Post Tagged with: "Community Archaeology Model"

The Bureaucracy of Regret: France’s Quiet Beginning to Undo Colonial Plunder

Inside the dim, glass-walled galleries of the Musée du Quai Branly, the ghosts of the French empire are kept at a meticulous relative humidity of 50%. For decades, these objects, including carved ancestral figures from Gabon, royal sceptres from Dahomey, and reliquaries from Madagascar, existed in a state of ‘suspended animation’. They were protected by a legal doctrine as unyielding as the museum’s reinforced glass: inaliénabilité. Rooted in the 1566 Edict of Moulins, which sought to […]

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When Art Gets Stuck: Cuba, MoMA, and the Risk of Loss in Display

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York is preparing “Wifredo Lam: When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream,” a major retrospective expected to show works by the seminal Afro-Cuban Surrealist. But several important pieces from Cuba’s National Museum of Fine Arts will not be part of the exhibition. Cuban officials declined to lend those works over fears that U.S. courts might seize them in legal claims brought by exiles over property confiscated after the […]

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From Classroom to Curator: Why Goa’s College Museum is the Antidote to History Boredom

Let’s be honest: history often gets a bad rap. It’s seen as dusty, sequestered, and something that happened exclusively to people who wore powdered wigs. But in the vibrant coastal state of Goa, a group of college students and their professor, Rohit Phalgaonkar, are proving that history isn’t dead; it’s just scattered in three pieces at the bottom of a temple tank, waiting for a passionate student to fish it out. At the Sant Sohirobanath […]

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