On 4th and 5th May 2022, an international colloquium, organized by the “Centre for International History and Political Studies of Globalization” (CRHIM) of the University of Lausanne, was held at the Palais de Rumine in the city center. Researchers, museum directors, curators and artists debated the following question: “How to decolonize the collections of Swiss museums?”
An important part of the Swiss museum collections comes from Africa, Latin America, Asia and Oceania. Indeed, the arrival of objects from overseas dates mainly from the time of the empires. Acquisitions were often made in an illicit manner, between theft and looting. Similarly, the design of exhibitions has long been problematic, marked by racial stereotypes and self-centered approaches. In recent years, an important movement of decolonization of museums has been organized, in academic circles, in museums themselves and in the art scene, in Switzerland and elsewhere. It aims to make cultural institutions and political authorities in countries whose museums have a clear colonial heritage more accountable.
Several themes were addressed during the colloquium held in Lausanne. First, the speakers focused on provenance research, which aims to establish the “biography” and “trajectory” of objects. It is the basis of the restitution process: objects looted in a colonial context should be returned to the indigenous communities that the provenance research allows to identify (these same communities collaborate in the identification process). In this perspective – and this was the second theme discussed during the conference – human remains (or ancestral remains) are extremely important. Swiss museums preserve a considerable quantity of skulls and bones that have no reason to be here. Finally, the speakers debated storytelling devices and agreed that these devices need to be rethought. While the inclusion of the “other” and the “elsewhere” is increasingly taken into consideration by museums (and academic research more generally), it remains marginal. This dimension must be integrated in order to make visible the history of those who, for too long, have been victims of violence, exclusion, anonymity or racism.
This conference, financed in part by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), was organized by Professors Bernhard C. Schär and Thomas David of the Institute of Political Studies (IEP). Among the original features of this conference, it is worth highlighting its interdisciplinary approach – it brought together researchers in the humanities and social sciences, museum directors, curators and artists – and its international character insofar as the speakers came from Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, as well as from South Africa and Sri Lanka.
The conference was organized under the auspices of the Centre for International History and Policy Studies on Globalization (CRHIM). The latter is a center of interdisciplinary expertise on the themes of international relations, colonization/decolonization, North/South relations, and issues of racism and racial discrimination. The CRHIM is also home to Bernhard C. Schär’s SNSF research group Eccellenza, which over the next five years will study the little-known history of Switzerland’s colonial interdependencies in the 19th century. The history of the creation of large colonial collections in Swiss museums is also part of this project.