Encoding and decoding a postcolonial constellation: Challenges for the national museum of Colombia

Introduction

Museums are sites of collection, classification, storage, interpretation, enactment, and communication. Countless articles, chapters and books have for decades critically engaged with the purpose and practice of museums. In order to discuss the workings of the Colombian National Museum, we find it useful to recall some key elements of critical museum discourse. First, as Bennett (1995) has shown in his influential study on the history of the Western “exhibitionary complex”, museums are displays of power/knowledge. In his Foucaultian view, museums can define forms of representation. They create an order of things and produce a framework for identification with that order. Second, the power dynamics of knowledge and identity production by museums are shaped by class, race, age, gender, sexuality, and colonialism. These dimensions influence decisions on the “archivable”, the aesthetics of exhibitions, the repertoire of didactic aims and tools, and the contours of the imagined public. Over the past decades, critical debates have constructively subverted the field and more and more museums embarked on a route towards decolonization and democratization. This is an immense challenge because museums are, in principle, institutions that contribute to normalisation, the stabilisation of elites and the transmission of colonial visions of history. We follow the critical perspective of Rivera Cusicanqui, who emphasises that decoloniality is not an abstract academic endeavour, but a concrete practice to make visible the local histories forgotten by dominant Creole ¹ and Europeanized history. This implies challenging biocentric and anthropocentric conceptions of history (Ruiz Serna and Ojeda Ojeda, 2023; Vargas Sarmiento, 2016) and bringing forward a museological practice that embraces the idea of a non-linear time in which “the past-future is contained in the present” (Cusicanqui, 2012: 96). Museums increasingly apply autorepresentation strategies, based on dialogue with marginalised groups. Third, following Halbwachs (1992), we would suggest analyzing the work of museums as reconstructions of the past in the light of the present needs of a collective. In the postcolonial constellation of the 21st century, the present is a non-peaceful world. In Bhaba’s words: “It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present” (Bhabha, 1994: 63). On the other hand, in that same postcolonial condition, history museums can also be filled with artefacts generating feelings of “inclusive pride” (Gómez Villar and Canessa, 2018). In either case, however, giving shape to a future plurivocal national project implies de-linking from Western thought and its problematic museological history of exclusion, segregation, and silence. Museums then can support social movements and social transformation (Chagas, 2017) and illuminate other possible futures.

The Colombian mnemonic landscape constantly shifts, adjusting to local demands, national debates, and transnational tropes and devices. In Colombia, there are several regional and two national history museums as well as countless local museums and exhibitions that bring to light the diverse mosaic of history and, especially, the legacies of more than six decades of armed conflict that has left millions of victims. This paper deals with the National Museum, founded in 1823, shortly after independence, as Museum for Natural History attached to the Mining School. As many history museums around the globe (e.g., Aronsson and Elgenius, 2014; Silverman et al., 2022), it played an important role in the process of nation-building and the invention of the history of the country (Pérez Benavides, 2015a; Rodríguez Prada 2013; Segura, 1995). The museum has witnessed many shifts in dominant narratives as well as moments of crisis, and it moved from a focus on collection to an audience-oriented story-telling. Although the 1991 constitution, which recognised ethnic and cultural diversity, provided an important frame for re-interpretation, it took a decade to become translated into curatorial practice. In 2001, a Strategic Plan set the basis for the reconceptualization of exhibition halls, and a new curatorial script for the permanent exhibition has been in the making since 2010. As María Victoria de Robayo, former director of the museum, put it, the main idea was to move from a linear chronological route to one that allows the collections to enter in dialogue, in order to re-narrate the process of formation of the Nation in its complexity (De Robayo, n.d, translated by the authors).

Based on our experience as scholar, curator, educator, and visitor, and paying particular attention to visual and sensory aspects, we critically engage with current scriptwriting and the idea of the inclusive and transformative museum. Our discussion of the Colombian experience was inspired by Stuart Hall’s argument on encoding and decoding. In his seminal text on the television discourse, first published in 1973, Hall challenged the idea that media transmit messages to receivers, who interpret these messages basically as intended by media producers. Hall’s famous argument was that the intended meaning can be redrafted by the audience (Hall, 2021: 162f.): it can either accept the suggested meaning or re-work the meaning or reject the meaning and develop alternative readings. This argument has been applied to diverse contexts, including museum studies. While some authors refer to the notion of encoding/decoding in a rather cursory or metaphorical manner (e.g., Gauthier and La Cour, 2014), others use it as a key conceptual reference when dealing with the role of audiences and museum visitors (Newman and McLean, 2006; Stylianou-Lambert, 2010). Our paper adds to this line of argument, taking a close reading of Hall’s text as a point of departure.

Our paper emerged in dialogue. In writing a co-authored text on the encoding and decoding of a postcolonial constellation in the National Museum of Colombia, we wanted to highlight different subject positions and interpretations. As researchers working on the Colombian process of dealing with the past, we have different “insider, “outsider”, and “insider and outsider” positions. As a German sociologist, Anika Oettler is an outsider, but in the commemorative landscape of Colombia, she is an “insider-outsider”, who has been working on global trends in memory politics for more than two decades, and who is interacting with and learning from diverse Colombian people on a more regular basis since 2016. Amada Carolina Pérez Benavides is an insider who worked in the Museum’s Educational Division. She has conducted research on the history of its collections, and she was part of the curatorial team for the exhibition “Histories of a cry. 200 years of being Colombian”. She is also an insider-outsider who in recent years has worked as a university professor and researcher and in social museology processes with indigenous peoples. In 2023, she worked again at the museum as an advisor for the elaboration of its research program. Our interest in collaborative writing was to shed light on, compare and counter-argue the other’s position. In entering in dialogic collaborative practice, we wanted to challenge ourselves and our views on the achievements of the Colombian National Museum. Therefore, we wrote the first parts of the paper in isolation. Our point of departure was our reading of Stuart Hall and some proposals of Latin American museology. Based on her experience as a historian and curator, Pérez Benavides provided a brief account of the National Museum’s process of revising the exhibition halls and collections since the 2000s. This is an insider’s view on encoding. Oettler, who has visited the museum various times since 2016, added a brief description of the exhibition halls and their multidirectional narrative. This is an outsider’s view on decoding, and it is a very particular – and decidedly not universal – point of view. Our aim was to challenge ourselves as scholars, activists and observers, and to discover both (or more) sides of the coin. Based on commentaries from the other, we wrote the section on encoding/decoding and the question of how the museum’s strategy relates to visitors’ tactics. The concluding section highlights the innovative role of the Colombian National Museum in paving the way for a transformative approach to dealing with cultural heritage.

The encoding/decoding model

Our conceptual point of reference is Hall’s famous text on “encoding/decoding moments in the communicative process” (2021: 247). We are, of course, not the first to base our analysis on Hall. If anything can claim originality, it is certainly not our interpretation of the text, but rather our subsequent writing process. We described the moments of encoding and decoding separately and brought them together at a later stage. Hall’s text on television deals with the production and perception of meaning in a circular and entangled process. Hall stresses that “the moments of ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding,’ though only ‘relatively autonomous’ in relation to the communicative process as a whole, are determinate moments” (Hall, 2021: 248).

Moments of encoding take place in a global memory landscape that has been on the move since the late 20th century. Museums are no longer isolated and detached places for the sacrification of elite knowledge. “Pressures toward decolonization and greater democratization have led to the development of collaborative processes of exhibition and program development and to a greater multivocality” (Coombes and Phillips, 2020: xxvi). While the way museums produce knowledge has changed considerably and became more inclusive, an essential function remains. It is the creation of a story. A narrative. Or, in a nutshell: a message. As with television, a museum is concerned with the production and dissemination of “a message: that is, a sign-vehicle, or rather sign-vehicles of a specific kind, organised, like any other form of communication or language, through the operation of codes, within the syntagmatic chains of a discourse” (Hall, 2021: 248). In the polyphonic and multilingual Colombian present, this is particularly challenging. There is a broad and diverse spectrum of relevant codes and discursive chains. And when Hall writes that messages are “constituted within the rules of ‘language’” and that they require their “material substratum” (2021: 248), the same question arises. What if there is more than one language? How does a contemporary museum deal with the multicultural patchwork of codes, languages and their material substratum? Museums, at least those of history, ethnography/anthropology and art, revolve around historical events that they attempt to explain in terms of their sequence, interconnectedness, and significance. In Hall’s words, “the event must become a “story” before it can become a communicative event” and the “’message-form’ is the necessary form of the appearance of the event in its passage from source to receiver” (2021: 249). This is certainly also evident in museum exhibitions that tell stories in order to convey one or more messages. In a context characterised by multiple exclusions and experiences of violence, it is particularly important to understand exhibitions not only in terms of their content. They are more than that because “the symbolic form of the message has a privileged position in the communicative exchange” (Hall, 2021: 249).

By applying Hall’s proposition to museum work, the complexity of encoding becomes evident. The message attached to each artefact is not accessible in isolation. Explanatory texts are themselves embedded in codification systems. The artefacts form part of structured and polysemic fields of meaning, which can be single walls or exhibition halls or the museum as a whole. In the next sections, we will discuss how Colombian museum professionals navigate and challenge dominant conventions.

A circuit of communication requires an institutional structure. What Hall writes about the production process of messages on television also applies to museums:

Of course, the production process is framed throughout by meanings and ideas: knowledge-in-use concerning the routines of production, technical skills, professional ideologies, institutional knowledge, definitions and assumptions, assumptions about audience, etc. frame the passage of the programme through this production structure (2021: 249).

This observation relates to the professional environment and the production process, but here Hall goes one step further and considers societal influences and interactions. In line with critical approaches of cultural studies, Hall stresses that the encoding moment in the communication process is not “a closed system. They [producers] draw topics, treatments, agendas, events, personnel, images of the audience, ‘definitions of the situation’ from the wider socio-cultural political system of which they are only a differentiated part” (Hall 2021: 249). The creation of a “meaningful” historiographic discourse by the staff of a museum is a process that is connected to the audience in a twofold way. The audience is the addressee of the message, but at the same time it is a source. The audience can also play an active role in museum work, taking part in feedback loops and mutual learning activities. What the museum does is to take up existing discourses and to lend them a sharper or even new form. In this sense, museums do ideological work, mediating between society and the domain of cultural memory and cultural heritage.

What made Hall’s text famous is his basic insight that the decoded meaning can differ from the encoded meaning. Obviously, the main intention of museum professionals is to communicate an intended message. In Hall’s terms, the intended message is a dominant message. As discussed above, there is not a fixed meaning attached to the message. “But we say ‘dominant’ because there exists a pattern of ‘preferred readings,’ and these mappings both have the institutional/political/ideological order imprinted in them, and have themselves become institutionalised” (Hall, 2021: 259). In decoding the message, the audience can adhere to the preferred reading and think inside the dominant (or professional) system of codes. If visitors would decode the messages exactly as intended by the museum professionals, the latter would probably be proud to have achieved their goal. But how often does that happen? According to Hall, decoded meanings often differ from encoded meanings. There are various reasons.

The viewer does not “speak the language,” figuratively if not literally: he or she cannot follow the complex logic of argument or exposition; or the concepts are too alien; or the editing (which arranges items within an expository logic or “narrative,” and thus in itself proposes connections between discrete things) is too swift, truncated or sophisticated etc. (2021: 260f.)

While these are standard challenges when designing exhibitions, Hall goes one step further and positions the audience in a proactive and even resistant role. He discusses two forms of distraction from intended meanings, a negotiated version of decoding and an oppositional one. The negotiated version occurs when viewers operate within dominant frames but at the same time oppose some elements and establish connections to their local realities. This mismatch between encoded and decoded meaning is even more obvious in the case of the oppositional code. The viewer “detotalises the message in the preferred code in order to retotalise the message within some alternative framework of reference” (2021: 264). This is in line with De Certeau’s (2000) argument on tactics. Although visitors cannot change exhibitions as a whole, they can establish alternative routes or interpretations that go beyond the museum’s strategies. And they can articulate demands regarding state policies of representation.

If, then, the museum seeks to overcome its traditional educational mission, how does it encourage decolonialized perceptions of history? How can a new type of museum, democratised and decolonised, leave questions open and point to alternatives? And is this intended meaning perceived by visitors? The following pages will approach this question from different vantage points.

Encoding: revising narratives in the Colombian national museum

As previously mentioned, the National Museum of Colombia was founded in 1823, just a few years after the proclamation of the country’s independence. It originated as a natural history museum annexed to the School of Mineralogy, but it soon received other objects (Rodríguez Prada, 2013). These objects were included into the collections of natural history, indigenous antiquities, curiosities and national history. Given that the institution has faced several changes over time there was no continuous development until the present. However, the history of its collections allows for sketching the genealogy of the institution.

The collections grew since 1823, but it was not until 1881 that the first catalogue, which had been commissioned to the naturalist Fidel Pombo the previous year, was published (Pombo, 1881). That catalogue and those that were published in the following two decades include some of the pieces that remain to this day in the collection, especially those related to patriotic history (Pérez Benavides, 2015b). During the twentieth century the pieces were reorganised into four collections: history, art, anthropology and ethnography (Reyes, 2017). This organization was consolidated with the transfer of the Museum to its current headquarter, the former Penitenciaría de Cundinamarca (prison of Cundinamarca) in 1948. A chronological order was implemented, with the archeological and ethnographical collections being located on the first floor, the historical collections on the second floor and the art collections on the third floor.

The general structure of the collections as well as the presentation were maintained with a certain stability until the late twentieth century, when the permanent exhibition was organised in sixteen rooms that followed the linear order of the historical narrative established by the Creole elites in since the 19th century. The promulgation of the 1991 Constitution and the demands of the social and political movements that promoted it led to rethinking the way the nation was represented in the museum.

Diverse social and academic sectors criticised the exclusionary character of the museum’s exhibition. One of the main points of criticism was that the museum privileged the representation of white elites and particularly men as protagonists of national history. One of the most controversial halls was the Ethnographic one because it represented indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombian communities and organizations that had not necessarily been consulted. The museological paradigm of exoticization still prevailed. Furthermore, the very existence of the hall implied thinking of these groups on the margins of time, as if they had not their own history or remained in the past. This subordinated them, as Johannes Fabian (1983) has pointed out, showing how removing others from coetaneity implies a strategy of domination configured from a particular notion of “universal” history in which some peoples inhabit modernity while others are relegated to a past considered inferior in evolutionary terms. The museum reproduced a pyramidal social structure produced by internal colonialism (Cusicanqui, 2015) by privileging the representation of the Creole elites and denying the historicity of different social sectors and the alternative stakes of modernity that they configure.

In response to this criticism, directors and officials from different areas of the museum initiated a multi-level reflection process in the last years of the twentieth century. The museum team asked visitors what they wanted to see in the museum (Museo Nacional de Colombia, 2003), developed the strategic plan 2001–2010 (Museo Nacional de Colombia, 2001), realised a multiplicity of academic events, created pedagogical materials, and launched a program of temporary exhibitions aiming at thinking the nation in more pluralistic terms. Among these activities, the annual history lectures furthered reflection on the relationship between the museum and its collections, the renewed national historiography and contemporary socio-political problems. Since the 1999 lecture on “Museum, Memory and Nation”, diverse issues have been debated, starting, among others, from the questions posed by Martín-Barbero: “who remembers when the nation remembers? at the cost of what oblivions does a nation-subject like Colombia remember?” (2000). During the first decade of the 21st century the annual history lectures addressed contemporary problems such as forced displacement and drug trafficking; the history of social groups traditionally marginalised from national representation such as Afro-Colombians and women, as well as perspectives from specific regions such as the Caribbean. In addition to the reflections raised in these lessons, the Museum’s Educational Division developed different pedagogical materials that proposed tours or highlighted pieces that drew attention to processes and social groups that were not very visible in the galleries. An example is ¿Tú quieres ser arqueólogo, reportero y pintor? (Do you want to be an archaeologist, reporter and painter), which dealt with the participation of women in historical processes.

The curatorship encouraged historiographic reflections that proposed interpretative alternatives, such as the permanent exhibition entitled “Conquest: Encounter or Confrontation?” Or the temporary exhibitions of the 2000s, among them Magdalena. Navegando por una nación (“Magdalena. Navigating a Nation”); Llegó el Amazonas a Bogotá “The Amazonas came to Bogotá), and Velorios y santos vivos, Comunidades negras, afrocolombianas, raizales y palenqueras (“Wakes and living saints. Black, Afro-Colombian, Raizal and Palenquero communities”). Although these exhibitions made dissident memories and other actors visible, these memories and actors continued to be marginal in the museum’s framework, due to the temporary nature of such exhibitions (Vargas Álvarez, 2010: 150). In any case, although the permanent galleries maintained their general structure until 2010, some irruptions began to fracture the version of history that the museum had presented until then.

The bicentennial commemorative exhibition Historias de un grito. Doscientos años de ser colombianos (“Histories of an outcry. 200 years of being Colombian”) gathered many debates that had taken place in the museum during the previous years. This exhibition sought to reflect on the way in which the representation of independence had been constructed, problematizing the insistence on certain figures and events and highlighting how far-reaching many social groups had been made invisible. One, room was packed with representations of the heroes, and another, very large room, demonstrated the scarce representation of popular sectors, whether peasants, Afro-Colombians or the Nariño Indians who opposed the Creole project of nationhood (Lleras, 2011; López Rosas, 2015; Pérez Benavides, 2015b; Serrano Zalamea, 2014; Vargas Álvarez, 2010). The bitter controversies that this exhibition generated, particularly the reactions of certain sectors of the cultural elite and the then government of right-wing Álvaro Uribe show the difficulty of challenging the dominant representation of the past.

This brief tour indicates the complexities of the configuration of the new curatorial script for the Museum’s galleries (encoding) aimed at breaking the linear structure of history and the compartmentalization of the different collections. The first hall to be inaugurated as a result of this script was “Memory and Nation” (Santamaría et al., 2015; see Figure 2). This was perhaps one of the most difficult rooms to change. Since the nineteenth century there had been a room dedicated to the heroes of the independence and when the museum moved to its current location, the room Fundadores de la República (“Founders of the Republic”) occupied the space of the old penitenciary’s chapel. In praise of three of the Creole heroes and founders of the Republic, Antonio Nariño, Francisco de Paula Santander and Simón Bolívar, this room was an effort to reconcile the history of liberals and conservatives. These were the two main political parties of the country that fought several civil wars during the nineteenth century and entered into a bloody confrontation in the mid-twentieth century, known as the period of violence. Moving from a hall that celebrated Creole heroes to one that had to account for a multiethnic and multicultural country was a difficult task. One has to bear in mind the complexities of the political context. It was a time of transition from the escalation of the internal conflict due to the militaristic policies of Uribe Vélez, the belligerence of the leftist guerrillas and the presence of paramilitary groups, to the construction of a new scenario. This would lead to renewed peace negotiations, one of the promises of the incoming government of Juan Manuel Santos (Nasi, 2018).

The new hall emerged from the joint effort of the museum’s different curatorial departments and teams, responding to dialogues with experts and social organizations. The new exhibition centers around those different cultures, knowledge and social groups, which shaped the nation. For example, iconic pieces from the collection were included, such as the Nariño printing press and some of the plates from the Botanical Expedition under José Celestino Mutis, but there is also an allusion to Indigenous and Afro-Colombian knowledge about the territory, the environment, medicine and healing. On the back wall of the room there is a large gallery with paintings of different periods, formats and sizes representing peasants, fishermen, indigenous people, Afro-Colombians, men and women of different ages and social categories. The representation of the nation is pluralised, although the room does not necessarily question the history of exclusions or the way in which the museum has helped to implement it for more than a century and a half. However, the curatorial shift is significant, and it is worth noting that the final part of the hall is dedicated to violence and the internal armed conflict.

The process of creating the curatorial scripts and assembling the remaining halls has taken more than a decade. This shows the difficulty of constructing a new representation of the nation and the intense debates that this has produced, as well as the institutional fragility of the museum. State resources do not flow continuously and the constant rotation of the work teams due to the precarious conditions of hiring has obstructed the realization of the project. However, there are currently several rooms that are part of the new installation: The history of the Museum and the Museum in History, Time Unforgotten: Dialogues from the Pre-Hispanic World, Land as a Resource, Being Territory (see Figure 1), Making Society, Being and Making are some of them.

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Figure 1.

Hall “Land as Resource”, Colombian National Museum (photo: Amada Pérez Benavides, 25 August 2024).

In sum, this curatorial proposal allows us to approach a multiplicity of historical processes and actors. It also highlights complex aspects of national history such as land ownership, extractivism, the construction of state institutions and the ways in which diverse sectors of society imagined the national territory and its inhabitants. The thematic axes of the general curatorial proposal move away from a linear perspective of history and, instead, show a multiplicity of processes that seek to encourage reflection. In these rooms, there is an enormous number of pieces, some of them arrived to the collection in recent years through calls to collect objects representative of social groups and historical processes that had not been previously represented. An example of this type of call was the program entitled Si lo tiene traígalo (If you have it, bring it). The number of pieces and the mottled curatorial proposal of some of the halls makes the interpretation of the new script not easy for the visitor, although it is true that the rupture of the traditional historical narrative leaves open the possibility of approaching history in a decentralised and perhaps less hegemonic way. In addition, it is likely that by approaching such diverse pieces and analysis entries very diverse sectors of the public will identify with some of the stories told or with some take away questions.

Decoding: a particular view on shifting exhibitions since 2016

In this section, we use one author’s personal experience as data to engage with the messages encoded in the museum’s exhibition halls. We hope that the experience of a personally engaged self is useful for preparing the ground for a systematic and intersubjective analysis. The following story is a highly subjective view, elaborated by an outsider working in the field of memory studies. It does not represent a neutral bird’s eye view but rather mirrors a variety of impressions from repeated museum visits. Although the impression could arise that we are placing the experience of the German occasional visitor above the experiences of others, there is reason to rely on this approach. Any summary of the museum content necessarily includes a subjective component. There are simply too many halls, too many artefacts, too many texts to describe them in a non-subjective way.

I (Anika) have visited the museum regularly since 2016, about twice a year, interrupted by the Covid pandemic, and then with increasing frequency. When I visited the museum for the first time, the hall “Memoria y Nación” (Memory and Nation) had already been open for 2 years, the hall “Tierra como Recurso” (Land as Resource) had just opened and other halls were still closed for renovation. I was deeply impressed by the hall “Memory and Nation”. It is a dimly lit, two-storey high hall about Colombia’s multicultural past and present. The number of artifacts is limited and each of them hints at a complex, often gendered, history of privilege and oppression. There are diverse worldviews as well as experiences of violence and resistance. A wall of images – individual and group portraits, paintings and photographs – illustrates the mosaic-like character of Colombian society (see Figure 2). One of my favorites is the drawing “El árbol de la abundancia” (The Tree of Abundance) from 2012, together with the nonuya artist’s (Abel Rodríguez) comment.

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Figure 2.

Hall “Memory and Nation”, Colombian National Museum (photo: Anika Oettler, 25 March 2023).

A couple of years later, probably like most foreign researchers working on the armed conflict, I went straight to the hall “Hacer Sociedad” (Making Society) to look for the representation of the history of violence. I was disappointed. “Why”, I thought, “are they renovating the National Museum for years and then the armed conflict is shown in a small corner?”. I felt that there were too many objects squeezed into a small space, there were audio installations with original recordings, it was crowded and it was hard to follow the narrative of the recent Colombian history. Very prominent was a damaged sofa from the Palace of Justice, which was occupied by the M-19 and stormed and destroyed by the military in 1985.

On another occasion, I visited this same hall to see how the museum presented the history of LGBTIQ + people and that of other minorities. Again, I had ambivalent feelings. There were a few vitrines dealing with these histories, but was this enough to do justice to complex and entangled histories and to revise the traditional, heroic, bourgeois and masculine form of historiography?

However, the more halls were opened, the more I went to the museum, the more I listened to teachers or visitors, the more I read and saw, the more I think I understood the overall concept. The National Museum’s exhibitions mediate between “one national history” and its diverse and contested local realities. What is represented in the museum is a patchwork of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic narratives.

The museum has three floors and 17 smaller and larger exhibition halls, two of them being still under (re-)construction. Once they have passed the ticket control, visitors enter the opening sequence of the museum, with one hall describing the history of the museum and Colombian museology and another hall containing artifacts from the pre-Hispanic world. In general, the arrangement of the exhibition halls follows a chronological order, with the halls about gold in the indigenous world being located on the first floor, Colonial Republican Goldsmithing on the second floor, and pieces of contemporary art on the third floor. But this linearity is broken. The curators have constantly (re-)connected the past to the present. Although some exhibition halls follow a chronological narrative, like the one on “land as a resource”, others don’t.

One of the most inspiring (and, in my experience, one of the most crowded) exhibition halls is “Being Territory” on the second floor. This is also a rather dark hall in which the past and present can be experienced, felt, lived, and turned into meaning. I heard an educator telling a group of schoolchildren that the geography of Colombia has isolated the different parts of the country from each other and that this is still the case today. This seems to be the central message. In this hall there are audio-visuals, stimulating questions, a wide range of artifacts from different times and regions and many boxes, drawers and puzzle items. It is like an invitation to visitors to carve out their own path beyond a timeline or thematic order. Without ever having tried this myself, I would guess that it would take at least 3 h to look at all the objects in this room, read all the texts and engage with all the haptic and textual stimuli.

Perhaps most impressive of all, the exhibtion hall “Ser y Hacer” (“To be and to make”) opens up a communicative field between the visitor and a manageable and focused selection of art and archeological pieces. It is an invitation to creatively draw connections between historical plots and to update historical objects with current meanings. The connectivity is particularly visible in three pairs of objects that appear to be facing each other, each surrounded by stories on the walls of a separate room, no bigger than a cabin. There are rooms dedicated to the novel “100 Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez, the painting “Suicides of Sisga II” by Beatriz González, a burial urn from the Serranía de San Jacinto in Bajo Magdalena, and the bronze statue of José Ignacio de Márquez that lost its head when the Palace of Justice was stormed in 1985. A room dedicated to constructing new lyrics for the national anthem stands opposite another dedicated to the musical work of the marimba artist Baudilio Cuama.

Anyone who, like me, is used to linear narratives will probably perceive this hall as the climax of the museum’s narrative. Then this climax would point to a resolution, the main point of the story. From a spatial perspective, this would be “La Naranja” (The Orange), a Botero painting from 1977 (see Figure 3). Since the late 1990s, Botero dedicated much energy to the portrayal of violence and the armed conflict. I had ambivalent feelings about this (main) point of the story. I stood there as a conflict researcher who does not simply see this orange as a gigantic orange. There is a worm (Herrera Herrera, 2016). How does the inside of an orange from which a worm emerges look like? Did it already enter a stage of decomposition? But was this the main point of the story?

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Figure 3.

Hall “Being and Making”, Colombian National Museum (photo: Amada Pérez Benavides, 25 August 2023).

Discussion

The imaginations, experiences, structures and practices discussed here illustrate the challenges at the dawn of a decolonial museological paradigm shift. Based on Hall’s canonical text, we reflected on how the intention of museum professionals connects to critically engaged forms of seeing, decoding, and knowing. From our perspective, the Colombian National Museum was a forerunner in creating spaces for preserving and engaging with complex, interconnected and non-linear cultural heritage. Above all, the museum practice witnessed a crucial move from centralised coding to an open form of coding that leaves room for interpretation. Some of the museum’s strategies even involved a clear questioning of colonial narratives that subordinated certain social groups, especially indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples, but also peasants, women or LGBTIQ + sectors. Some of the museum’s strategies went further, raising reflections on injustices and the close relationship between colonial representations of history and nation with practices of exclusion and violence. In addition, some proposals for participatory museology have been implemented in recent years, involving a strong discussion about the museum, its history and its social place.

The particular visitor experience we described above suggests that encoding/decoding works as intended. But it also points to key challenges. During Anika’s first encounters with the museum, she took a negotiated position. She understood the overall intention of the museum, but strongly considered her own expectations regarding the representation of the violent aspects of Colombian history. She decoded the message taking into consideration broader theoretical knowledge (decoloniality, intersectionality, museology, peace and conflict studies) and rather limited knowledge regarding local Colombian histories. Later on, she decoded more and more messages as intended by the museum professionals, understanding and appreciating more the details of the curatorial strategy. This preferred reading refers to the composition of exhibitions, arrangement of exhibition halls and the non-linearity of the historical narrative. There are, however, about 2.500 objects on display in the museum, and each of them carries meaning. Like all visitors, Anika came with specific interests and particular identities that directed her museum experience. Some objects attracted her attention, many others did not. Some of the questions displayed and arranged all over the exhibition made her think, others did not. Why did the worm coming out of Botero’s orange attract her intention at the end of a museum visit? Did her interpretation of the painting corresponded to the meaning Botero hoped viewers to take away? And was this the dominant code?

The rupture of the traditional historical narrative invites visitors to approach history in a decentralised and perhaps less hegemonic way. It is likely that diverse societal sectors would identify with some of the objects, stories, and take-away-questions. While Anika was fascinated by Botero`s orange, other visitors identified “Mulata Cartagenera” by Enrique Grau and “El Niño de Vallecas” by Fernando Botero as the most meaningful artifacts of the museum (Figure 4). These are negotiated meanings created from Afro-Colombian and adolescent positionalities. The perspective adopted by the museum breaks with a historical narrative in which white elites, especially white men from the highlands, were seen as the protagonists of history. In the current exhibition, not only do other characters appear, but also the political agency of subaltern sectors that challenged hegemonic models of civilisation and progress. Some pieces and montages problematise issues such as economic extractivism, inequality and structural violence.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Visitors’ highlights, temporary wall on 3^rd floor, Colombian National Museum (photo: Anika Oettler, 25 February 2023, anonymised by AO).

Audience studies on visitors’ interpretations have not been conducted yet, but our experience suggests that the permanent galleries attract a constant flow of visitors who approach the variety of objects with curiosity. ² Future systematic visitor studies should focus on the perception of the new galleries: It would be worth asking if and how people make sense of the encoded concepts of historical non-linearity, decoloniality, and the brindle character of Latin American temporalities (Cusicanqui, 2015). This would be crucial in order to advance the critical perspective that the museum has been building over the past 20 years. Current activities regarding the concept of an archipelago museum and the reformulation of the museological cycle demonstrate that the museum is moving in that direction. Educational activities (“Exploring your patrimony” guided tours, workshops) follow the same line. As mentioned above, the museum reinterpreted its task of collecting national heritage. It calls on citizens to donate objects that represent diverse experiences.

Conclusion

Museums are sites of the reproduction of power and dominance. Members of more powerful social groups – roughly the lighter skinned, formally educated, urban middle and upper classes – have more access to and control over specific discourses such as those of museums or other cultural institutions. Museum professionals like curators and educators have persuasive power that stems from cultural capital, expertise, and authority. However, these are very often people who critically reflect their own positionality and advocate for a decolonization and democratization of museum work. In the Colombian case, there has also been a generational change in different working units of the National Museum and a demand from different social sectors to transform the representation of the nation.

The Colombian National Museum presents a national history that is, of course, overshadowed by political violence, but it is more than that. Over the past 20 years, the curatorial strategy witnessed a profound change towards representing the multifaceted layering of everyday practice (De Certeau, 2000). The museum’s potential for the transformative processing of experiences of violence implies such a broadened horizon, and most importantly, there is curatorial move towards non-linearity and diversity. In this essay, we discussed how current decolonial conceptions of history as “heterogeneous historico-structural nodes” (Mignolo, 2011) have manifested in the Colombian National Museum. Museum professionals and memory activists engaged with the possibility of thinking history through multiple temporalities. In this sense, the Colombian National Museum was pioneering new curatorial practices that questioned linear narratives of history and offered inclusive and fragmented narratives as well as multiple interpretative spaces around objects. In its restructured halls, the museum shows amazing pieces of art, rich cultural heritage, and directions for a post-capitalocene future that requires us to life in harmony with human and non-human beings. Developing more museological proposals in collaboration with diverse communities and social organizations across the national territory could enhance these processes. This joint work would allow for the decolonization of narratives, knowledge and visualities and at the same time problematise the place of knowledge and power that the museum has constituted. What is crucial for a decolonial project is to move away from the idea of linearity and to problematize racist and patriarchal representations in an open way. Representing the multi-layered character of Latin American history, in which temporalities overlap and transgress the linear order of past, present, and future (Cusicanqui, 2015), would also imply the approach to other epistemologies of history.