MEG Conference 2022 - Write Up by Amie KIrby.

 A word from our Chair

Thank you to everyone to made it to the MEG conference this year, including the incredible speakers who generously shared their thinking and practice, challenging us all to approach our work in news ways. A particular thanks to National Museums Scotland for hosting us, and putting on such a well-planned couple of days. After two years of online conversation, it was wonderful to catch up with friends and colleagues, and a real reminder of what makes MEG so unique as a community. 

 

This year’s Bursary holders, Amie Kirby and Rhea Blem were tasked with writing a blog about their experiences of the conference. They capture some of the conversations that were had, and offer critical insight that I think we can all learn from. I was particularly struck by Aime's reflection on the radical - a term which as she articulates so well has a moral capital, drawn on through change-oriented language used by museums with increasing confidence. 

 

Amie Kirby is an early career professional in the museums & heritage field. She currently works for Stockport War Memorial Art Gallery and is available for freelance projects. She holds a BA in Archaeology from the University of Durham, an MA in Art Gallery & Museum Studies from the University of Manchester, and is active in various political organising groups across Manchester. She is interested in the foregrounding of decolonial and abolitionist perspectives in the museum, seeing this space as a site of care-centred, relational practice.

 

“After all, radical simply means ‘grasping things at the root’”

Angela Y. Davis, Women Culture and Politics (1989)

I thought about this quote a lot on my train journey home from MEG 2022. My first time attending any academic conference, this event also was the first time I had met any MEG members in person since joining earlier this year. As a fresh-faced “early career professional” recently out of postgraduate study and considering a PhD, my motivation for attending was to engage not only with the latest invigorating research and chatter permeating the sector, but with people who believe similarly to me – that museums can be agents of social change.

Whilst there were many stimulating, insightful, and productive presentations, provocations and Q&A sessions, and I will summarise my favourites shortly, I couldn’t help but think of the above quote from Davis when reflecting on the many and varied ways in which the work being done is described as “radical”. As it was noted in the plenary discussion, Sara Wajid had previously called the group “quiet activists”. In a similar vein to the use of “radical”, there is much to unpack in the connotations of museum work being “activist”; notably in its romanticisation as Dr. Ayesha Fuentes noted. Moreover, with the decolonisation agenda firmly planted in institutions’ consciousness, how much “activist” museum work is quiet – and how much should it be?

This short summary of my experience at #MEG2022 aims to emphasise that, whilst amazing work is being done, there remains much to do – and it’s our collective responsibility to empower and amplify the voices of the communities who are the most excluded or marginalised by our institutions (Sheila Asante used the term “priority communities” and it has since remained fixed in my vocabulary).

Relationship-oriented Practice

One of the key themes running throughout multiple sessions of the conference was that of co-production. This brought about important critical points, such as how to approach those you wish to work with – instead of expecting them to come to you, how to recognise and act to correct the power imbalances between institution and community, the problems of “community” itself as a homogenising term, and how to ensure relationships are sustainable past the completion of a project.

These issues point towards a greater reckoning of “value” in the museums sector. As Miles Greenwood astutely pointed out, museums have the potential to hold value, i.e. in being freely accessed in cases where there is no admission charge, but their value is far from innate and is not something to be taken for granted. Indeed, the value of museums and the work we find ourselves in is constructed – and once we recognise this, we must question who imposes this value and to which ends. This was further emphasised by Sheila Asante’s provocation that in order to embed care-centred, relational practices into museum work, we must “flip the narrative”. Rather than asking how we can engage our priority communities, we must ask: why encourage people to engage in the perpetuation of trauma? What would their involvement do to enrich their own understanding and wellbeing?

Once this is understood, it is imperative to change the ways in which we work with people. As Asante noted, this must involve the very structures and processes of decision-making that permeate our work; when we lead with the importance of process, there is great scope to understand cultivated relationships as an ongoing process – not a “decolonial” tick-box. Many of the talks across Day 1 highlighted the importance of relationship-oriented practice, such as Dr Karen Jacobs, whose work with Māori artist George Nuku emphasised the importance of privileging Indigenous worldviews which emphasise the relationships between people, and their relationship to land.

Elaborating in the Q&A session, Jacobs asserted a wariness of relationships constructed for or in tandem with a project – as relationships should be reciprocal, longstanding, community-led, and “not extractive”. Similarly, Rosa Dyer noted the importance of building relationships between two individuals, rather than the homogenising and spurious categories of “institution” and “community”. In this way, we must not only rethink structures and processes embedded in our institutions – but we must continually interrogate the place we hold in these institutions and how we carry ourselves as such.

We Must Reinvent to Move Forwards

“But the urgency for decolonisation didn’t come from us! It came from activists out there, indigenous communities out there” – Prof Wayne Modest

In realising the need to diverge from our identities as agents of museum institutions, it becomes apparent that we must break out of the museum walls, so to speak, and to reinvent if we are to engage with the individuals we wish to reach in a way that is meaningful to them. One of the primary ways to do so is to step outside of our conceptions of the important work our institutions do, and to realise instead that relationship-centred, care-grounded community work is being done all the time, it already exists – just outside of museums. By being more aware and mindful of where work already exists, we can begin to look inwards and see where our museums may, or may not, serve, supplement, and amplify this work.

One example I was rather captivated with was that of the Nigeria60 project by the Horniman Museum & Gardens, discussed by Dr Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharp. This project, produced in collaboration with Alafuro Sikoki-Coleman and other prominent Nigerian creatives, explores and celebrates the global impact of Nigerian creativity and directly brings this into conversation with collections of Nigerian material in the Horniman. Here, contemporary collecting of creative material was used as a method to interrogate existing collections with more accountability and criticality whilst using the process of creativity to form an “anti-collection”, in which ideas of fixing, permanence and centrality are refuted. As Zetterstrom-Sharp illustrated, this project serves to remind us that creativity is flourishing all the time, especially outside of museums. By emphasising creation and creativity, museums are better placed to don the role of facilitators, as opposed to animators or controllers of the narrative. This is again supported by Karen Jacobs’ description of the work completed with George Nuku – whereby nurturing relationships with artists and activists can lead to work that challenges the role of institutions.

Where Next: Interdisciplinary, Collaboration, and Grasping at the Root

One of the most exciting elements of this conference was the Work In Progress session, where current PhD students presented their research. The presentations themselves and the Q&A that followed felt dialogic and engaging; allowing speakers the opportunity to receive feedback on their work, and audience members to be provided with fresh, critical thought. Amy Shakespeare’s presentation on “Exhibiting Absence”, for example, was well-conceived and thought-provoking, putting forwards some of the arguments mentioned in this article – such as prioritising the formation of relationships between individuals.

Shakespeare’s use of “the three radicals” (radical trust, radical hope, and radical empathy) as a methodological basis prompted questions surrounding the use, or over-use, of ‘radical’ as terminology. Indeed, we must interrogate our language use continually whilst it changes at rapid pace; this includes recognising that larger institutions are guilty of co-opting or romanticising terms such as “radical” (which are often politically-charged) to denote a wildly different or innovative way of doing things; when in fact this way of doing things has been commonplace for many groups on the peripheries of our networks. Indeed, as I asserted at the beginning of this article, Angela Y. Davis says that radical simply means “to grasp at the root”: to get to the root cause of what you are trying to do and who you are trying to form relationships with. This should not be wildly innovative.

Conclusion

#MEG2022 has proved that museums are at their best when they are for and within the communities they serve. As practitioners, we are at our best when we work together: across distance and across disciplines. The prioritising of relationships and sustainable, embedded care-oriented practice holds true power to enable our users to define the value of museums for themselves: changing institutional culture beyond short-term participatory projects.

As an Early Career Professional whose interests lie in the intersection between museums and political organising, it is welcomed and refreshing to hear so many assertions of what should be done differently in order to prioritise relational working. The next step, whilst difficult, is to let such provocations spur us to action – to work together step-by-step to plot how change can occur in our institutions from the ground-up. As MEG member Mario Tuki from Rapa Nui noted in the end discussion, priority communities are more than capable of speaking for themselves. Arguably, the way we commit to change is to decentre ourselves.