has quickly spread to Brussels, Switzerland and France, where in various places doctors can prescribe visits. In Montpellier, the “Art sur ordonnance” project has developed between the contemporary art center and the psychiatric emergency and post-emergency department, as well as in Rennes and the Yvelines department⁶⁶ (Figure 12). Art on Prescription distinguishes itself from art therapy by offering visits and activities at the museum (totally detached from the medical world) rather than hospital sessions.

Care also ties in with older concerns about diversifying museum offerings. The *Doppio Senso* programme at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, which offers tactile experiences and educational activities
for people with visual impairments, is one instance of the policies of inclusive access that have marked recent decades around the world. However, as Valeria Bottalico insists, this is not just another service added to the museum's organisational chart, but a provision designed in collaboration with users, to meet their real needs. Alessandro Paolo Lena points out that the initiatives to promote touch in the museum are part of a wider effort to take account of the body and the senses from a perspective of care that refers to classic philosophical debates from the sensualism of the Enlightenment to the current perspectives of neuroscience.

Here and there we are now seeing collaborations⁶⁷ between museum professionals and the medical world, particularly around mental health treatments.⁶⁸ The Museums of Liverpool have devised a digital collection of museum objects and everyday items combined with sounds, under the title *My House of Memories*. Irene Di Pietro describes how, along with other similar projects, the initiative is working to care for people with dementia, through the development of inter-personal skills within a community setting. A philosophy of care such as this has given rise to professional training courses: in France, through the *Institut national du patrimoine* (National Heritage Institute)⁶⁹, and through the Association of Museum Curators.⁷⁰ The museum, thanks to its objects and their different histories or biographies, is defined as a place for therapeutic work on people - on a par with other practices, such as the storyteller's workshop (Figure 13).

## Relying on the museum

Walter Benjamin defined the storyteller in terms of the art of recounting experience⁷¹ and distinguished two types: the sedentary ploughman (guarantor of traditions) and the merchant navigator (involved in voyages and discoveries). Both share a set of traits that, for him, define “the nature of the true narrative”: “It always has, overtly or tacitly, a utilitarian aspect. This is sometimes expressed as a moral, sometimes as a practical recommendation, and sometimes as a proverb or a rule of life - in all cases, the storyteller is a man of good advice for his audience”.⁷² In this case, a museum's good advice to its guests could be that of healing through objects, of which Western literature has left some remarkable examples.⁷³ In chapter CX of *Moby-Dick*, Melville recounts how during his grave illness Queequeg asks for a coffin to be made for him. The creation of the coffin seems on to strengthen him, however, so that he recover and he later makes himself a chest out of the object: “Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them;
and these mysteries were therefore
destined in the end to moulder away
with the living parchment whereon
they were inscribed, and so be un-
solved to the last”.⁷⁴

The episode of a vanished wisdom
evokes the “paradigm of the last”,
dear to the French anthropological
school.⁷⁵ For Jean Jamin, who has
written an acute commentary on the
topic, Queequeg’s coffin - which sur-
vives the shipwreck of the Pequod,
gutted by the white whale, serves as
a lifeline for the hero, and therefore
provides the basis for the possibil-
ity of Ishmael’s story being told at
all - is “an allegory of the collection
and storage of objects from the far-
thest reaches of the civilised world,
(...) seen as covers for cultures in
mourning, obviously doomed to dis-
appear if not already gone (...), but
whose deeper meaning, whatever
was done or said, would remain
forever buried, unreachable, inde-
cipherable”.⁷⁶ From the perspective
of the “last romantics”, the *Musée
du Trocadéro*, in the discussion of
which Jean Jamin cites the tale of
Queequeg’s coffin, exhibits the relic
of an elsewhere lost to all and ulti-
mately useless. But today’s restora-
tive museology wants to imagine the
positive force of Queequeg’s coffin.
The radical alteration of the origi-
nal context of the tattoos – when the
prophet spoke and was understood
– renders his chest indecipherable,
but does not prevent it from being
faithfully preserved by those who
still claim it, nor does it prevent the
captain, a foreign viewer, from re-
specting it as an enigma or a myth.
The combination of their care and
respect is undoubtedly utopian, but
isn’t that always the case in muse-
ums?⁷⁷

In studies of museum and library
audiences, sociologists have long
identified a gap between authorised
commentary and ordinary practice.
In fact, “sympathetic attention to
places, people and practices that are
subject to power or relegated to the
margins,” Joelle Le Marec has point-
ed out, is often lacking both in the
studies carried out by institutions
and in the critical viewpoints of in-
tellectuals and specialists. In other
words, in the vast body of contem-
porary museum evaluation, “it is
hard to take seriously that the mu-
seum or the library can engender
trust and even produce it on a dai-
ly basis, and we are even saddened
by the naivety this implies”.⁷⁸ In the
end, writes Le Marec, this lack “ex-
empts us from thinking about and
considering the nature of an embar-
rassing form of trust”. And yet the
challenge facing museums today is
precisely to inspire confidence, or
to continue to do so, in the absence
or confusion of identifications and
belonging. For the museum, it is a
question of what care its collection
obliges it to take; for the visitor, it
is a question of whether he or she
can trust the museum and rely on
its care.⁷⁹
Endnotes

1 I'd like to express my deep gratitude to Mark O'Neill and Jonah Siegel for their invaluable contribution to the proofreading and commentary of this text. Their expertise has significantly enriched the content and improved the quality of the translation.

2 Portin, Grinell 2021.

3 Weil 1999.

4 Poulot 1985.

5 Bourdieu, Darbel 1966.

6 About the French case: Galard 2000; Fourteau 2002; Donnat, Tolila 2003.

7 https://www.vie-publique.fr/rapport/36387-inventer-des-musees-pour-demain-rapport-de-la-mission-musees-du-.

8 As the pandemic episode showed, in an emergency, priority is given to the collections rather than the public, and the museum once again becomes an invisible treasure, except in very small ones: Poulot 2020.

9 https://www.icom-musees.fr/sites/default/files/2019-11/Publication%20Muse%CC%81es%20et%20droits%20culturels.pdf.

10 Chakrabarty 2002.

11 Perec 2010.

12 Smith 2019.

13 *Confidential note...* 2025.

14 Sterling, Larkin 2021.

15 The *A World to Heal* exhibition was presented at the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum from November 2021 to April 2022.

16 Guzin Lukic 2004; for an example, see the exhibition *Enfants en guerre, guerre à l'enfance? at La Contemporaine*, Nanterre, http://www.lacontemporaine.fr/.

17 https://musee-memorial-terrorisme.fr/. On the phenomenon Barrett, Alba, Moses 2025.

18 https://www.dhmd.de/en/exhibitions/preview/fake.

19 Šveb, van Zomeren, Hansen 2024.

20 Lemieux 2007.

21 *Rapport sur la bibliographie 22 germinal an II* (1794), quoted by Poulot 1996, p. 279.

22 Etienne 2012.

23 Lethbridge 1992.

24 Lenz 1978.

25 Poulot 2025.

26 Bal 1992.

27 Riegel 1995; Forni 2020, pp. 59-71. For the general context Tator, Henry, Mattis, 1998, chapter 2, pp. 36-61.

28 The first one of this kind being Benjamin Ives Gilman's article on "Museum Fatigue" from 1916, https://archive.org/details/jstor-6127/page/n13/mode/2up

29 Baxandall 1972.

30 Valéry [1923] 1960.
31 Buttier, Roullier, Sandras 2022.

32 Bataille 1930, p. 300; Debaene 2002.

33 Salles [1939] 2022, p. 133.

34 Flamm 2007, p. 692.

35 See the poems by Volker Braun, translated and edited by Jean-Paul Barbe: Braun 2023.

36 Gasnier et al. 2022.

37 Oldenburg 1999.

38 Besson 2017.

39 Among others, Fischer Taylor 2013.

40 Interview with Céline Trautmann-Waller: McEwan, Trautmann-Waller 2018.

41 *Mining the Museum* was an exhibition installed by Fred Wilson, invited by The Contemporary, Baltimore, using the archives and resources of the Maryland Historical Society in October 1992: Corrin et al. 1994.

42 *Report of the World Commission...* 1987

43 Deliss 2013.

44 Faure-Favier 2018.

45 Quoted in Dercon, Lecuyer 2023.

46 On the complexity of actual museum experiences, see Debary, Roustan 2012.

47 https://hemisphereon.com/youmna-saba-dans-la-tour-des-instruments-du-monde.

48 *Tuning In*, temporary exhibition 2024-2025, International Museum of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, https://redcrossmuseum.ch/exhibitions/tuning-in-acoustique-de-lemotion-exhibition-redcrossmuseum/.

49 *Réparer les vivants* is a novel by Maylis de Kerangal published in 2014 by Verticales.

50 *Report by the Canadian Museums Association*, cited here by Nada Guzic.

51 Ruddel 2005.

52 Garneau 2022, p. 245.

53 Assu et al. 2018; Loget 2021.

54 Brulon Soares 2024, p. 83; Russi 2024, p. 5.

55 Phillips 2011.

56 Garcia Gomez 2023.

57 Arndt, Etienne 2023.

58 Delamour 2019.

59 Le Marec 2021a, p. 21.

60 Chaline 1983.

61 Owens 2024.

62 Tronto 2008; Brugère 2023a; 2023b.

63 Detambel 2017; 2023.

64 https://www.mbam.qc.ca/fr/seances-dart-therapie/.

65 https://www.mbam.qc.ca/en/news/museum-prescriptions/.
66 https://www.moco.art/fr/art-sur-ordonnance; prescriptions-museales-quand-lart-devient-un-remede.

67 Cowan, Laird, McKeown 2020.

68 Chatterjee, Vreeland, Noble 2009; Holzritter 2024.

69 https://mindful-art.eu/care-et-cure-au-musee. A bibliography has been compiled by Célia Corbet and Nathalie Bondil, as part of the continuing education course: “Museothérapie - Art et santé dans les musées”, 2024 by the Institut national du patrimoine in Paris. See the collection of articles edited by Joëlle Le Marec: Le Marec 2021b.

70 *Le caring museum...* 2023.

71 Benjamin [1936] 2016.

72 Benjamin [1936] 2016, p. 119.

73 Orlando 1994.

74 Melville 1851, Chap. 110, “Queequeg in His Coffin”.

75 Wendling 2021.

76 Jamin 2014.

77 See the chapters by Donald Preziosi and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett in Rüsen, Fehr 2004; Michael Conforti 2018.

78 Le Marec 2021a, p. 16.

79 It's worth noting that the entire issue was composed before the recent political upheavals in North America, which are calling into question the previous orientations of many museums.

## References

Arndt, Etienne 2023: Arndt L., Etienne N., *Transforming conservation: challenging hegemonic models, broadening the realm of the concerned, changing practices*, in “Museums & Social Issues”, 2023, 17, 1-2.

Assu et al. 2018: Assu S., Townsend-Gault C., Labrusse R., Mauzé M., Uzel J.-P., *Histoire de l'art et potlatch : regards croisés entre la France et le Canada*, in “Perspective. Actualité en histoire de l'art”, 2018, 2, pp. 37-56.

Bal 1992: Bal M., *Telling, showing, showing off: a walking tour*, in “Critical Inquiry”, 1992, 18, pp. 556-594.

Barrett, Alba, Moses 2025: Barrett J., Alba A.,Moses D. (eds.), *The Holocaust Museum and Human Rights: Transnational Perspectives on Contemporary Memorials*, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025.

Bataille 1930: Bataille G., *Musée*, in “Documents”, 1930, n° 5, p. 300.

Baxandall 1972: Baxandall M., *Painting and Experience in 15th century Italy*, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1972.

Benjamin [1936] 2016: Benjamin W., *Die Erzähler*, 1936, translated in *The storyteller: Tales out of loneliness*, London, Verso Books, 2016.

Besson 2017: Besson R., *Rôle et limites des tiers-lieux dans la fabrique des villes contemporaines*, in “Territoire en mouvement Revue de géographie et aménagement”, 2017, 34, https://doi.org/10.4000/tem.4184.

Bourdieu, Darbel 1966: Bourdieu P., Darbel A. (eds.), *L'Amour de l'art, Les musées européens et leurs publics*, Paris, Minuit, 1966.

Braun 2023: Volker Braun, *Grande pirogue en souffrance*, translated and edited by Jean-Paul Barbe, Nantes, Bardane, 2023.
Brugère 2023a: Brugère F., *L'éthique du care*, Paris, PUF, 2023.

Brugère 2023b: Brugère F., *Du musée-sanctuaire au musée-vie : Quelle démocratisation de la culture?*, Arnaldo J. (ed.), *Coordenadas culturales en la museología del presente: cinco neologismos: Actas del congreso internacional*, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2023, pp. 29-34.

Brulon Soares 2024: Brulon Soares B., *Collecting the sacred: the transition of diasporic objects in between museum regimes*, in Krmpotich C., Stevenson A. (eds.), *Collections Management as Critical Museum Practice*, London, UCL Press, 2024, chapter 4, pp. 65-83.

Buttier, Roullier, Sandras 2022: Buttier J.-C., Roullier C., Sandras A. (eds.), *Éducation populaire : engagement, médiation, transmission (XIXe-XXIe siècles)*, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, Archives nationales, 2022.

Chakrabarty 2002: Chakrabarty D., *Museums in late democracies*, in “Humanities Research”, 2002, 9, 1, pp. 5-12.

Chaline 1983: Chaline J.-P., *Les bourgeois de Rouen*, Paris, Presses de la Fondation nationale des Sciences politiques, 1983.

Chatterjee, Vreeland, Noble 2009: Chatterjee H., Vreeland S., Noble G., *Museopathy: Exploring the healing potential of handling museum objects*, in “Museum & Society”, 2009, 7, 3, pp. 164-177.

*Confidential note...* 2025: *Confidential note dated 13 January 2025*, in “Le Parisien”, 23 January 2025, p. 2-3.

Conforti 2018: Conforti M., *Museum utopia for the twenty-first century. “An odd and impractical little dream”*, in Brusius M., Singh K. (eds.), *Museum Storage and Meaning: Tales from the Crypt*, London-New-York, Routledge, 2018, chapter 14, pp. 198-203.

Corrin et al. 1994: Corrin L. G., Wilson F., Berlin I., King-Hammond L., *Mining the museum*, New York, New Press, 1994.

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<figure><img src="image_24.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_25.png" /></figure>
# Roundtable: Caring Museums Today

edited by Dominique Poulot

Keywords:

Museums, Care, Diversity, Indigenization, Exhibition, Inclusion, Contemporary art, Violence.

## ABSTRACT:

The round table convenes a British museum professional, a North American philosopher and critic, and a German curator, to deliberate contemporary museum issues. The discourse focuses on contemporary museology and its challenges, particularly regarding the democratisation of visits and practices. The presentation of several case studies of institutions mobilising to present their collections and address the violence that may be associated with them is also a feature.

La tavola rotonda riunisce un professionista britannico dei musei, un filosofo e critico nordamericano e una curatrice tedesca, attorno a temi legati all'attualità dei musei. Presenta scambi di opinioni sulla museologia contemporanea e le sue sfide, in particolare riguardo alla democratizzazione delle visite e delle pratiche. Riporta diversi esempi di mobilitazione delle istituzioni per mettere in scena le loro collezioni e rendere conto delle violenze eventualmente ad esse associate.

La table ronde réunit un professionnel britannique des musées, un philosophe et critique nord-américain et une curatrice allemande, autour de thèmes relatifs à l'actualité des musées. Elle expose des échanges de vues sur la muséologie contemporaine et ses enjeux, en particulier à propos de la démocratisation des visites et des pratiques. Elle rend compte de plusieurs exemples de la mobilisation des institutions pour mettre en scène leurs fonds et rendre compte des violences qui leur sont éventuellement associées.

## Opening Picture:

A Day at the Seaside: workshop for children inspired by paintings stored in Glasgow Museums Resource Centre (2004), which holds the city's collection of 1.4 million objects and is visitable seven days a week.

Image Credit: Glasgow Life Museums.

<figure><img src="image_26.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_27.png" /><figcaption>Jonah Siegel</figcaption></figure>

Jonah Siegel, Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University, is the author of many publications on art and its institutions and on literature, including *Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth Century Culture of Art (2000)*, *Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century, (2020)* and *Overlooking Damage: Art, Display, and Loss in Times of Crisis (2022)*. In 2008 he published *The Emergence of the Modern Museum: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Sources (2008)*. He has held fellowships at the National Humanities Center, and at the American Academy in Rome, where he was a Rome Prize Fellow in 2004. In 2005 he will be at Oxford, Bogliasco, and Università IUAV, completing work on a book on the destruction of art objects in popular culture.

<figure><img src="image_28.png" /><figcaption>Nora Sternfeld</figcaption></figure>

Nora Sternfeld is an art educator and curator. She is professor of art education at the HFBK Hamburg. From 2018 to 2020 she was documenta professor at the Kunsthochschule Kassel. From 2012 to 2018 she was Professor of Curating and Mediating Art at the Aalto University in Helsinki. In addition, she is co-director of the /ecm - Master Programme for Exhibition Theory and Practice at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, in the core team of *schnittpunkt. austellungstheorie & praxis*, co-founder and part of *trafo.K*, Office for Education, Art and Critical Knowledge Production (Vienna) and since 2011 of freethought, Platform for Research, Education and Production (London). She publishes on museums, contemporary art, educational theory, exhibitions, historical politics and anti-racism.

<figure><img src="image_29.png" /><figcaption>Mark O'Neill</figcaption></figure>

Mark O'Neill worked for over 30 years in museums, mostly in Glasgow, serving as Head of Museums from 1998-2009. He led a number of large scale, award-winning projects, including: in 1993 the only museum of world religions in the UK ("In terms of interpreting and inspiring society afresh... probably the most important museum to have been opened in Britain since the V & A", *The Spectator*); in 2006, the £35 million refurbishment of Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum (one of the "few memorable paradigm-shifting museums that come along in any lifetime" Elaine Gurian); and the £74 million Riverside Museum (European Museum of the Year 2013). He has lectured worldwide and published on museum philosophy and practice, on social justice and inclusion in museums and on the health benefits of cultural participation.
**How should we view the notion of "care" for collections in museums today?**

**Jonah Siegel:** The responsibilities of curators have evidently multiplied to an extraordinary point. As in the past, those in charge of collections still need to protect objects in practical ways so they survive, and to display them effectively for various audiences. But curators are also called upon to explain or justify the value of the ownership and display of objects that in the past might have been assumed – often in response to shifting concepts of ownership and display that have been more effective at raising challenges than at reaching any kind of consensus. Today “care” includes the justification of value – as well as a related transparency and openness about provenance.

**Nora Sternfeld:** If we understand the task of a museum as a critical faithfulness to the material, then how can institutions be faithful to their objects? Is this really mainly about protecting materiality? Or is it perhaps, after all, more about the sedimented histories they carry within them and what the works are about? And would “care” not also touch the responsibility of the institutions and their relations to violence? We could think about questionable processes of acquisition, but we could also think of all the artistic works that have understood themselves in terms of collective processes, critical interventions, or ephemeral actions; they actually contain a potential. I propose that curatorial “care” really ought to apply to these processes and suggest

therefore a new para-museological understanding of “care”.

**Mark O'Neill:** Understanding of the task of caring for the vast number of objects in the 100000 or more museums across the world are changing along with the epistemologies through which they are interpreted and with the political economy which supports the burgeoning number of museums. They are now seen less as archives where inert objects wait to be given life in displays or through the attention of researchers. Their meanings as well as their materiality now needs to be cared for, so that indigenous epistemologies can influence how they are stored and how – and to whom – access is provided. Just as visitors are no longer seen as passive recipients of sense impressions of objects (based on a *tabula rasa* theory of mind) but instead as contributing actively to the process of sense making, objects, in the language of Bruno Latour, are seen as having agency; they actively shape our lives by the affordances they provide and the limitations they impose.

In political terms, there have been demands for increased accountability from a public who are not entirely convinced of the value of these vast repositories – especially when incidents like the recent thefts from the stores of the British Museum reveal that many objects in even the most august museums are not adequately documented. Surely these institutions were not simply accumulating and hoarding in the name of scholarship – without doing the basic work of recording? In Glasgow in 2004, to justify one of the poorest
cities in Western Europe spending £7 million on a new store (phase 1 of a repository which eventually held as 1,4 million objects – all fully inventoried! – at a final cost of £22 million), we decided to make it fully accessible to the public, with guided tours seven days a week. The approach to caring for the collection was transformed by taking seriously the fact that it was owned by the people of the city. “Care” means the museum is less a gatekeeper to publicly owned treasures and more enablers of access – both physical and intellectual.

**What is the difference between this notion of “care” and the ordinary concern for technical and scientific conservation?**

**Jonah Siegel:** Practical and ethical burdens increase as curators recognize their work as fundamentally educational and possibly even polemical. The need to care for the public has also grown, given the extraordinary expansion in the concepts of harm that have become available in recent years. The experience of the viewer has become an occasion in relation to which the claim of injury can be advanced – and possibly even felt – leading to the need for a new level of care in imagining where harm may be experienced and how it might be mitigated or prevented through modes of display.

**Nora Sternfeld:** Caring would be a faithfulness to the unarchivable aspects of the museum: to the emotional and conflictual dimensions of the material, to the history of its

“way” to the museum, to the sedimented histories they carry. I would opt for a “care” for the conflictual and unarchivable dimension of the material – precisely that which cannot be stored in archival boxes, but should nonetheless not be forgotten – also because the historical tension and conflictuality that is part of what the museum is can erupt once more.

The custodians’ and curators’ contradictory and always also somewhat impossible task would be to “care” for the conflictuality and performativity of the works – a “care” focused on the fact that there needs to be room precisely for the “unarchivable” element of art and history in the museum – because this is what actually distinguishes a museum from a police archive. The museum as para-museum would therefore be precisely a place in which a renewal of the material’s current relevance – and not just its immobilization or, alternatively, exploitation – can become possible.

**Mark O'Neill:** The key shift in this notion of “care” is from an epistemology based on the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the positivism of the Scientific revolution, the dualism of Descartes and the utilitarianism of Bentham, to one that emphasizes relationships, systems and ecologies. The museum is no longer an island of civilization, occasionally visited by worshippers, but an active agent in a complex web of cultural, social and economic networks and systems.

This reflects the increased political valency of museum objects, no longer seen as neutral specimens, but as embodying the values of
the cultures which collected them
which, at the time of the formation
of public museums, were dominat-
ed by imperialistic and patriarchal
norms.

Do you see a new ethical concept
in this concern for “care”?

**Jonah Siegel:** Practical considerations come to the fore initially when the concept of the museum itself needs support, but the challenge also may be viewed as an occasion for serious self-reflection. Why save this thing? Why display it? What values are we supporting by what we preserve, display, and explain – and by the terms we use to explain or justify ourselves? If we think of self-consciousness as a fundamental ethical responsibility, this process of reflection is revealed to be deeply ethical. I am not sure it is a new concept that recent ideas of “care” will require, so much as the recognition of a very old one.

**Nora Sternfeld:** The ethics of this concept of “care” are related to the ethics of Derrida’s *Archive Fever* and of Benjamin’s *Thesis on History: Ethics of the “archival unconscious”*. I would speak about ethics that are based on the admission of intrinsic violence and a history of struggles that are haunting the archive.

In this sense I would speak about
ethics as a faithfulness to the “unar-
chivable” – a concept that I owe to
and have been working on together
with the theorist Irit Rogoff.

But when we confront the unarchiv-
able that haunts the archive, we en-
counter contradictions, uncanny

contradictions. With Jacques Derri-
da I would refer to these contradic-
tions as the ghosts in the archives.
And what I would call care and eth-
ics would be to be faithful to these
contradictions instead of silencing
them: We don't want to admit them,
because we are looking for an or-
der that legitimizes our lives, our
positions, our points of view, we
are looking for an order in which
it is clear who are the good guys
and who are the bad guys. But if we
work with archives we encounter
contradictions and struggles. And
these will never legitimize what is.
They may motivate what is, they
move us, but they cannot legitimize
it, even if the archives always try to
do so in a certain way with their or-
ders and structures.

**Mark O'Neill:** Newer notions of “care” in museum culture derive from movements to revise and enrich our understanding of human life, reflected in a series “turns” – cultural, linguistic, embodied, material, ecological, spiritual, spatial – a search in the humanities equivalent to efforts by Mahbub ul-Haq, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum to replace metrics based on GDP with the Human Development index, and a legalistic version of human rights with one rooted in human capabilities. The philosophy of “care”, largely derived from feminist thinking aspires to be more than a “turn” however, and to function as a paradigm shift, in the full Kuhnian sense, of a transformed way of thinking which re-frames everything and provides a new basis for “normal science”. Virginia Held, for example, has argued that the feminist ethic of “care” is not
an approach which can be added to
more established philosophies such
as Kantianism, utilitarianism or vir-
tue ethics. It has something in com-
mon with the latter, but “in its focus
on relationships rather than on the
dispositions of individuals, the eth-
ics of “care” is distinct”.¹

Insofar as museums are adopting a
relational ethic of “care”, museum
theory is moving beyond the her-
meneutic of suspicion and the de-
construction of the ideological role
of museums to a focus on relational-
ity, using terms like community, en-
gagement, empathy, co-production,
visitor centered, social justice, and
cultural democracy.

The pandemic exposed a widespread
hypocrisy about “care”, where the
(majority female) workers in homes
for the (majority female) elderly,
were exposed with their charges to
higher risks than any other profes-
sion, for wages that were at or near
the legal minimum. While many
museums have engaged with the
ethic of “care” through projects, the
great majority delegate these to the
largely female staff who previously
had delivered school programs, and
later art/engagement programs de-
rived from Community Arts. During
COVID most museums tried to adapt
and provide caring services online,
but some, most notably MOMA in
NY, made their real priorities clear.
Despite being one of the wealthiest
museums in the world, within days
of the first lockdown, and delivering
“care” projects, including one fo-
cused on individuals living with de-
mentia, MOMA sacked their entire
education and engagement team
– again mostly female, and from
global majority backgrounds. In the

UK, any time there are budget cuts,
the engagement staff are always the
first to go, in order to preserve the
museums' core functions. Dementia
care is of course very fundable, so
it costs the "core" nothing. Despite
values espoused in mission state-
ments, museums like MOMA deny
relational ethics and are driven by
a desire to retain unilateral control
over the institution and its environ-
ment, not to engage and to learn in
order to contribute, in the words of
the old ICOM definition, to society
and its development.

"Care" in museums is focused on
interpersonal care, working with
small groups, selected from commu-
nities under-represented amongst
museum visitors, through volun-
teering programs or time-limited
projects. These are often linked to
mission statement objectives in-
volving contributing to social mo-
bility, social cohesion or democra-
tization. Where these engagements
are designed to reshape the muse-
um as a whole, there may be some
truth in these claims. If they are just
projects, these claims are not tena-
ble – the numbers involved are sim-
ply too small to have any impact. As
Nick Merriman, now CEO of English
Heritage put it.

"If we are honest with our-
selves, ...we like talking
about socially engaged
projects because social
change is part of the accep-
ted discourse and reward
system of museology, and
we feel better about our-
selves when we're doing
this kind of work. Howev-
er, we have not found a
way to translate this small
scale but important work
into mass participation
that makes a change in the
wider society”.²

Embedding “care” in museum institutional culture would mean recognizing the unchanging gap in visitation between upper and lower socioeconomic groups, and that a strategic response to structural inequalities is required, in particular to the fact that the single most important predictor of museum visiting is prior level of educational qualification. Despite the huge focus on improving access to museums over the past 50 years, I don’t know of any museum which puts this core insight of cultural sociology at the centre of its engagement strategy. For every increased level of educational attainment, people are proportionately more likely to visit museums, and there is a big jump for people with degrees – especially those with humanities’ degrees. Very few museums have mediation programs (involving all aspects of display, marketing, PR, outreach, inreach and visitor welcome) designed to create access for people with few or no educational qualifications. This means that, while museums can enhance the education of those who are already educated, the people who get the most out of them are the most educated. And the people who could most benefit from an enhanced education are the least likely to be addressed by the museum. And of course, education intersects with other vectors of inequality, compounding their exclusionary effects.

## How can we link the notions of provenance and “care” for objects?

**Jonah Siegel:** Clarity about provenance and even about uncertainty as to provenance is vital. The history of an object includes the vicissitudes it has experienced. Caring for the museum itself requires frankness in these areas – and I anticipate that the burgeoning importance of the question of provenance will ultimately lead us to move beyond simply endorsing fairly primitive notions of cultural property, of group blame or responsibility, or of the ethics of individual ownership.

**Nora Sternfeld:** If we admit that conflictuality is somehow part of every process of musealization then we will see that provenance and “care” are intrinsically linked: The objects come to the museum with their histories. And musealization consists in a revalorization of values: It is doing something with the objects, and this “something” becomes part of them, for the better or for the worse. Caring for objects means caring for their histories – as violent (or as mundane) they might be.

**Mark O'Neill:** A relational perspective also emphasizes context, including provenance. The focus on the context of objects has been influential in museums from a number of perspectives – ecological in natural history, historical and cultural in human history collections. The role of context in art collections is still unresolved. The great English art historian, Michael Baxandall, ar-
<figure><img src="image_30.png" /></figure>

gued against providing context in museums, despite writing inspiring work on how culture shaped the period eye which enabled works of art to be understood and appreciated.³ For different reasons, the evocation of context for non-European objects was disavowed by the Musée de l'Homme, in an assertion of the primacy of the European category of “art” over cultural meanings. This echoes arguments put forward by museum directors like James Cuno and Neil McGregor that, in effect, non-European peoples should be flattered by having their objects elevated to this status. This denial of the importance of context led many American museums, including the Getty and the Met to collect unprovenanced antiquities from Italy and Greece, many of which they have been forced by the courts to return, most famously the Euphronios krater.

One of the puzzling aspects of provenance studies is how wide acceptance that objects spoliated by the Nazis should be returned to the descendants of the original owners, is often combined with a vigorous insistence that the same principle does not apply in the contexts of other, relatively recent atrocities. *Reductio ad absurdum* arguments invoke claims for the return of objects taken by the Roman legions or marauding Vikings, with no recognition of the links of the objects with identifiable living descendants of their original owners. In 1999, Glasgow City Council agreed to return a Lakota Ghost Dance Shirt which had been removed from a corpse after the Massacre of Wounded Knee (1890) to descendants, mainly as the result of provenance research which showed that there was no way the object could have been legally acquired by the donor, as well as because of its religious, cultural and historical significance.

**What contradictions or connections do you see in contemporary museum situations?**

**Jonah Siegel:** The museum can be seen as a culminating point of a general education – a structure containing objects one understands or appreciates if one has been educated to the point at which doing so is possible. It can also be seen, on the other hand, as precisely the location at which that instruction should be carried out, one that should not require prior knowledge as a price of entry. To these extremes, between which museums and thinking about museums have moved since their inception, we might add the pres-

**Fig. 01:** Lakota Ghost Dance Shirt repatriated to the Wounded Knee Survivors Association in 1999. The shirt was probably removed from the body of someone killed in the massacre in December 1890. This was the first ever repatriation from a UK museum to a Native American organisation. Image Credit: Glasgow Life Museums.
<figure><img src="image_31.png" /></figure>

sures for instrumental value on the one hand, which is one characteristic manifestation of the educational mission (we must train our designers or citizens) and the claims for broader general values (such as the aesthetic, the ideal, universal culture, etc.) which are manifestations of that culminating quality of the institution, but which have been put under a great deal of pressure by recent reflections on the social interests inherent in the institution. The embrace of multicultural and inclusive values in European and American cultural institutions along with new sensitivities about the politics of ownership and display have tended to reveal the fault lines dividing the never truly harmonious elements that made up the cultural logic of the museum. Who is it for? What is it for? These basic questions are easy to answer in broad terms, but are less straightforward in practice than it is sometimes thought. I'd add that the same might be said

about other important social structures that matter (the family, the nation, and so on). To put the matter in the terms offered in the original question: in some ways the museum might be better understood as a good example of the inevitability of contradictions that will be manifested at the junction point of all important connections rather than as an especially troubled instance of contradiction.

**Nora Sternfeld:** Since the beginning of the 21st century, critical theories have spread like wildfire in the practice of institutional texts and contexts: feminism, anti-racism, environmental policies, institutional criticism, inclusion debates, decolonial and queer theories are omnipresent – while structurally, however, little has changed for the better and a hard-earned critical vocabulary often becomes a label. The question remains: How can the

<caption>**Fig. 02:** In response to the backlash triggered by the exhibition SH(out), on LGBTI issues and art, we commissioned artist Anthony Shrag (http://www.anthonyschrag.com) to make a rapid-response display documenting the controversy and inviting public comment. Image Credit: Glasgow Life Museums.</caption>
<figure><img src="image_32.png" /></figure>

critique of the museum have actual consequences within the museum?

**Mark O'Neill:** Critical theories have indeed had a strong influence on the exhibitions and activities of some museums, with many claiming radical reinvention. There is little evidence that these changes are anything other than performative, validating the identities of the staff and those sections of the public which share their values. I know of no museum which takes a visitor-centered, experimental approach to progressive displays. This would involve ascertaining the attitudes towards, and the knowledge and understandings of, the issues involved amongst a wide public (not just minoritized groups) and then using formative evaluation to implement effective public education in the sense described by both Nora and Jonah. This is all the more important in our polarised society. The aim would be to reduce public bewilderment about many culture

war issues, offering accessible information, reducing rejection and nurturing the reflection which is essential to active citizenship.

In Glasgow we learned the need for this approach the hard way. After three successful exhibitions in our Gallery of Modern Art on the theme of Contemporary Art and Human Rights, in 2004, 2006 and 2008, we added another to the sequence, celebrating LGBTQI art. We mismanaged the risks very badly, resulting in really negative experiences for staff and in damage to our capacity to address difficult issues in the future.⁴

**What examples of (good) treatment could you cite in this context?**

**Jonah Siegel :** An example of a recent display that I found rich and thought-provoking even as it addressed difficult questions in American history is *Wiyohpiyata: Lakota*

**Fig. 03:**
Visitors in 2009 to Sh(out): Contemporary Art and Human Rights at Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art admire 'Memorial To A Marriage' by Patricia Cronin. Despite the controversy triggered by the exhibition, this work was acquired by the city and is now on long-term display in Kelvingrove Museum & Art Gallery.
Image Credit: Glasgow Life Museums.
<figure><img src="image_33.png" /></figure>

*Images of the Contested West*, at the Peabody museum at Harvard as I write, an exhibition that shows a museum leading with new ideas about its holdings and the relationships those holdings can illustrate. Among the effective strategies the curators used are some that I would describe as more phenomenological than conceptual. The exhibition has been given pride of place, occurring as it does near the beginning of the museum, which ensures the primacy of its account of difficult unresolved contact. The display is beautifully designed, indicating a material commitment to the concepts it strives to illuminate, thereby making a politically-charged and morally complex topic immediately interesting to the viewer.

At the heart of the exhibition is a complicated document, a Lakota Sioux ledger book (on loan from the Houghton library, also at Harvard), said to have been found on the battlefield where Custer was defeated at the Battle of Little Big Horn. The

book contains illustrations by and of Plains Indian warriors that the exhibit presents along with historic Lakota objects from the museum's collections, and work by Butch Thunder Hawk, a contemporary Lakota artist, who was also a co-curator of the exhibition.

It would be difficult to describe in detail the many intelligent and effective design elements of this exhibition, but what is unmistakably clear is that the display begins with conflict, with unresolved and unresolved issues that it does not attempt to close off or resolve, but instead leaves open in a productive way. The object at its heart was recovered from a scene of battle and displays warriors, so it does not only acknowledge conflict, but leads with it. The provenance of the object – and even its likely uses – are clearly indicated to be not fully established. The display includes works of art of the Lakota people, so it does not make conflict or conquest the only topic that matters about indigenous

<caption>**Fig. 04:** Image Credit: Glasgow Life Museums.</caption>
<figure><img src="image_34.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 05-06: Wiyohpiyata: Lakota Images of the Contested West.**
© Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University.</figcaption></figure>

05

<figure><img src="image_35.png" /></figure>

Dominique Poulot
Roundtable: Caring Museums Today

06
communities. The inclusion of con-
temporary art that is directly related
to the material on display illustrates
in the most concrete way the conti-
nuity of Indian life – that the topics
raised by the works on display are
in no way merely retrospective. The
exhibition thereby makes a contrast
– to cite just one local example –
with the images of indigenous peo-
ple at the Fogg Museum that were
painted – as so many fantasies and
documentations of indigenous life
were in the nineteenth century – to
capture a culture presented as inev-
itably vanishing by the very people
who were working to make it disap-
pear.

Ultimately, what stands out to me
about this example at the Peabody
is that the most interesting respons-
es to the ethical challenges of own-
ership and exhibition at a muse-
um – and to historic violence and
displacement – may well be the
care taken in the organization and
display of material. It bears saying
that the success of this exhibition
to my mind is not unrelated to the
clear discussions of NAGPRA (the
Native American Graves Repatria-
tion Act) elsewhere in the museum,
or the display of archeological work
undertaken at Harvard as a site,
and – of course – to the capacious
collection of objects from different
regions and cultures present in the
rest of the museum.

Museums of anthropology carry a
high burden when it comes to the
recognition of practices of political
power and of collecting and display
that can no longer be passed over,
given their complicity in practices
of conquest and control, and in the

development of racialized analy-
ses used to justify those practices.
The Peabody, a nineteenth-century
foundation with troubling holdings
and controversy in its recent past,
is to be commended when it creates
a display that tries to do more than
merely reflect on its own failings.
Needless to say, one display does not
atone for decades of injuries or for
centuries of conquest, but this one
is to be applauded for the effective
use of the resources of the museum
 material, conceptual, phenomeno-
logical) to suggest new kinds of rela-
tionships between the past, present,
and future.

**Nora Sternfeld:** With the collective *schnittpunkt. Exhibition theory and practice* and within our publication series "curating" in the publishing series of the University of Applied Arts Vienna we thought a lot about these questions. In our book on "Curating as Anti-Racist Practice", Natalie Bayer, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński and I ask how curatorial practices refuse to play the game of "getting over it". We discuss anti-racist curating as a practice that is faithful not only to objects, but to existing social struggles that encounter the ghosts of historical violence. And I think that the Kreuzberg Museum in Berlin, that Natalie Bayer is actually directing, is dedicated to these questions in its entire practice. Another example could be the Volkskundemuseum in Vienna that has reworked its collection presentation from an anti-racist perspective and is now in a process of restructuring thinking together with the collective *MUSMIG*. *MUSMIG*, the acronym for Museum of Migration is a museum
in Vienna that does not (yet) exist. MUSMIG is a collective, an attempt at post-migrant self-historicization and a performance of the demand for a museum for migration. MUSMIG describes itself as “the blind spot of traditional museums, the thorn in the flesh of nation-state institutions. MUSMIG is the gap that comes into the world performatively, the utopia that is only realized in the act of speaking, in debate and in celebration”. Since February 2024, MUSMIG has had a room in the Vienna Volkskundemuseum (Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art), its “director’s room” is a meeting room for MUSMIG, which is currently headed by the first elected – six-member – director collective. The manifesto of the MUSMIG collective states:

A museum about migration is a museum about wars.

A museum about wars is a museum about exploitation.

A museum about exploitation is a museum about resources.

A museum about resources is a museum about capitalism.

A museum about capitalism is a museum about power.

A museum about power is a museum about fascism.

A museum about fascism is a museum about annihilation.

A museum about annihilation is a museum about pain.

A museum about pain is a museum about racism.

A museum about racism is a museum about borders.

A museum about borders is a museum about movement.

A museum about movement is a museum about people.

A museum about people is a museum about migration.

A museum about migration is a museum about wars.⁵

At this very moment we are preparing a book on the difficulty of working with the history of nazism in an era of post-nazism.⁶ Luisa Ziaja, chief curator of the Belvedere in Vienna, writes in her text about some of her collection exhibitions. Her text “on historical and institutional critique in curatorial work with a collection” has the title: *Not following, not not showing, breaking, challenging*. And she describes her very careful curatorial practice against the grain and the weight of the canon.

## How do the notions of “care” for objects and “care” for visitors fit together? Are there any contradictions between the two approaches?

**Jonah Siegel:** While safeguarding the objects in their “care” is a prime duty of curators, their responsibility to visitors is no less important. Given the state of general education today, it is challenging to know what positive information or knowledge a culture-worker can rely upon. People may or may not know clearly why they are in the museum, or even why something is of interest. In every public institution, the curator needs to teach and inform in order to safeguard the ongoing value of the institution itself and of the objects it contains.
Meeting people where they are, in-
forming, and inspiring them are all
key elements for the future health
of the museum. Finding the balance
between confidence (in the good the
institution can do), humility (when
it comes to historic museal practices
inextricably associated with acts of
violence) and respect (for the public
as moral and intellectual subjects,
for objects and their histories) will
always be challenging and lead to
policies and practices characterized
by compromise and contradiction.
The question is whether our intel-
lectual communities are willing to
see contradiction and compromise
as powerful conceptual tools, or
whether they will be unable to do
more than judge them for being
in the end what they were to start
with—the main elements shaping
culture.

**Nora Sternfeld:** This is a very good question. I think that a museum is a place of contradictory tasks and negotiations. If we think about “care” in the museum as a “care” for the conflictuality that comes with the relation to history this contradiction is exactly what has to be lived and negotiated in the process of museums. This is why I think that we should imagine new museum practices that I would call “progressive conservation” in which conservators, curators and educators work closely together.

**Mark O'Neill:** Any formulation of
museum practice that posits a con-
tradiction between care for objects
and “care” for visitors is an admi-
sion of failure; the core task is to rec-
oncile these obligations. When we
were planning to move Glasgow's

Museum of Transport to a new Zaha Hadid-designed museum on the river Clyde, the most consistent request for improving the old museum was to allow access onto the trams and buses, which had been prohibited to preserve the vehicles. The conservation team did an ethical assessment of the issue and recommended partitioning the interiors, screening off half with Perspex, and allowing the other half to be very gradually eroded by visitors.

Many people do not visit museums
because they find them uninterest-
ing, but the inequalities in museum
visiting by class, race, ethnicity, lev-
el of education etc. are not the re-
sult merely of individual choice, but
of structural, systemic inequality in
society. This implies that museums
are up against strong forces and it
is important not to make excessive
claims about the capacity of museu-
ms to change these structural bar-
riers. But some museums – of art,
science, history or other subjects –
have much more representative au-
diences than others, so there is scope
for change. The restriction of “care”
for visitors to one group of staff is
a way of avoiding working out how
the museum as a whole would need
to change to reduce the attendance
gap and attract more representative

<figure><img src="image_36.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 07:**
Patricia Cronin
'Memorial to a
Marriage' on
display in Kelvin-
grove Art Galle-
ry & Museum.
Image Credit:
Glasgow Life
Museums.</figcaption></figure>
audiences. Just as museums are required by law to make changes to enable access by disabled people on equal terms with the non-disabled, an ethic of “care” would require equivalent adjustments be made to enable educationally disadvantaged people to benefit from museums in all their dimensions.

**How can “care” in the museum relate to the notion of expenditure - you can give your own definition of this concept - as the Surrealists, Georges Bataille, etc. might have thought of it between the wars, or to classical economics, etc.? So how do we think about the obsolete, or even the waste, in this utopia of “care”?**

**Jonah Siegel:** The question of expenditure and waste is always going to be of most interest when understood to be a matter not of value (what is this worth?), but values (why does this matter?).

Contemporary culture is obsessed with efficiency, and shows an ever-renewed (and extraordinarily naïve) faith in novelty and in the genius of inexpert solutions. The museum stands athwart these tendencies and demands attention to what has been left behind *schnittpunkt* and – respect for expertise. These elements that make the institution feel atavistic are key to its moral function today – to stand against the pressures of aggressive ignorance and the valorization of financial profit and loss as the measure of all things.

What are we caring for and about when we care for and about museums? What is a museum when it cannot take either desire nor complacency for granted? The answers to these questions will make the next decades among the most exciting in the history of the institution, or contribute to the ongoing emptying out of its purpose.

The dictionary tells us that in English at least, “expenditure,” not infrequently brings along with it the idea of waste (in *Oxford English Dictionary*: “The expending or laying out (of energy, labour, time): often with notion of waste”). It strikes me that this question makes most sense in a world in which any expenditure that is not aimed at satisfying some basic need or pleasure will be a waste. In that world, the museum will always be a waste: it makes demands on our memories, it offers pleasure depending on effort, and sometimes unpleasure as well, following reflection. It does not make us richer or (*pace* Pierre Bourdieu and his followers) place us in a superior position in our society from which we can benefit practically.

A fundamental question is whose desire is being recognized, generated, and satisfied in the museum, and how to make the experience of the viewer one in which passions are activated but not cloyed. If we think of the matter this way, literature may be as good or better a guide than the theorists of museum design or economists. William Shakespeare lays out in one long complex sentence in his Sonnet 129, one account of the nature of desire (he calls it “lust”) in relation to expense. The sentence
is stylistically complicated because the poet is trying to capture a deep- ly dynamic relationship in which cause and effect, emotion and expe- rience, are deeply and complexly in- tertwined, but the point is relatively straightforward as a description of experience. “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” he tells us in a grim vision of the psychological ef- fects of desires satisfied, “Is lust in action.”.⁷ He also reminds the read- er however, that before the expense and waste that is the moment of de- sire satisfied comes the truly pow- erful experience of lust: “and till action, lust / Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame, / Savage, ex- treme, rude, cruel, not to trust.” Satisfaction is not the end of the cy- cle, however: once satisfied, desire tends to turn on its object: “Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight, / Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had / Past reason hated as a swal- lowed bait” Is it possible to escape the cycle of violence to the object of desire –or to route desire different- ly so that it escapes the moralized structures that make its workings a waste of shame? The museum will provoke such questions when we al- low it to – and perhaps some of the ongoing antipathy to the institution may be traced to a complex includ- ing both the regrets of satiation and – the prude’s fears disguised as eco- nomic prudence.

Influential economic models aside, the question of excess has also been shaped by the ongoing influence of some residual avant-garde sensi- bilities. Modernists tended to take the museum for granted, to push against the pressure of the past, as the Futurists did most flamboyant-

ly, imagining an institution charac- terized by the charisma of antiquity on the one hand, and by the excess of material it gathered together on the other, a place in which the prestige of history justified the as- sembling of a profusion of objects that crowded out the emergence of important and deeply necessary re- sponses to the dynamic new world technology was bringing into being. There is something perverse in the fact that the museum sometimes is still met with an attitude that made far more sense in 1909, when the technology being celebrated was the car and airplane. It should be difficult to argue not only that the cachet of history or of art is where it was in that earlier era, but even that the museum will provide the most copious kind of experience of culture available to us today. After all, almost everyone carries in their pocket access to more objects and experiences than all the museums that have ever been could relay to them in many lifetimes—though the result of all that access amounts to one experience over and over again. The crowding to be feared, it turns out, is not that of the museum—and technological innovation today has evidently not led to the new engage- ment with life celebrated by F. T. Marinetti and those who followed his lead.

**Nora Sternfeld:** What is waste and obsolete now, might mean some- thing completely different later. This is why I think that all that seems obsolete is part of a certain uncontrollable and ungovernable relation to history – that is exactly the reason why it might be able to carry the “unarchivable”.
**Mark O'Neill:** In terms of Bataille's grand guignol philosophy of energy, the images that come to mind are from the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, which featured three of the city's great museums: the mocking headless Marie Antoinette figures dancing at the Conciergerie; the paintings and images of the Louvre coming to life to the sound of Saint-Saëns' Danse macabre, implicitly acknowledging their death and denial of jouissance in the museum; and the Musée D'Orsay, a converted railway station, built on the site of Palais d'Orsay which was burned by the Communards during the Paris Commune of 1870. Expenditure on what Veblen might have called this conspicuous heritage was not matched by adequate investment in the most basic need of civilization- effective sewage systems, so that the swimming events in the Seine had to be postponed numerous times because of excessive amounts of human waste. This cultural contradiction is also evident in the UK, where in 2023, 265 conservative MPs voted against an amendment to stop private water companies from dumping raw sewage into the England's rivers and coastlines, reflecting how much neoliberal values had changed the meaning of "conservative" to such a degree that it no longer includes conserving the countryside, in a nation where the natural heritage of "this green and pleasant land" is a key part of its traditional identity.

In terms of classical economics, I think of museums as social institutions like the family, friendship or religion, which are outside the market and essential for its function-

ing – but constantly transformed by market forces. In the current era of market fundamentalism, where economics functions in a closed-off world of transactions which generate profit and loss, any impact on society or nature outside this cycle is called an “externality”. Increased pollution and mass redundancies, for example, are “negative externalities”. The core of society is the economy; all other aspects of life are “external”, and by implication, secondary.

In this interpretation, the ethic of “care” can be seen as a resistance to this vision of society as a mere external effect of the market, rather than the market being a servant of society. This neoliberal ideology claims the authority of Adam Smith, but it is a travesty of his thought, and not only because it discounts his *Theory of Moral Sentiments* (1759) and its celebration of empathy as the basis of civilization. Even in the *Wealth of Nations* (1776), he argues that the endless repetition of simple tasks resulting from the division of labor leads to a “torpor” of mind which renders the worker “not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life”.⁸ The need to remedy this, Smith argues, even justifies state expenditure on public education. Museums in this view are instruments of human development, but as mere “positive externalities”, the “invisible hand” of the market constantly demands that they justify themselves in terms of
economic utility. It is a key paradox of museum culture that they carry out this humanizing function, and also, as instruments of modernity, take part in the destruction of traditional ways of life which modernity entails, transforming modes of landownership and human relationships with objects and nature as more and more aspects of life are commodified and absorbed into the market economy. Museums function as an extractive industry, collecting the flotsam and jetsam from the wreckage of cultures in the wake of modernization, in processes often conceived of as rescuing these remnants for the benefit of humanity, and romanticizing cultures which they have helped destroy. Jonah's quotation of a Shakespeare sonnet, reminds me of another, no 64, which may help to account, in part, for the muting of desire which is often apparent in museums. The obsessive gathering of artefacts may less an acquisitive response to the proliferation of artefacts, and more a manic flight from the fear that this hoarding will not, after all, keep an awareness of mortality at bay:

> Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,

> That time will come and take my
> love away.

> This thought is as a death, which
> cannot choose

> But weep to have that which it fears
> to lose.

> How can we think about distance
> from objects, or even their detestation/condemnation, within this
> framework of “care”?

**Jonah Siegel:** Evidently the ethical museum has to be ready to separate itself from the works of art it values if those works have been acquired unethically. And yet, there may be more to the responsibility of the museum than abdicating “care” to an owner. Might “care” for an object mean letting it go? Certainly. Might “care” argue for retention? In some cases. There is no necessary relationship between “care” and property, as Solomon demonstrated when it came to identifying the parent of the baby.

It seems to me that the question of the condemnation of objects, which has been a controversial topic in museums for decades now, has taken on new urgency in very recent years, that the premises on which opprobrium and suppression have been based may need to be revisited. To condemn specific objects for the memories they carry of past ethical failures to the point of no longer displaying them is to make a decision that ignorance is better than knowledge. This extreme proposition may evidently be reasonable in specific cases (in the display, for example, of works designed to sustain a dangerous lie about history and to suppress a people, as is the case with confederate monuments in the American South) and has perhaps been worth entertaining more broadly for the fundamental challenge it presents to any complacent sense that knowledge will match up in an easy way with virtue. But it is probably time to move on from the idea that removal of objects tainted with evil amounts to an authentic act of care. Such decisions imply ethical claims about curators (we
are ethical because we protect you from the possibility of harm), about objects (they may cause harm), about museum visitors (they are liable to be harmed) and about one version of “care” (to care is to anticipate injury and to prevent it from happening). All of these claims tend to suggest that either the broader world has moved on from harm, so that the museum is the location for vestigial possibilities of ongoing harm (like unexploded ordnance after a conflict) or that it has at least recognized harm reduction as a good that should be carried out in the museum as well as elsewhere. Alternatively, they amount to a proposal that in an incurably cruel world the museum should work towards a compensatory safety not available outside the institution. In recent years, when we have seen the bold and open embrace of irrational forms of cruelty in situations and locations where we had thought such things had been superseded pretending that anyone is better off by being ignorant about any part of the past risks embracing blindness not only about what is behind us, but what looms in our near future, not to say what is here right now.

**Nora Sternfeld:** In our next book “not only exhibiting”⁹ we try to face the fact that the museum is a place that has so many traces of violence in its storages... “Care” – as I tried to explain – is care exactly to these contradictions.

**Mark O'Neill:** One of the most pervasive fantasies of museum workers, especially those in art museums is that, despite their elaborate training in the skills involved, read-

ing objects is something that people can do without training or mediation. This may reflect one of the major blind spots in how museums understand their audiences. With the rise of identity politics and a reduced prominence of class politics, a great deal of effort in museums goes into addressing ethnic, cultural and sexual identities, often framed by equalities legislation. It is not our job, say “traditional” art museums, to reduce the distance between objects and people by attracting less unequal, more representative audiences, to compensate for inadequate state education or to undertake social work to boost the self-esteem, identity and self-efficacy of social groups based on their socioeconomic position. This is dishonest: these museums work very hard to address the inadequate education and self-efficacy of potential donors, and to offer privileges to Friends and Members. This is precisely social work for the well off and the well-educated.

In our increasingly individualistic, globalized, geographically mobile society, fragmented by rapidly changing forms of identity- what Zygmunt Bauman has labelled “liquid modernity”¹⁰ – museums can provide relief from the anomie of an atomized existence, anchoring people in time and place, reinforced by the potentially inclusive civic ritual of museum visiting. The cultural richness of museum collections has the potential to de-escalate polarizing and fragmenting forces by creating spaces where all are welcome and which offer multiple perspectives. But, as noted above, this will not happen as a side effect of progressive displays: museums need to learn how to make it happen.
In terms of the issues Jonah raises about the tensions which arise from the museum's need “to separate itself from the works of art it values if those works have been acquired unethically”, the most prominent event in my experience was when Glasgow City Council agreed, in 1998, to return a Lakota Ghost Dance Shirt to the Wounded Knee Survivors Association. There was no legal obligation to make the return, and there was considerable pressure not to create a precedent – this was the first repatriation from the UK to Native Americans. The Council, however, recognized that possession is not an absolute value, and, given that there was no legal way the Shirt could have been acquired, repatriation was the only ethical thing to do.¹¹

**Is an anti-museum of opprobrium conceivable?**

**Jonah Siegel:** Certainly – but I do not believe it is worth the effort. On the whole, it is probably better to build institutions for admiration than otherwise.

The public is less interested in being scolded than it is sometimes thought. If culture will only tell them that our old institutions are sites for negative judgments and for storing the evidences of past evils, they are likely to seek out more positive cultural messages where they can, which will often lead them to too-simple or dangerous versions of nationalistic chauvinism. Life is short; most activities do not quite match up to their ideal aspirations. It is not clear that the current pre-

occupation with historic moral failings has eventuated in more than in encouraging the most pernicious forms of reactionary thought.

**Nora Sternfeld:** I think that not to reflect the violent histories of the museum is and would be a shame.

**Mark O'Neill:** Apart from memorial institutions such as Holocaust museums, the Gulag Museum in Moscow, the House of Terror in Budapest, or the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, museums of opprobrium are very rare. Jonah is right, the public don't like being scolded, and this was evident from the early days of public museums. In 1852, reasoning that to learn about good design, visitors needed to see bad design, a precursor exhibition to the Victoria & Albert Museum in Marlborough House showed 87 objects in what the Times called a “chamber of horrors”. It illustrated “decorations on false principles of design, such as vulgar and inharmonious coloring, want of meaning and unity and pattern, graceless imitations of natural forms etc”. Visitors did not appreciate seeing objects they owned judged as being in bad taste and the backlash was such that the display was soon removed. I am unaware of any museum that has attempted to enhance their educational impact by showing art and design that has been explicitly labelled as bad (excluding Nazi anti-modern exhibitions).

Memorial museums clearly signal to visitors before they enter what their focus is – and many millions are interested in these topics, will-
ingly to expose themselves to the
pain involved in exploring them.
Other museums, however, especial-
ly art and “universal” museums find
themselves unable to move beyond
positive, utopian visions of the past,
denying Walter Benjamin’s insight
that every document of civilization
is also a document of barbarism.
The questions memorial museums
ask about who we humans are and
why we are capable of such violence
would be much more challenging if
they were embedded in the British
Museum, the Louvre or Munich.
The denial of complexity to create
utopian spaces clearly has a psy-
chological cost – in the psychic en-
ergy required to repress awareness
of the barbaric – which includes a
muting of intensity of the museum
experience, and the well-known
phenomenon of museum fatigue.

In psychoanalytical terms this split-
ting is a form of dissociation. Lauran-
jane Smith has shown that attempts
to address this dissociation by, for
example, interpreting the role slav-
ery played in Southern plantations
in America or the wealth that great
country houses owned by the Na-
tional Trust in the UK, struggled
to engage the largest museum vis-
iting demographic – middle-class,
well-educated white people whose
identity is tied up with what she
calls the Authorized Heritage Dis-
course.¹² If museums are to contrib-
ute to reducing toxic polarization,
we need to find ways of supporting
visitor – and staff – confidence in
reflecting on more complex narra-
tives. Many museums, like the Na-
tional Portrait Gallery in London,
are attempting to do this, but, as I
said, we need a lot of rigorous ex-

perimentation to understand how
this might become more effective.

Is it possible to conceive of a mu-
seum of exiled objects?

**Jonah Siegel:** Of course. In
fact, it is harder, I think, to do the
opposite: to imagine a museum of
objects that are at home. New eth-
ical dimensions open up when we
recognize the inescapable condition
of exile, and the privileged position
of the museum as locus of exile.

**Nora Sternfeld:** Isn't every museum a museum of exiled objects? And shouldn't we reimagine ownership under the conditions of exile? Very interesting projects think at the moment about practices of shared ownership.

**Mark O'Neill:** With the exception of artworks specifically commissioned to be part of a museum (such as the Rivera mural in Detroit Institute of Art), all museums are made up of objects which are exiled, in place, time, context or meaning. This is inherent in the nature of museums and has been an issue since their earliest days. Quatremère de Quincy complained about religious objects being ripped from their contexts in the days after the French Revolution. Theodor Adorno made a similar point more than 150 years later in his essay on the Valéry Proust Museum, when he noted the homology between the words museum and mausoleum.

The idea of exile implies a forced
rather than a willing migration, with a sense of loss – no matter how reconciled one is to one's new home, the ache of longing for the place of origin endures. Thinking of objects in this anthropomorphic way is alien to the positivist tradition, but it may be a useful approach, in terms of creative interpretation, helping to focus both on what they meant to the people of their originating contexts and what they mean to contemporary visitors. If this exiled object could speak, what would it want to say to people today? Labels written in the voice of the object would be partially fictional, but if well researched they could support more accurate, less presentist labels, and go beyond mere identification.

**What is the relationship to repa-**
**ration - of objects, of societies, of**
**history - in the politics of museum**
**"care"?**

**Jonah Siegel:** As noted above, “care” and property rights have no necessary relationship. Indeed, some of the most important moral guidelines we live with have to do with the limits of property. Society steps in when individuals treat their animals in abusive ways, or use their factories to pollute the environment more than the approved amount. I cannot do what I want to my own home because there are building rules constraining my actions. When we do not enforce such rules in relation to architecture, propertyed vandals destroy our urban fabric. In short, ascertaining ownership is only a very limited basis on which to build an ethics. In the cultural realm it tends to lead to a very narrow, and sometimes perni-

cious brand of politics, involving as it does quite short-sighted views of nationalism and property.

True reparations would be a project of such extraordinary complexity given the practical, political, and moral issues it raises, that one suspects that the tendency to focus on the entirely limited version of the practice that might be achieved by museums shipping objects from one place to another is just a way to avoid doing the actual work.

While it is clear that for the foreseeable future and with good reason the question of reparations will be an urgent topic for the museum, there are real limits that need to be recognized: 1. Caring for an object and establishing the rights of owners are different things because law and ethics are not the same thing. 2. True injuries are not liable to repair, which means there is a limit to what institutions of culture can do in this direction. 3. There are real risks to the museum and to the ethical moment if a ritual of sacrifice is seen as the main work of the institution, thus freeing the rest of society from its moral burden while placing an unsatisfiable demand on structures that will inevitably fail in response. To ask curators to serve as priests tasked with the symbolic work of expiation is to confuse ritual with ethical action and care with atonement.

**Nora Sternfeld:** Contrary to many understandings of “healing” and “care” in connection with museums and decolonization I would like to propose a different approach: What
if we were to approach the decolonization of museums from a perspective of the inconsolable? What would the debates and concepts for the decolonization of museums look like? What would they tell? How would they deal with their epistemic violence and their stolen artefacts? And how can a museum of the inconsolable be conceived against this background, in which restitution is not thought of as reparation while instead serious work is constantly being done not only on restitution, but also on the consequences that the history of colonialism demands?

The German author Max Czollek speaks about a “reconciliation theatre”.¹³ By this he means the cultural and social staging of a certain element of German “memory culture”: The imperative “that everything should be good again,” without any actual and real consequences. What Max Czollek outlines in his book as a counter-image, is “inconsolability.” He refers to Vladimir Jankélévitch, a French philosopher who thought a lot about the irrevocable, about what can’t be taken back, away, or be deleted. The inconsolable is the bitter realization that nothing is and can actually be “good again” anyway. Sarah Ahmed, said: “Don’t get over it, if you are not over it”.¹⁴ And in this sense the inconsolable is not an end. On the contrary, it is consolation that is actually the expectation of an end. The inconsolable is a beginning. The inconsolable is the bitter realization that nothing is and can actually be “good again” anyway.

But what can happen in the museum, and what Max Czollek outlines in his book as a counter-image, is

“inconsolability”. I would argue that this is exactly what the museum can actually do: If we insist and persist in an emancipatory museum perspective, that doesn’t want to tell history as the story of victors, then we will encounter a history full of violence, of pain, of wars and de-feats – full of lacks and cracks and breaks and histories that were silenced.

**Mark O'Neill:** The traditional account of museum history tells of a transition from cabinets of curiosities or wonders to rationally systematized, scholarly collections, which emerged as part of the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries and in response to Europeans’ “discovery” of new worlds full of alien cultures, and innumerable hitherto unknown plants and animals. These discoveries evoked a predatory response, embodied in the legal doctrine of *terra nullius*, which held that lands whose peoples did not mix their labor with the land were “empty” and could therefore be legitimately appropriated by those who practiced Western agriculture. The doctrine of racial inferiority authorized a similar predation of the inhabitants. Underneath the veneer of Enlightenment rationality museums gave to these processes we may see, not so much, or not only, a new process of knowledge production, but a manic response to the unanticipated cultural diversity of humanity and the fecundity of tropical flora and fauna - an effort to impose control in the face of excess, and the anxiety it generated. Museums have proliferated more or less in line with the scale of globalized anxiety.
Many museums began with ideals of reparation - the Louvre healing the French nation after the violence of the Terror and the Revolutionary Wars, royal collections opened up voluntarily by royal families to enlist the newly wealthy bourgeoisie into the public sphere, civic museums designed to inspire and heal the new industrial cities with their anomie and social fragmentation. Perhaps the most obvious healing museums were open air museums of rural life, beginning with the prototype in Sweden - Skansen. Significantly sited, not in the countryside but in the heart of Stockholm, it was designed to recover some of the traditional ways of life that had been destroyed by modernization, not only mitigating the pain of these losses, but romanticizing the rural past as the authentic soul of the nation. A similar task was performed in Bucharest much more recently when the Museum of the Romanian Peasant was redisplayed to recover a sense of life before the depredations of the Ceausescu regime.

While the revolutionary impetus behind the opening of the Palais du Louvre as a public institution, were Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, as Andrew McClellan has shown, bourgeois hierarchy was rigidly enforced and the significant numbers of the “lowest classes” who visited in the early days soon came to understand that they were not welcome;¹⁵ the social role of the museum, as identified later by Bourdieu, of reproducing elite cultural capital, became firmly embedded. Malraux’s pre-internet vision of the democratization of access to art, so that everyone could form their own “collection

of works with the power to help us live” has not materialized, even in the age of the internet, which mirrors and often amplifies real world inequalities.

The museum of healing became less convincing after World War I. For anti-modern modernists like Ezra Pound, the mass slaughter “and of the best among them” was a “wastage as never before” for a “botched civilization...for two gross of broken statues”. Towards the end of *The Wasteland* (1922), TS Eliot, another conservative (and antisemitic) modernist lamented the costs of progress, writing of “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”. Against this background the self-perception of many museums, especially those which see themselves as “universal”, is simplistic and likely to fail to deliver any kind of repair. While museum collections do, in many ways, represent the greatest achievements of human creativity, the results of the human desire to understand nature and the aim of documenting human histories and cultures, they are also an inventory of what has been lost; even the most positive change involves loss. For museums to embrace an ethic of “care” they need to find ways to acknowledge and encourage reflection on this reality, and to enable much more representative audiences to benefit from the reparative power that this implies.

The roundtable was edited by Dominique Poulot in December 2024 - january 2025.
Endnotes

1 Held 2006, p. 4.

2 Merriman 2020.

3 Baxandall 1991.

4 Hollows 2013.

5 English Translation of the manifesto in *schnittpunkt*, Baur 2020, p. 93.

6 The term *post-nazism* is used with the prefix “post-” in reference to postcolonial theories and denotes the examination of continuities after the break – the defeat of the nazis and the liberation by the allies. It seems particularly relevant in the context of the resurgence of right-wing parties in the successor states of nazi Germany. The book asks about curatorial ways to deal with continuities of nazism in the 21st century. It is dedicated to curatorial formats and strategies that address and deal with the mechanisms of repression and denial of nazi history. The contributions analyze the normalization of fascist aesthetics and discourses. They position themselves within new debates about the politics of memory, seek possibilities for confronting histories of violence, and reflect on contexts and projects in museums, universities and public spaces.

7 Shakespeare 1997, Sonnet 129.

8 Smith [1776] 2008, p. 560.

9 Griesser-Stermscheg, Sommer, Sternfeld, Ziaja 2004.

10 Bauman 2000.

11 O'Neill 2006.

12 Smith 2006.

13 Czollek 2003.

14 *Diversity Work as Emotional Work*: Lecture at the University of Vienna within the framework of Gender Talks on 22 November 2013.

15 McClellan 2008.
References

Bauman 2000: Bauman Z., *Liquid Modernity*, Cambridge, Polity, 2000.

Baxandall 1991: Baxandall M., *Exhibiting Intentions*, in Karp I., Lavine S.D., *Exhibiting Cultures; The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display*, Washington DC, Smithsonian Institution, 1991, pp. 33-41.

Czollek 2003: Czollek M., *Versöhnungstheater*, München, Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, 2023.

Griesser-Stermscheg, Sommer, Sternfeld, Ziaja 2004: Griesser-Stermscheg M., Sommer M., Sternfeld N., Ziaja L.(eds.), *Nicht einfach ausstellen – Kuratorische Formate und Strategien im Postnazismus*, Berlin-Boston, De Gruyter, 2024.

Held 2006: Held V., *The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global*, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006.

Hollows 2013: Hollows V., *The performance of internal conflict and the art of activism*, in "Museum Management and Curatorship", 2013, 28,1, pp. 35-53,

McClellan 2008: McClellan A., *The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao*, Berkley, University of California Press, 2008.

Merriman 2020: Merriman N., *30 Years after the New Museology: What's Changed?*, in "Zeszyty Naukowe Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Prace Etnograficzne" 2020, 48, 2, pp.173-187.

O'Neill 2006: O'Neill M., *Repatriation and its Discontents: the Glasgow Experience* in Robson E., Treadwell L., Gosden C. (eds), *Who Owns Objects? The Ethics and Politics of Collecting Cultural Artefacts*, Oxford, Oxbow Books, 2006, pp. 105-128.

schnittpunkt, Baur 2020: schnittpunkt, Baur (eds.), *Das Museum der Zukunft*, Bielefeld, transcript Verlag, 2020.

Shakespeare 1997: Shakespeare W., *Sonnets*, in *The Arden Shakespeare* (ed. By K. Duncan-Jones), London, Nelson, 1997.

Smith [1776] 2008: Smith A., *The Wealth of Nations*, Radford, Wilder Publications, [1776] 2008.

Smith 2006: Smith L., *Uses of Heritage*, London, Routledge, 2006.
<figure><img src="image_37.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_38.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_39.png" /></figure>
**ABSTRACT:**

This article brings together four episodes of French 19th century mu-
seal history through which to explore the tensions inherent to incorporat-
ing the (material) culture of others – in this case Pre-Columbian America
– into national collections, and the process through which they become
part of a national patrimoine. As a guiding thread, we use not a particular
collection but the idea of “American French collections” and their associa-
tion to a specific type of national institution that used them abundantly in
its historical genealogy: the idea of a “French national museum of ethnog-
raphy.” We offer a historical panorama where Amerindian and Pre-Colum-
bian French collections found themselves at the heart of several debates
regarding the definition and function of the museum and during which the
need to “repair” – either an object, a national institution or a concept – was
invoked.

L'articolo riunisce quattro episodi della storia museale francese del
XIX secolo, attraverso i quali è possibile esplorare le tensioni insite nell'in-
corporazione della cultura (materiale) di altri – in questo caso dell'Ameri-
ca precolombiana – nelle collezioni nazionali, e il processo attraverso cui
essa diventa parte del patrimonio nazionale. Come filo conduttore, non uti-
lizziamo una collezione specifica, ma il concetto di “collezioni americane
francesi” e la loro associazione a un particolare tipo di istituzione naziona-
le che le ha ampiamente utilizzate nella sua genealogia storica: l'idea di un
“museo nazionale francese di etnografia”. Offriamo un panorama storico
in cui le collezioni francesi amerindiane e precolombiane si sono trovate
al centro di numerosi dibattiti sulla definizione e la funzione del museo,
durante i quali è stata invocata la necessità di “riparare” – riferita a un og-
getto, un'istituzione nazionale o un concetto.

Opening Picture:

Fig. 02: Ancient Peruvian figurines at the Cabinet des Médailles, ca. 1830-1840, by Jean-Baptiste Muret. In Recueil. Monuments antiques (1830-1866), vol. 1 folio 131. BnF département Monnaies, médailles et antiques, RES-MS-70100-MUR-GF- (1).

Susana Stüssi Garcia

Susana Stüssi Garcia is a Doctor of Art History from Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne. She has worked on the history of Pre-Columbian French collections and their place in the developing 19th century art market. She is also interested in the history of ideas, taste and scholarly production in the longue durée: the relations between the construction of national heritage discourses and museal institutions, and the writing of new theories in Art History to incorporate non-European art and artefacts.

CC BY 4.0 License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
©Susana Stüssi Garcia, 2025
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.3034-9699/21589
In 1930 the newspaper *L'Intransigeant* called, in a scathing article, for a "sweeper" to come save the collections of the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro from being buried under "filth and dust".¹ Paul Rivet (1876-1958) and Georges Henri-Rivière (1987-1985), then at the head of the museum, answered by recalling the recent inauguration of the "Galerie Américaine" which presented the Trocadéro's considerable Amerindian and Pre-Columbian collections in a new and modern space, experimenting with novel museographical techniques set against a simple and minimalist aesthetic. They noted that "[the project] garded great sympathy and interest in France, both amongst the members of Parliament and the public".²

If the situation of the Musée d'Ethnographie was particularly dire,³ the need to *repair* and *rethink* the museum reflected a larger crisis of the nature and function of the "modern museum", which included topics such as the modernisation of infrastructure, the difference between "scientific" and "fine arts" museums, the pedagogical value of the institution, the professionalisation of its staff, and the role reserved to visitors and the public. The 20th century already appeared, to the protagonists of this debate, "the 'century of museums' (...) weather one finds in this epithet cause for celebration or regret".⁴

The favourable response from the public gave Rivet and Rivière hope in their project of "repairing" their museum beyond this first gallery: to "repair" the physical damage the collections had suffered over the last few decades of neglect in the old, dusty and non-insulated exhib-

its and storage. But also hope that by "repairing" the museum they would also repair French Ethnography and reflect the new directions the discipline had undertaken since the turn of the century.⁵ Chiefly amongst these, the need to develop fieldwork and collecting and, in turn, enrich the museum and contribute to France's "admirable colonial efforts".⁶

That Rivet and Rivière chose to start their project by "repairing" the Galerie Américaine is not a fortuitous choice. Since the beginning of the century, interest in non-European arts and artefacts had been steadily increasing amongst intellectuals and artists, as well as amongst collectors, gallerists, and art dealers. This was also the case for Amerindian and Pre-Columbian objects, especially after the success of the exhibit *Les Arts Anciens de l'Amérique* organised in 1928 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs by Rivière and other collaborators, and which featured pieces from private collectors and museums, including the Musée du Trocadéro.⁷ The American collections (*fonds américains*) of the museum had been the largest since its inauguration in 1882. The old Galerie Américaine thus became a viable testing-case for Rivet and Rivière's project to "repair" the museum.

This was not the first instance in which calls were made to "save" the ethnographic and archaeological collections from the Americas that were kept in different French national institutions. I want to explore four instances throughout the 19th century where French Amerindian and Pre-Columbian collections found themselves at the heart of different attempts to (re)define the
museum and during which the need to “repair” – either an object, a national institution or a concept – was invoked. Far from being an exhaustive historical survey, and more in the spirit of an essay, I will try to bring together different episodes through which to explore the tensions inherent to incorporating the (material) culture of others – in this case mostly Pre-Columbian America – into French collections, and the process through which they become part of the national *patrimoine*. As a guiding thread, I will use not a particular collection but the idea of “American French collections” and their association to a specific type of national institution that used them abundantly in its historical genealogy: the idea of a “French national museum of ethnography.”

## 1. Après la Révolution: “Repairing” Royal Collections

“Exotic” or “curious” objects from the Americas have been collected in Europe since the first contacts with the New World. Prior to the Latin-American Independencies of the early 19th century, objects sent to France came mainly from Brazil, the Caribbean, the Guyana and the territories in North America and Canada where France had been engaged, with varying degrees of success, in colonial enterprises during the 17th and 18th centuries.

French royal collections of antiquities and curiosities were dispersed amongst a variety of spaces, such as the “Bibliothèque Royale” (rue Vivienne) and the “Cabinet du Roi” at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. “A treasure of nature and a triumph of good taste”, according to the Abbé Expilly (1719-1793), who in 1768

visited the Cabinet: “[It is] a superb gallery; hanging from the ceiling are all kinds of arms, utensils and clothing from the savages (...) the cupboards, in total twenty-two, are crowned (...) with clothing and feather-works from the Indians”.⁸ Even if detailed inventories from this period are scarce,⁹ some information survives of what became of the objects from the New World after the French Revolution. Considerable archival work was already undertaken in the 1880s and 1890s by Ernest-Théodore Hamy (1842-1908), the first director of the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro. An Americanist¹⁰ and ethnographer by training, Hamy dedicated his later years to documenting the collections his museum had inherited from other institutions and writing a history of the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro.¹¹

More than an institutional history, Hamy was writing the genealogy of French ethnography – deeply interwoven with the history of Modern France – and of which the last and crowning chapter was the creation of the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro at the end of the 19th century. We will come back to Hamy later. For now, let us point out that a considerable amount of his research into the earliest non-European collections in France – which he playfully calls *raretés, singularités, curiosités* in a nod to “pre-scientific” usages¹² – relate to Amerindian and Pre-Columbian objects.

Hamy attributes the first true attempt (*essai*) at creating an ethnographical national museum to Barthélemy de Courçay (1744-1799) and Aubin-Louis Millin de Grandmaison (1759-1818) and their “Museum des
Antiques”, located in the Cabinet des Médailles et Antiques of the Bibliothèque Nationale (rue Vivienne).¹³ Albeit short-lived, this new museum was born from the state of disrepair in which numerous collections confiscated during the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars in Europe had been left in. Contemporary sources paint an image of accumulation and clutter: “[on the upper floor] there is a vast attic filled with small idols, vases, busts, lamps and many other interesting fragments of antiquities [...] another larger and more voluminous group is simply left on the floor, in a small, humid room on the ground-floor”, writes Villar de la Mayenne, reporting in 1794.¹⁴

This situation was unbearable in a context where museums had become an integral part of the revolutionary project seeking the regeneration and edification of the new *citoyen* through education and instruction. Thus, Villar de la Mayenne despairs: “this collection is lost for the benefit of instruction and curiosity. How can the public be made to go into such an indecent place, where no object is safe from the perils of clumsiness and infidelity?” He calls for something to be done in the interest of science and in the name of the Republic: “for a long time and especially since the Revolution, for the sake of science and of the arts, this *dépôt* needs to find an appropriate destination (...) a *Muséum des Antiquités* (...) [bringing together] the considerable collections that now belong to the *Republic*. He calls for a project to: “gather here all the monuments of antiquity declared national property”.¹⁵

It is in this context of effusive national reorganisation of collections

that the Amerindian and Pre-Columbian collections from the *Ancien Régime* and the *saisies révolutionnaires* came to be part of the Museum des Antiques. Barthélemy de Courçay and Aubin-Louis Millin intended to “revitalize the study of antiquity” by bringing together Greece and Rome and all other “monuments (...) useful to understanding the customs and traditions of various peoples (...) separated by time and space.”¹⁶ Taking a comparative perspective, they sought to present “classical” and non-European antiquities together with “exotic” objects in a cabinet of encyclopaedic ambitions. While it is impossible to re-

<figure><img src="image_40.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 01:** Joseph Dombey's catalogue of Peruvian collections, deposited at the Cabinet des Antiques du Roi in 1786. BnF département Monnaies, médailles et antiques, 2011/091/ACM04-04.03.</figcaption></figure>

Susana Stüssi Garcia
Défense et illustration du Musée d'Ethnographie.
constitute the exact contents of the Museum des Antiques, André-Louis Cointreau notes that the “Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek, Roman and Peruvian” antiquities numbered more than six thousand.¹⁷

One of the most “remarkable” collections¹⁸ came from the “Cabinet du Roi” and was formed by the archaeological artefacts brought to France by Joseph Dombey (1742-1794) in the late 1780s. A doctor and naturalist, Dombey had accompanied the Spanish expedition led by Hipólito Ruiz López (1754-1840) and Jóse Antonio Pavón (1754-1814) that travelled through Perou, Chili and Brazil between 1778 and 1785.¹⁹ The abbé Barthélémy himself had written instructions for Dombey, summarising the current knowledge on pre-Hispanic Peruvian monuments and history and suggesting the kinds of studies Dombey could carry out in his terrain – drawings of monuments, information on indigenous vocabulary, for instance.²⁰ Upon returning to France, Dombey deposited the collection at the “Jardin du Roi.” It included ceramic and metal vases, gold and silver jewellery, intricately decorated woodwork, a pre-Hispanic mummified body with its garments, statuettes and more modest assorted utensils such as loom-weights (fig. 1).²¹

Dombey's collection was of special value because of the age and the quality of its contents. It was one of the first collections of “true” Pre-Columbian antiquities from the Spanish territories to arrive in France, which until then possessed mostly “ethnographical” objects from North America, Canada and Guyana, even if some of these dated back to the 17th century. Hamy

furthermore valued Dombey's collection amongst others at the Museum des Antiques because they had been “excavated by [Dombey] with method”.²² For Hamy, Dombey's collections, arriving on the eve of the Revolution, were the linchpin between pre-modern and modern ethnography, and between *Ancien Régime* and *National* museal collections.²³

Apart from Dombey's collection, the Museum des Antiques contained other objects from the Americas, both archaeological and ethnographical. Most were assembled between 1795 and 1799, coming from *saisies* in France and in Europe. Amongst the collections of the Cabinet of the Stadtholder of Holland were treasures from the “American savages” as well as pre-Hispanic Mexican ceramics.²⁴ From the aristocratic collections sent to the Hôtel de Nesle were “ancient Peruvian vases” (some anthropomorphic and zoomorphic) from the collections of the Comte d'Angiviller (1730-1809), as well as textiles, jewellery, weapons and adornments.²⁵ Barthélemy de Courçay and Millin also requested objects from the newly nationalised Museum d'Histoire Naturelle – mostly from Canada, North America and the Guyana - and some which had been sent to the Musée Central des Arts (the Louvre).²⁶ If we add the gifts and donations they received,²⁷ there were at least between one and two hundred objects from the Americas in the Museum des Antiques at the turn of the century.

Thus, for the first time, artefacts from the Americas – both Amerindian and Pre-Columbian – found themselves part of a new national museological project through which
<figure><img src="image_41.png" /></figure>

the newly formed Republic was reclaiming collections, until then neglected and sequestered in aristocratic and royal hands, to ensure their preservation and make them useful to the comparative study of Antiquity. This new museum was intended to serve as a counterpart to the Musée Central des Arts, which was still mostly a collection of artistic works.²⁸ At the same time, the Museum des Antiques also became the first chapter of Hamy's genealogy of French ethnography. By bringing together archaeological and ethnographical collections to offer a comparative and historical overview of the products of the arts and industry of humanity, Barthélemy de Courçay's project was the "begging of the museum of ethnography" (as a new category – "le musée d'ethnographie naissant"), "later imitated by almost everyone in France and (...) by most of the great ethnographical museums [which still] follow the [geographical principle] established in 1799 at the small Cabinet in rue de la Loi".²⁹

However, and despite its ambitions, the Museum des Antiques was short-lived and did not survive long after the death of Barthélemy de Courçay in 1799.³⁰ As for the American collections, at least some remained at the Cabinet des Médailles throughout the following decades, as attested by drawings from the 1830s and 1840s by the artist Jean-Baptiste Muret (1795-1866) (fig. 2).³¹ Part of the collections were later transferred to the newly created Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro in the 1880s.

## 2. "Repairing" French Americanism. The Musée Américain du Louvre and the hope of a "Deuxième Egypte"

A brief lull follows this first efflorescence of museal activity as far as objects from the Americas, both old and new, are concerned. The Latin-American independences of the beginning of the 19th century precipitated a first qualitative and quantitative change in the types

**Fig. 02:**
Ancient Peruvian figurines at the Cabinet des Médailles, ca. 1830-1840, by Jean-Baptiste Muret. In *Recueil. Monuments antiques* (1830-1866), vol. 1 folio 131. BnF département Monnaies, médailles et antiques, RES-MS-70100-MUR-GF- (1).
of Pre-Columbian and Amerindian artefacts available to collectors in France. With the opening of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies to travellers, scholars, businessmen and diplomats, new collections began arriving in Europe and found both popular and institutional interest, a memorable example being William Bullock's 1824 London exhibition, evocatively titled "Ancient and Modern Mexico". In Paris, collections of Mexican, Mesoamerican and Peruvian antiquities belonging to collectors such as Latour Allard (1799-?),³² Maximilan Franck (ca. 1780 – ca. 1832)³³ and Léonce Angrand (1808-1886)³⁴ were offered to the French state, which struggled to find a place to exhibit them.

The old rooms of the Museum des Antiques had become too small and crowded. At the same time, a new institutional repartition of national collections was underway. Indeed, at the Bibliothèque Nationale – once again “Royale” under the *Monarchie de Juillet* – the ethnographer and antiquarian Edmé-François Jomard (1777-1862) was lobbying for the creation of a “Dépôt géographique” where ethnographical non-European artefacts would be reunited with drawings, plans, manuscripts and maps.³⁵ Jomard was however overruled in favour of the Louvre, which was no longer primarily a museum for artists and connoisseurs to admire the masters and complete their education, but was rapidly becoming the great repository of France’s treasures.

Three projects for the growing non-European collections were proposed. One by the Comte de Chabrol (1773-1843), who wished to install a collection “of monuments related to

the history and customs of the peoples inhabiting the Great Ocean”³⁶ and were disappearing under the progress of industry and colonialism. And a second project, championed by the Baron de Férussac (1786-1836), whose project more broadly included “the monuments of art”, antiquity and industry. If Chabrol and de Férussac disagreed in the nature and precise organisation of these collections,³⁷ both agreed that the Louvre should be their home. “Our aim is to give France an institution that will be the envy of all European intelligentsia,” writes de Férussac.³⁸ He is against leaving the American collections acquired over the last years with Jomard and Raoul Rochette (1790-1854), newly appointed curator of the Cabinet des Médailles: “their true placement should be at the Louvre since [the Louvre] has become the repository of our rich collections of antiquities”.³⁹

In this, de Férussac was supported by eminent personalities such as Alexandre Lenoir (1761-1839)⁴⁰ and the Comte de Clarac.⁴¹ He imagined the American collections – at least the archaeological ones – as a continuation of the Egyptian and Greco-Roman series and would serve to write the “history of different peoples through the monuments of art”.⁴² This comparative project, however, never came to be. The Pre-Columbian and Amerindian collections acquired or gifted to the Louvre since 1825 were installed at the Musée Naval or Musée de la Marine. Inaugurated in 1827 in the Louvre, it presented ancient and contemporary models of ships, scientific instruments of navigation, and artworks of historical significance for France’s naval forces.⁴³
The ethnographic artefacts and curious souvenirs obtained through exploratory missions and colonial expeditions were added to the Musée Naval, in a space consecrated both to technical savoirs and to curiosity.

The Amerindian and Pre-Columbian collections – now several hundreds of objects44 – stayed at the Musée Naval until 1850, when Adrien de Longpérier (1816-1882) requisitioned them to create a new “Musée des Antiquités Américaines” at the Louvre. The origins and evolutions of this Musée Américain are now well studied45 and we will only comment on a few elements of this temporary “divorce” of the archaeological and ethnographic series in the Musée Américain. The creation of a Musée Américain can be understood in the context of the developments of the Louvre in the middle of the century, with the multiplication of new “museums” dedicated each to a new Antiquity beyond that of the Greco-Roman world. These included a “Musée assyrien,” a “Musée algérien,” a new museum for the collection of casts of Egyptian monuments, and a “Musée d’antiquités chrétiennes”.46 The Louvre had become the domain of Antiquity, where each ancient civilisation had its own set of rooms visitors could admire, but where the comparative framework between the old and the new, the local and the exotic, between the antique and the primitif of the Museum des Antiques was no longer the structuring principle.

Secondly, the critical reception of the Musée Américain was ambivalent, hesitating between praise for the novelty and ambition of the project, and the confusion of visitors unfamiliar with the aesthetics and

iconography of Pre-Columbian arts. However, scholars were mostly enthusiastic, especially in Americanist circles, who were keenly aware that their field of study still lacked an established museal collection.47 Brasseur de Bourbourg (1814-1874) for example congratulated France for “repairing” this omission and being “the first [in Europe] to open its palaces” to American antiquities.48 There was also hope that the Louvre would keep growing its American collections and that the Americas would become a “second Egypt” for France. This idea would know special favour in the 1860s with the Second French Intervention in Mexico (1861-1867).

In 1861, emperor Napoléon III (1808-1873) launched an invasion of Mexico, which, in the image of Napoléon Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign, was accompanied by a scientific expedition.49 Scholars and field-agents joined the troops, tasked with undertaking a scientific survey of the country.50 New collections of Mexican antiquities made their way to France in the following years. And although the military campaign ended with the defeat of the French troops in 1867, the work of the “Commission Scientifique du Mexique” illustrates how a scholarly discipline was (re)framed as a national and imperial project. Both in political discourse and amongst erudite circles, the moment had come for France to have its “deuxième Egypte” thanks to the discovery and collecting of the Mexican past and its monuments. Victor Duruy (1811-1894), minister of l'Instruction Publique celebrates in his speeches how “[the Emperor] has the noble ambition to conquer this great country [Mexico] through science”51 and
"Your Majesty's desire is: that which was accomplished by the Nile by Napoléon Ier should be accomplished in Mexico under Napoléon III".⁵²

For French Americanists, the hope was that the Mexican campaign would “repair” both the lack of a great national collection of American antiquities - on par with the Egyptian, Greek, Romand and Near Eastern collections - as well as “repair” and bring together the scattered groups of French Americanists and create a national discipline. Drawing once again from Brasseur de Bourbourg, who was one of the explorers sent by the Commission to Mexico: “everyone [is interested in the Mexican past] but France will be the first to raise its flag [in its conquest]” and “[as we have done for] Egypt, Persia, Syria and other nations (...) so shall we rescue Mexico’s past from oblivion.”⁵³ Similarly, another agent named *voyageur pour l'archéologie*, Léon Méhédin (1828-1905) argues to Mexican authorities

that by letting the Commission take antiquities and archaeological collections to Belgium, Austria and especially France, Mexico's monuments would finally be raised, in the eyes of the workers, to the "level of those from Egypt, Greece and Italy."⁵⁴

In the end, the Mexican war was a disaster. The French defeat in 1867 was considered a personal embarrassment for Napoléon III, and the political crisis precipitated soon after by the end of the Second French Empire put on hold any projects of new acquisitions for the Louvre. Nevertheless, the idea of Americanism as a fundamentally French discipline endured and would again play a significant role in the creation of the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro in the last third of the century.⁵⁵ As for the Musée Américain at the Louvre, despite its initial success and considerable developments throughout the 1850s, the collections suffered over the following

<figure><img src="image_42.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 03 :** Ethnographic curiosities, naval models and paraphernalia in the "ethnographical section" of the Musée Naval at the Louvre in the 1870s. In Adolphe Joanne, *Paris illustré en 1879 et 1876. Guide de l'étranger et du Parisien*, Paris: Hachette, 1876, p. 703. BNF département Philosophie, histoire, sciences de l'homme, 8-Z LE SENNE-4595.</figcaption></figure>
decades. Longpérier was preoccupied with other projects and lacked the time and the resources to maintain it. Beginning in 1859, the museum was relocated several times before a part was unceremoniously installed in a corridor adjacent to the "Section Ethnographique" of the Musée Naval (fig. 3). The rest was either moved back into the curators' office or put in storage.⁵⁶

Both scholars and the general public made calls to “repair” the state in which the Musée Américain had been left in. Collector and critic Eugène Piot (1812-1890) complains that already in 1862 access to the American collections was difficult.⁵⁷ In 1877, Léonce Angrand, who had gifted part of his extensive collections of Peruvian and Bolivian antiquities to the Louvre over the previous decades, was appalled to see the conditions in which they were kept and, fearing further damage, threatened to bequeath his remaining pieces to the British Museum instead.⁵⁸ In 1876, Orientalist scholar and archaeologist Emile Burnouf (1821-1907) called for the American collections to be moved to a new museum rather than having them suffer in defective conditions at the Louvre.⁵⁹ Caix de Saint-Aymour (1843-1921) in turn proposed the American collections be integrated into a new museum reuniting ethnographical, archaeological and prehistoric artefacts.⁶⁰

### 3. "Repairing" French Ethnography. Ernest-Théodore Hamy and the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro

At the same time, critics were also concerned with the state of the "Ethnographical section" of the Musée

Naval and the lack of a distinct ethnographical museum in France – a category now present in most European capitals –. The Musée Naval, with its mismatched collection of naval models, exotic curiosities and souvenirs brought back from Asia and Oceania was, in the eyes of contemporary scholars – for whom ethnography was no longer the domain of curiosity but a historical science, – terribly outdated if picturesque. Furthermore, the question of whether the Louvre should be strictly a museum of *beaux-arts* and of Classical civilisations was once again raised. A report from 1871 notes that "many of the ethnographical objects (...) are mere curiosities and thus of little interest to an institution dedicated to the highest works of art".⁶¹

Amid this debate of weather – or rather *where* and *how* – a new ethnography museum should be built, the American collections would play an unsuspecting role, both in the discourse justifying the creation of the museum, and in its material realisation. This is where we once more find Ernest Théodore-Hamy and his museal genealogy of French ethnography.

As stated before, for Hamy the creation of the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro in 1878 was the culmination of France's long tradition of ethnographical inquiry throughout the Modern Age. The museum was the "heir by right of birth" of the Museum des Antiques de Barthélemy de Courçay and of the Ethnographical section of the Musée Naval organised by Morel-Fatio (1810-1871) at the Louvre. For Hamy, the development of ethnography, constituted as a *savoir*, would always have an
anchoring point in a museal institution. The reader of his history will therefore note that Jomard’s “Dépôt de Géographie” is only included because it was a failure – reflecting Hamy’s diverging opinions on ethnography and his unabashed dislike for Jomard.⁶² Similarly, the Louvre chapter focuses on the Musée Naval, since Longpérier’s museum was concerned with antiquities and not with ethnography. The Musée Américain is only mentioned to point out its state of disrepair and disorder.

In this section I want to explore two things. First, how thanks to a fortunate convergence of circumstances – namely the ongoing debate regarding the Musée Américain and the ethnographic collections on the one hand, and the arrival in Paris of Charles Wiener and his extensive collection of South American collections on the other – precipitated the long-awaited creation of a national ethnography museum. And secondly, how Hamy’s history of the museum, which draws extensively from France’s early colonial relations with the New World, contributes to the idea, already formulated in the 1850s and 1860s, that Americanism was fundamentally a product of French science and French erudition. And that by incorporating the history of French collecting of and in the New World to France’s Modern History, these objects become part of France’s national patrimoine by essence and by virtue of their history, and not because of their physical placement in a French museum.

Regarding the first question, that of the role played by American collections in the founding of the Musée du Trocadéro. The decision to create the museum was made follow-

ing the success of the *Exposition spéciale des missions scientifiques* (Special Exhibition of Scientific Missions) of 1878. Organized under the auspices of Oscar de Watteville (1824-1901), the director of the *Service des missions de la Division des Sciences et Lettres*, this special exhibition aimed to display ethnographic and archaeological collections obtained through missions sponsored by the Service or donated to the French state.⁶³ It also sought to gauge public opinion on creating a permanent ethnographic museum. Initially organised at the Palais de l'Industrie, the exhibition was subsequently relocated to the Champde-Mars for the 1878 World's Fair.

This exhibition is particularly noteworthy for the prominent role given to American archaeological and ethnographic collections, as well as for its scientific and museographical choices, which were later incorporated into the museography of the Musée du Trocadéro and especially in the Galerie Américaine. At first, the exhibition was intended to feature the archaeological collections from Perou and Bolivia brought back by Charles Wiener (1851-1913).⁶⁴ The explorer, together with artist Emile Soldi (1846-1906),⁶⁵ designed an exhibition space with life-size reproductions of some of the most famous monuments of pre-Columbian Perou and Bolivia, such as the gates of Huánuco Viejo and the Gate of the Sun in Tiahuanaco. The facsimiles of archaeological monuments were accompanied by mannequins representing the most “characteristic” physiognomies of South America Amerindians (Hamy 1890, p. 57) and the background featured large-scale paintings of monuments and landscapes by artists Alexandre
de Cetner and Paul-Louis-Joseph Roux. This was the backdrop to the hundreds of vases, ceramics, wooden sculptures, gold figurines and adornments, ancient textiles, weapons and even a pre-Hispanic mummy brough back by Wiener (Riviale 2001, p. 287).

The show was a success, and it was quickly decided to incorporate it to World's Fair and install it on the left wing of the newly built Palais du Trocadéro in the Champ-de-Mars. Hamy was entrusted with coordinating the project. New American collections were added first, followed by more modest contributions from Oceania, Africa and even prehistoric Europe.⁶⁶ The colossal “Gate of the Sun” dominated the rear wall, complemented with the reproduction of a “Peruvian hut.” The walls were lined with antiquities hanging from panels or stacked in shelves. As they progressed through the hall, visitors could see the Mexican and South American collections of other explorers of the *Service des missions*, such as Alphonse Pinart (1852-1911) and Léon de Cessac (1841-1891) (fig. 4). A series of lectures delivered by the explorers was also organised. The museography of this new installation pushed the immersive effect and picturesque “dépaysement” of the first installation even further, aiming to create a didactic experience without sacrificing aesthetics and atmosphere.⁶⁷

This second iteration of the exhibition decided in no small part the creation of a permanent and national “ethnographic museum”. Installed later that year in the same Palais du Trocadéro, Hamy was named its first director. If the 1878 exhibit was important for the role

the American collections played in promoting the museal project, it also reflects Hamy's vision of ethnography as a modern scientific discipline and its museographical realisation in the new museum. First, Ethnography was conceived fundamentally as a historical science and thus encompassed the study of all material products of human activity, both past and present. It is what Hamy defines as an *alliance intime* (intimate alliance) of archaeology and ethnography and why, for him, Barthélemy de Courçay's project was superior to Jomard's.⁶⁸ Similarly, Oscar de Watteville clearly states that “the ethnography museum shall be a history museum”.⁶⁹

This definition of ethnography as encompassing both the products of the past (including antiquities) and present justifies the transfer of the Louvre's collections to the new Musée d'Ethnographie in the 1880s, despite opposition from Longpérier's successor, Ravaisson-Mollien (1813-1900). For Ravaisson-Mollien “the Louvre should encompass the artistic products of all peoples up to our contemporary era. [...] The Ethnographic Museum would logically commence when the former concludes; in other words, while the Louvre collects all elements that contribute to a comprehensive and comparative overview of past civilizations, the Ethnographic Museum would provide a similar overview of present-day civilizations.”⁷⁰ Jules Ferry (1832-1893), minister of l'Instruction publique et des Beaux-Arts, responds that it was not a question of chronology but of disciplinary boundaries: “The philosophy behind the Ethnographic Museum is not to provide a synthesis of contemporary peoples (...) but to
<figure><img src="image_43.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 04: Layout of the exhibit “Missions ethnographiques” with labelled sections and contributors, designed by Wiener, Soldi and Hamy installed at the Palais du Trocadéro in 1878. In Exposition universelle de 1878. Catalogue du Ministère de l'Instruction publique, des cultes et des beaux-arts, tome 2/2 (Missions et voyages scientifiques), Paris: imp. de la Société de publications périodiques, 1878, n.p. Bnf, département Philosophie, histoire, sciences de l'homme, 8-R-1429 (2,2).</figcaption></figure>

present the history of customs and practices of all peoples across all ages, just as the Louvre does in relation to their works of arts”.⁷¹

Furthermore, ethnography as a science was intimately linked to the promotion of national and patriotic sentiments. As Oscar de Watteville explains in his inaugural speech of

the Muséum ethnographique des Missions Scientifiques, “it is the love of Science and the love of France” which inspires French explorers and scholars, and the Service des Missions scientifiques who makes their work possible.⁷² Thus, the Musée d'Ethnographie was destined to play an active role in promoting
France and its global interests. Consequently, it was deemed essential that the museum serve the public: beyond its scientific and pedagogical mission, it was necessary to present ethnography in an attractive manner. De Watteville asserts then that “[the collections] are put to the eyes of the public first, and of scholars second”.⁷³

In the end, it was a combination of ideological *parti-pris*, shifts within disciplines, and practical reasons that determined the transfer of the Pre-Columbian collections from the Louvre to the Trocadéro. Antoine Héron de Villefosse (1845-1919), curator of Roman and Greek antiquities, finally agreed that it was preferable to lose the collections rather than keep them in their current state of neglect and entrusted them to Hamy in 1887.⁷⁴

At the new Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, this alliance between archaeology, ethnography, and a science fuelled by national-patriotic sentiments is reflected in the museography of the Galerie Américaine. When the museum opened in 1882 it was the largest section, measuring fifty meters in length and twelve and a half meters in width. The gallery proposed a geographical journey through the Americas from Brazil to British Columbia, even if the “classical” civilisations of Mexico, Central and South America were the largest (fig. 5). The American collections were overall the most extensive the time of the inauguration: around 10,000 objects, which did not include part of the Wiener, Pinart, Crevaux and Charnay collections which had not been installed in time for the opening in 1882.⁷⁵ The collections kept growing and

expanding through donations and archaeological and ethnographical fieldwork sponsored by the French state.⁷⁶

Thus, “ethnographical” artefacts and “antiquities” came together in the Galerie Américaine to offer a historical and synthetical overview of the material productions and cultural practices of the Americas (fig. 6). The museography was completed, like in the temporary exhibition, by large panels adorning the walls depicting landscapes and ancient American monuments from “Bolivia to Ohio”.⁷⁷ The Galerie Américaine also reflected France’s political and historical interests in the New World. The “colonial cause” was, to Hamy, “the perfect expression of the alliance between scientific knowledge and national interests”.⁷⁸ The case of the American collections is particular in the sense that, at the time of the inauguration of the Trocadéro, France no longer had colonies in the New World, except for territories in the Caribbean and South America.⁷⁹ With the exception of the Second French Intervention in Mexico, French ethnography and archaeology in the Americas is more aligned with practices of informal imperialism than direct colonisation.⁸⁰

This does not mean that the New World was free from colonial rhetoric and indeed the ambitions of French science were linked with economic and industrial interests in Central and Latin America. As discussed earlier, the 1860s and Napoléon’s III incursion in Mexico was essential to the efforts of finally crystallising Americanist studies in France. This idea was further developed in the last third of the cen-
<figure><img src="image_44.png" /></figure>

tury, with commentators opining that the Americas were “the most fruitful terrain for the deployment of French science”⁸¹ and that “(Mexico) has, from an early stage and to a considerable extent, been the domain of French scholars”.⁸² The Galerie Américaine paid homage to the greatest of French heroes – explorers, scholars and collectors – whom, since the 16th century, had explored the New World – with their names inscribed in gold letters in the archways of the gallery.⁸³

Before looking at the last case-study, lets return briefly to Hamy's *Origines du Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro* and why it is that in this genealogy many of the earliest episodes of ethnographical enquiries he recounts relate to the Americas. If Charlemagne's court had received curious gifts from faraway lands of the “Orient”, the first true “modern” cabinet – associated with a particular kind of expansive and erudite cu-

riosity – is that of François Ier (1494-1547), often considered France's first Renaissance (or modern) king and under whom the first French explorations of the New World took place. François Ier “never stopped sending travellers far and wide to bring him back *news* of faraway lands”, notably the explorations of the coast of the United States by Jacques Cartier and of Brazil by Bizeret.⁸⁴ Similarly, Hamy compiles every French contribution to the “discovery” and exploration of Mexico dating back to the early 16th century, “correcting” the impression of a Spanish and Portuguese monopoly before its independence.⁸⁵

Hamy then presents a summary of the explorations undertaken under each French monarch. He condemns Louis XIV's disinterest in the New World, despite the potential for French expansion in the recently discovered expanses of Canada and the Mississippi basin. Hamy's

<caption>**Fig. 05:** Peruvian and Mexican antiquities at the Galerie Américaine of the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro. In *La Nature. Revue des sciences et de leurs applications aux arts et à l'industrie* n. 471 (10 juin 1882, p. 25) and n°483 (2 septembre 1882 p. 213), BnF : Gallica.</caption>
<figure><img src="image_45.png" /></figure>

critique of Louis XIV's "obsession" with Classical Antiquity should then be understood as a condemnation of his abandonment of "ethnographic" exploration and collecting, only supporting missions to the Levant to enrich his collections of medals, engraved stones and manuscripts.⁸⁶

This interest in showing the close parallels between the history of French ethnography and the exploration of the Americas is in part explained by Hamy's own preferences as an Americanist. However, it is not surprising either that French collections from the Americas reappear as a guiding thread in a work that intimately associates "history of (French) ethnography" (and its museal realisations) with the "his-

tory of (Modern) France", seeing as the "discovery" of the New World became one of the hallmarks of the conceptualisation of the Modern Age in Western thought. Others shared Hamy's interpretation: thus Léon Lejeal (1867-1907) alludes to the same idea in his inaugural lesson at the Collège de France when he remarks that the sailors from de Gonneville's exploration to Brazil around 1500 were "Americanists, even if they did not know it".⁸⁷

Finally, by retracing the history of "French ethnography" to François Ier, Hamy is "repairing," or reconciliating, the collections from the *Ancien Régime* with Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary French heritage (in the sense of *patrimoine*), now redefined as "national". Thus, it is significative that if Barthélemy de Courçay's project at the Cabinet des Médailles is the first "revolutionary" project of nationalisation of (ethnographic) collections, Hamy is insistent that "long before Barthélemy (...) other efforts had been made" and that "one has to delve deeply into the history of the monarchy to unveil the first of these royal collections (...) which represent the first stage of the history of our national museums, and of the Musée d'Ethnographie in particular".⁸⁸

## 4. "Repairing" a National Omission: Eugène Goupil's gift to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Finally, I want to shift the perspective from institutional museal histories and present one last case where a private collector come to "repair" a glaring omission in French Amerindian and Pre-Columbian collections: that of a documental collection, and more precisely of Mesoamerican

**Fig. 06:** An exemple of the mannequins conceived by Hamy for the Galerie Américaine. "Costume de fête d'un chef coréguaje du Rio Ica" in E.-T. Hamy *Choix de pièces archéologiques et ethnographiques décrites et publées*. Galerie Américaine du Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, Paris: E. Léroux, 1897, LIX. BnF: Gallica.
and Mexican codices. If in the last third of the 19th century the archaeological and ethnographical series in the Musée du Trocadéro continued growing, the collections of codices were much more modest, despite a now century-long interest in deciphering and translating the writing systems of Pre-Columbian Americas. Until 1896, the Bibliothèque National had only sixteen manuscripts from the Americas.⁸⁹ The situation changed drastically with the bequest of Eugène Goupil's (1831-1896) *Bibliothèque américaine*. Goupil's gift contained over three hundred documents, endowing France with a unique collection in the world. This gift was celebrated as a gesture of patriotic devotion. I want to briefly go over this episode and discuss the implications of this legacy in both France and Mexico – where most of the collections originated from – in terms of narratives of heritage, national identity and national collections.

A prominent industrialist, Eugène Goupil amassed one of the largest collections of Pre-Columbian antiquities in Paris in the latter part of the 19th century. He closely collaborated with art and antiquities dealer Eugène Boban Duvergé (1834-1908), who served as Goupil's personal supplier and undertook a significant part of the practical management of the collection.⁹⁰ Goupil was born into a French-Mexican family, of Aztec lineage in his mother's side. This Aztec heritage was of great significance to Eugène and his brother Louis – also a well-known collector – and it was the personal connection to the objects and the history they invoked which, according to Goupil, fuelled his passion for collecting and his predilection for Mexican

antiquities.

Eugène Goupil returned to France in the early 1860s and started a factory of glass beads and pearls which gave him the financial means to pursue his passion for collecting. Other than antiquities and curiosities, Goupil amassed a vast *bibliothèque* of literature pertaining to the Americas: history books, travel accounts, natural history treatises, novels, books on linguistics and dictionaries of modern and historical Amerindian languages... As well as a number of important manuscripts and codices from the early Colonial period or from Pre-conquest times, such as the *Mapa Tlotzin*, the *Codex Xolotl*, the *Codex Azcatitlan* and the *Relaciones de Chimalpáhin*.⁹¹ His great-nephew, the muralist artist Jean Charlot (1898-1979), remembers visiting the family house where one could not escape “his idols, his books, his facsimiles and his codices, and his *catalogues raisonnés*”.⁹² Upon his death, Goupil bequeathed his *bibliothèque* to the French state, a gift that brought the “fonds américains” from 17 to over 400 items in 1898.

It is on the public discourse about the bequest that I want to focus on. In the preface of his *Catalogue raisonné*, Goupil insists that he was merely the “dépositaire” of this unique collection and that he intended to make it accessible to scholars and “useful to science and history”.⁹³ But how are we to understand Goupil’s choice of leaving his collection to France and not to Mexico? Despite Goupil’s pride in his Aztec heritage, his relationship with his Mexican identity was complex and full of contradictions. He justifies his choice by arguing for
the superiority of French scholarship and an easier access, for both the scientific community and the public, to the collections in France, rather than Mexico. He hesitates in his private notes: "I am French, but my hearts is French and Mexican".⁹⁴ The final version in *Documents pour servir (...)* however, reads: "I believe I am rendering Mexico a greater service (...) Mexico is very far away (...) Paris is the centre of the intellectual world, the unavoidable stop for all scientific travellers (...) may Mexico appreciate my efforts in contributing to a better understanding of my homeland".⁹⁵

The situation is further complicated if we consider the dubious history of how these documents were taken out of Mexico and came to be in Goupil's possession. Indeed, most of the treasures in Goupil's collection had belonged to Joseph Marius Alexis Aubin (1802-1891). Aubin's library was well known for being the largest of its kind, containing part of the collection from 18th century scholar the Chevalier Boturini Benaduci (1702-1753).⁹⁶ Aubin had obtained his collection in Mexico in the 1830s and illegally took them back to France, where he only rarely admitted visitors.⁹⁷ In the late 1880s, Aubin's was plagued by debts and his mental and physical health were much diminished.

The conditions under which Goupil and Boban acquired the collection from Aubin are also suspicious. Upon learning that Antonio Peñafiel (1839-1922)⁹⁸ had approached Aubin to buy the collection and repatriate it, Goupil and Boban pressured Aubin to sell to them instead. If, years later, they presented this acquisition as a "rescue mission" to ensure

the collections would remain in France for the sake of Americanist scholarship, Goupil's private correspondence shows he and Boban went to questionable lengths to ensure their victory over Peñafiel and did not hesitate to exploit Aubin's diminished state in their favour.⁹⁹ They went so far as changing the locks of Aubin's study and calling for a police escort to be present to avoid any "trouble" while the sale contract was being signed.¹⁰⁰

Throughout, Peñafiel is painted as a scheming individual driven only by personal ambition, whilst Goupil's efforts and onerous financial sacrifice are framed as being in the interest of France and Americanists studies. "These documents must remain in France whatever the cost," writes Goupil. And Boban, despite recognizing that Peñafiel was acting out of duty to his country, accuses the Mexican archaeologist of humbris: "he dreamed only of return the Boturini collection to Mexico when he had only just arrived in Paris and was unknown to European scholars. He believed he could immediately distinguish himself [by buying the collection] and announce to Mexico, as if he were Julius Caesar, *veni, vidi, vici*."¹⁰¹ In private letters to his friends, Goupil boasted of having "outmanoeuvred" that "dog" Peñafiel: "We have just saved the Aubin collection,"¹⁰² he writes, recounting a conversation with explorer Désiré Charnay (1828-1915). In another letter, Goupil excuses himself for not having included Hamy in their scheme, as a "delay of even twenty-four hours would have led to an irreparable loss," adding as a peace offering that "it is very probable that my entire collection will (eventually) come to the Tro-
cadéro.”¹⁰³

There is no doubt that the acquisi-
tion of the Aubin collection by Goupil
represented a significant loss for
Mexico. It is interesting how in pub-
lic Goupil always justified his actions
as being of “national interest” and as
a patriotic sacrifice towards France
and French Americanist studies.
This celebratory discourse was per-
petuated after Goupil’s death, when
his bequeath to the Bibliothèque
Nationale was confirmed.¹⁰⁴ Albert
Réville (1826-1906), a close friend of
Boban and Goupil, drafted an arti-
cle titled “Les Aventures d’une col-
lection” which perfectly embodies
the celebratory narrative adopted
by posteriority. Here Réville tells the
“rather curious story” in which the
valiant intervention of French pa-
triots ensured that these treasures
were rescued from “oblivion” and
from the greed of those who would
“steal them from science for their
own gain” (an obvious reference to
Peñafiel). “Mr. Goupil... did not hes-
itate to make the necessary sacrifice
to ensure that this scientific treas-
ure remained in France.” Thanks to
Goupil and Boban, France had been
bestowed the most “authentic and
instructive” of collections of Am-
erindian and Pre-Columbian doc-
uments and manuscripts, the only
type still severely underrepresent-
ed in French national collections.
“From this point onward, it will be
in France [and] under the auspices
of French scholarship” that the his-
tory of ancient Mexico and of the
Americas would be “brought back
to life,” concludes Réville.¹⁰⁵

In this text, we attempted to bring
together several episodes in which
French Amerindian and Pre-Colum-
bian collections were mobilised in
the context of creating or reform-
ing national museal institutions. In
every case, these projects were assos-
ciated to the need to “repair” phys-
ical spaces - and ensure the preser-
vation of material objects – but also
to “repair” or renew intellectual
thought. The American collections
are particularly interesting for the
development, throughout the 19th
century, of Americanist studies in
France and the parallel calls for “re-
pairing” museums/collections and
“repairing” Americanism. These
calls to “repair” are characterised
by moments of high enthusiasm
and activity followed by periods of
“stasis” or neglect, often due to eco-
nomic difficulties and/or concrete
shifts in scholarly interest.

These examples traversed the 19th
century, but, as we have seen, the
same collections were mobilised in
the early 20th century as Rivet and
Rivière attempted to repair the “old
Troca” – both the physical museum
and its disciplinary and ideological
foundations. ¹⁰⁶ Similarly, if we were
to extend Hamy’s genealogy of a
French National Museum and the
evolving definitions of ethnogra-
phy into the 20th century, we could
continue by exploring the Musée de
l’Homme – which replaced the old
Trocadéro in 1937 – and, more re-
cently, the Musée du Quai Branly –
Jacques Chirac. The creation of the
Quai Branly was marked by its own
set of controversies. ¹⁰⁷ But, almost
twenty years later, the question
of whether a museography open-
ly embracing the aesthetic of the
“arts premiers” would imperil the documental value of its collections and perpetuate “othering” images of the cultures it represented seems to have been mostly settled by assuming the inevitability of the current museal state of affairs. That is, the new constellation of collections and disciplines shared between the Quai-Branly, the renewed Musée de l’Homme, and the MUCEM in Marseille.

In the last two decades, the field has been marked by reflexions on the need to decolonise collections and deconstruct national narratives. The potential of museums to be reparative of the social tissue needs to contend - especially in the case of museums of the “Other” – with a myriad of political and legal hurdles as well as complex colonial and imperial legacies. Recently, at the Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, discussions concerning the provenance and the decolonisation of the museum have been anchored by an explicit desire to “historicize” its collections,¹⁰⁸ ideally a first step towards accomplishing a “reparative” function. It is, perhaps, within this context that we might see what the next call to “repair” American French collections could resemble.