A choreography of stillness

From the third floor of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) in Cambridge, you can watch the main gallery space below. Listen to the creak of the doors opening, the hushed tones of viewers. The main gallery is presented in the 19th century museum style, where one can drift through the room from one culture and one continent to another, with the larger objects from their collection — boats, statues and a 14-metre-high totem pole — in the centre. I have watched tourists, students, researchers and children move in the same silent, clockwise rhythm around the main gallery, before repeating this motion on the third floor, where I do my work. 

On the third floor of MAA, I  weigh, measure and analyse its collection of South-East Asian bronze drums (for an ongoing international rematriative project, RE:SOUNDING, in collaboration with James Nguyen). I usually do my work on the days that the collection is closed to the public. This is the time when I can start discussions with the museum’s impassioned staff, revealing their hope for decolonising the collection and tackling the complexities of repatriation. In the MAA, located in regional England yet at the centre of the British Empire, I am confronted with two opposing customs: the museology that dictates the controlled flow of movement and meaning within collections acquired through colonial violence and the practice of rightful return. 

The tension between colonial museology and repatriation has made my engagement with the MAA’s collection, namely its bronze drums, an uncomfortable experience. My discomfort is in no small part cultivated by my engagement with conversations on decolonisation in Australia (where I grew up and mostly live outside my studies). In my time studying at Cambridge University, and working with the MAA, I’ve noted a strong desire to address the nexus of colonialism and conservation practices, including the possibility of the repatriation of objects. But such desires are at odds with a larger issue involving national identity. 

In the United Kingdom, decolonisation is not a possibility (Kassim, 2017), since the United Kingdom was and remains a coloniser. The rebranding of a violent empire into The Commonwealth does not mean that its ongoing colonial practices are simply a shadow from the past. Institutions I have encountered here, metropolitan and regional, often use phrases such as ‘legacies of colonialism’, ‘post-colonialism’ and ‘decolonial times’ in their communications pertaining to temporary exhibitions and panel discussions. Their inclusion of such terminology, to my mind, allows institutions to avoid meaningful interrogation of the imperial foundations from which their present-day practices extend. Where the Empire’s heart exists, the museum remains the cultural, ideological, and political arm of colonisation. This is a bleak reality to confront, particularly when paralleled with the significant conversations building momentum within museums and their affiliated institutions around the world (​​Ault 2022, Bredgaard & Lind Ravn 2020, McBride & Smith 2022, Stumpe 2005). 

From the third floor of the MAA, I see a mixture of challenges and possibilities emerge. The cavity of the museum can hold many antithetical sensations: it is familiar and alienating; possessive while dispossessing; mythological and clinical; ritualistic and secular; exhibiting and concealing. Instead of proposing an approach towards reconciling these tensions through compromise, I am suggesting to disrupt the state of institutional stillness and silence that museums advocate for. To present this, the following three sections will dissect the movements we experience physically and socially as through a museum’s body, and how changing our relationship with movement could offer an alternative attitude to listening and making meaning.

Movement one: in a line, repetition morphing into canon

Lying in illuminated darkness,

a specimen.

Exposed –

Like the plates of your skull,

Like the body of the Earth,

Bound –

By the perpetual digestion of time.

It was during the Enlightenment that the establishment of the state museum as we recognise it emerged (Duncan 1991). Our need to see time and our human place within it as linear has been a useful tool to structure our relationship with the past. Human behaviour and cultural history seem far too complex to be approached and understood without systematically breaking it into units. However, the pitfall of this methodological compromise is its reductive and biased depiction of reality. The modes of classifications, chronologies, and presentation of an evolution of cultures from ‘primitive prehistory’ through to ‘civilized’ is an archetype for a Western characterisation of progress (Lubbock 1865, 1870; Lucretius; Mahudel 1737; Thomsen 1836). This modular representation of reality when presented in a museum positions the viewer to be guided through cultural time and space in this same limited linearity. 

Moving in a line is entwined with the notion of progress embodied in the inanimate and silent collections before us. This notion of a ‘reasonable and logical’ cultural evolution is ultimately dictated by colonial conceptions of classification and a Euro-centric definition of civilization. Thus, the reliance of museum collections upon these modes of representing humanity through time diminishes the lived experiences of non-Western cultures. The continued acceptance of ‘straightness’ of the colonial narrative permeates the acquisition and research aims of the institution, the museum, and its scientific arms — anthropology, archaeology, natural history, art history — themselves. An academic interpretation of material culture is co-dependent upon replicating the same procedures of knowledge and culture making — academic referencing, for example. 

Firstly, we presume the truthfulness of an archival source or document. Often this began several decades or centuries ago, for example, a misinformed interpretation in the late 19th century which can then be verified by being published. Its publication is then replicated into the literary and academic canon of research. This interpretation, no matter how misinformed or colonial, is now accepted as objective fact. This process of academic tradition unveils that our acceptance of what is history is constructed by acts of selection. 

However, my central critique lies beyond the reliance upon linear modes of constructing time for the purposes of academia. It is the perpetuation of historical and cultural ‘straightness’ in lines. This diminutive understanding or meaning-making is then replicated in our movements throughout museum exhibition spaces and programs. The viewer is expected to fall in line, with their motions, engagements with collections and objects being predetermined by the museum’s strict adherence to social linearity. In other words, we — the viewer — are expected to contain our motions through a set of choreographed encounters. We are restricted to encoded lines of seeing, lines of listening, lines of thinking and, thus, lines of moving.  

The silence and static nature of a museum summons an awkward dilemma. The museum is responsible for how the identities of its contemporary local community are defined through the display of historical artefact. This reality of a museum’s role in contemporary society opens a can of worms: what is our shared identity? The body of the viewer is positioned only as a spectator. We are commanded to witness the objects displayed before us, often arranged in a manner that imbeds linearity with imperial objective truth (Mitchell 1989 :222). Set as a stage on which our movements are suggestively democratic. We can generally see and hear other viewers in polyphony with our own movements, even if one is fixed upon an object, the overwhelming use of glass ensures lines of visibility between ourselves and other bodies. Often without being cognisant of the programmed curation of an exhibition space, we fall in line. Therein lies the social ritual that the museum commands. Through this stillness between object and spectator, the collective imagination conjures silence.  

The quasi-sacred aura of an exhibition orders a heightened awareness of our bodies and its movements, and allows the museum to govern for a specific viewership. Enforcing pathways of engaging with the past through ordering collections chronologically, culturally or upon anthropological classifications, perpetuates a model of colonial ethnography that we have since identified as racist. The form of physical silence and reliance upon visual modes of interaction that the museum upholds contains our movements as much as it does the objects and knowledge it proclaims to conserve and preserve. This silence is ultimately exclusionary to those whose voices have been historically marginalised or deemed invalid to contribute to the knowledge-making processes of museums, and their respective academic disciplines. 

As such, the museum’s reductive presentation of human culture and the Westernised production line of knowledge continues to legitimise colonial violence. To distill movement and time as linear is a disservice to the complex, entangled nature of reality. I leave this movement by suggesting that disrupting the procedure of linearity must be confronted by museums. 

Movement two: in a circle — we echo

Inanimate communities,

Discover and dance. 

Heavy, soft and brittle,

Like clay in your hands;

They emerge from spaces where,

Your bones remain their cage.

When I was a child, I adored museums and galleries. They were magical places that allowed me to travel around the world in only a few hours. I would traipse through these spaces that commanded from me reverence, and pretended to be an explorer discovering new cultures, bringing their local wares home, and displaying them as prized souvenirs. I became obsessed with collecting and cataloguing objects as a method from which to acquire and procure knowledge. This recollection of my motivations for becoming an archaeologist now renders me embarrassed. I have since grown and find myself researching amongst archives, museum collections, often in spaces that remind me of violence — how history is collected, and how it is made — and suppression: the silence of objects and the ritualised expectation of how we move amongst them. 

To consider how we can disrupt the transactional exchanges of knowledge and inclusion within a museum, I wish to speculate on a collection I have encountered in Australia and England. The James Cook Collection has followed my trajectory as an archaeology student since 2014. In my first volunteering position in the Australian Museum’s Department of Anthropology, I was tasked with ascertaining how Cook had acquired a number of Peruvian ceramics in his collection. Frankly, we are still unsure how they came to be in his collection, which is a common dilemma when attempting to pinpoint modes of acquisition or provenance of objects housed in colonial collections. Seven years later I find that the MAA holds 102 objects from that same collection. I often wonder at how the souvenirs of a single man have encircled the work I have been engaged with in museums. I have handled these objects behind the walls of an Australian metropolitan museum, and now I can interact with their cousins in a regional English museum. 

The Cook assemblage is a good example of what occurs with colonial collections. It makes sense that the Cook collection would span multiple nations and continents, and have a profound presence in cultural and academic institutions across the United Kingdom. Although such a large collection provides a hoard of diversity and variation of cultures and objects, they are ultimately acquisitions that attempt to simplify cultures into miniature images of themselves. The majority of these objects are not just relics serving cultural fascination for the exotic, but operate as displays of the wealth and profound geographical power of the Empire over its colonial outposts (Duncan 1991) [3]. What is profound to me is that through circling the same collection, not only are these objects conserved in time but as are the protocols that hold these cultural assets frozen.  

In the words of Sullivan and Thuy Bui (2016), ‘human beings around the world use spatial models to understand Time.’ Traditionally, the museum object is conserved to withstand the effects of time. Held in an ordered space, we walk alongside time. However, this is our understanding of time in a Western context. For example, in Vietnam, the notion of time passing is circular (Dao 2005; Jullien 2016; Pham 2021) and the Vietnamese language has a complex relationship with time. Instead of the Western norm of time being positioned in front, Vietnamees implies that Time approaches from behind and around, as well as ahead (Sullivan & Thuy Bui 2016). The significance of this consideration lies beyond semantics and proposes a key challenge: different traditions offer an alternative option away from a linear relationship with history. Perhaps instead of relying on a simplified and palatable version of reality, there lies the opportunity to complicate and entangle our connection to objects through time. What if time were behind us, around us and between us?

The current architectural and cabinetry design in museums relies on the physical segregation of cultures and objects into distinct classifications. This restricts our ability to contextualise history across cultures and through time. As such, our bodily connection to objects is purely defined by visual spectatorship. Instead of being bound to a false order or hierarchy through the display of objects as sets, the museum may be able to encourage a sense of circulation. The circularity I propose is not through the replication of lines of seeing, listening, moving and of knowledge, but to position a space in which the viewer is encouraged to circle-back in space, re-contextualise their engagement with an object (or, indeed, culture) and interrogate the nature of knowledge beyond the rectilinear. This is not to say that I am recommending a presentation that mix-matches cultures in a manner that reinforces comparisons of value (progress or aesthetic) between them. Instead of our minds and motions being bound to the limitations of a straight choreography, an exhibition that offers the possibility of a physical manifestation of our contemporary entanglement with objects and time, offers a stage for agency of movement and viewership. This more nuanced performance of time, one that is fluid and circular, broadens to a more holistic presentation of the past through alleviating the reliance upon preconceived notions of colonial progress, imperial truth and Western ideals of civilization. In place of past time being relegated to historical fascination or, indeed, imagination, the past can be displayed in a manner that interrogates our contemporary assumptions.  

Back to the Cook collection, one that I have unintentionally waltzed around the globe with. I have spun around the same objects and followed their trajectories through time. Simultaneously, this collection has been subject to ongoing cycles of ethnographic research, colonial critique, and appeals for repatriation. Continuing tracing this circle, there is one example I wish to draw forth. The Gweagal spears that were appropriated by Cook in 1770 are held by the MMA, however, they no longer exist on English soil. The spears can now be viewed at the National Museum of Australia where they have been on display across 2020–21, and it is where they will continue, for the foreseeable future, to remain. Displayed alongside them are contemporary spears commissioned by Gweagal man and artist, Rod Mason. It is difficult to ascertain if this gesture towards repatriation and reconciliation is permanent — after all, the spears remain in the custody of the MAA — however, this exhibition is one small example of presenting history as lived experience through a circularity of time. To consider the possibility of decolonising a fundamentally colonial collection, where many of its objects were acquired through violence or the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the museum must contend with the circularity of time. The juxtaposition of Mason’s 21st century work alongside the 18th century stolen objects of his ancestors does not assert any grand statements of reconciliation or repatriation. Rather, this collision of time redressed and time re-contextualised exposes historic and contemporary exclusion. This circularity offers a more nuanced presentation of history and our lived experience of it. The Gweagal spears remain a vision behind glass and inaccessible to their traditional custodians.

Movement three: listening inwards and outwards, listening backwards and forwards

With seasonal cycles,

Soil trembles,

Space vibrates,

Roots propel themselves up from below.

Erupting memory seeds;

Entombed, Excavated, Exhumed. 

In recent years, the term decolonisation has morphed into a buzzword in English and Australian cultural institutions. Much like ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’, I have begun to react to the use of the word regarding institutional change with skepticism. Perhaps my reaction stems from my experience of being invited into colonial spaces to voice opinions about how to enact change. Museums operate at a unique intersection. They are research facilities that seek to objectify cultural truth and, within the same infrastructure, they function as civic meeting places that provide informal public education (Hall 1999). Decolonisation is neither an event nor a performance, and cannot be presented as so. Decolonisation is not achieved in a consultation, at a roundtable nor through an announcement for a temporary exhibition. It is not a moment in time on the terms of museums that wish to dictate them, enact, and complete them. Decolonisation is a process, and one that is seemingly impossible to realise inside institutions that are established on colonial principles. Decolonising has little opportunity to be sustained if a museum is to continue upholding a partition between its collection body and the public body. 

I have consulted for Australian classical music institutions as to how to make performances or programs ‘more diverse’. Reflecting a similar desire that museums have to display a self-imposed standard of ‘cultural heritage and tradition’, these consultations have largely been a scheduled block of time where myself and peers express hopeful ways of tackling change to a panel of less enthused interviewers. The exchange that I am expected to participate in remains linear; I answer questions, I am thanked for my candour, I am asked what could change and how, I respond tentatively, aware that if I am too honest, it may result in other marginalised voices not being heard in the conversation, I am thanked again, and then I depart with the knowledge that I probably won’t hear how our contributions have been used or in what way it has informed a museum. 

In such situations, I often leave wondering whether or not my body, and those of other people of colour present, were simply mined as a resource and dismissed once the time limit of listening expired. Often, this has occurred under the guise of giving myself and fellow people of colour voices in spaces that would have traditionally marginalised us. Rarely have these gestures of reconciliation been genuine, particularly when it is an invitation from a well-known state or national museum. The use of my body to absolve an institution of its responsibility for structural change, and the excavation of my body for its lived experience and inherited cultural knowledge, leaves me wondering how I could have danced along this line differently. 

My discomfort is not about my body being seen in these spaces. Like my critique of collections being relegated to visual spectatorship, my uneasiness is that seeing has been prescribed as the primary form of being inclusive. If we are to visually and physically confront the constraints of lines in favour of circularity, this same sentiment should be echoed in the sensory nature of museum practices. In other words, we should include other forms of sensory engagement instead of perpetuating the erasure of the body by containing its presence to the visual. Therefore, my speculation for structural change for the museum extends beyond physical or architectural rearrangements of collections. What if we were to disrupt our choreography of stillness with sound, and made noise through practices of deep listening?

If we disengage our need to interact with culture through only objects, perhaps there will evolve space for exchanges predicated on knowledge building beyond the visual. We need to consider what we can hear. Through this, there is a chance to decolonise a collection from a variety of approaches by engaging the physical and the metaphysical. On my part, this seems an obvious prospect as a result of my musical background. Music is performance. It is a bodily connection between performer and musician. Sure, there exist recordings; however, being in a space with others transforms our experience of culture and imbeds the viewer as a participant in this culture-making process. To translate this into the museum, consider a musical artefact. The label informs us that it is a sound-producing object, and yet we cannot hear it or play it. We cannot access it, and even as researchers we have to contend with the exclusionary protocols of conservation. I have experienced this tension of access when working on the RE:SOUNDING projectwith collaborator James Nguyen. To circumvent our desire to reimagine Vietnamese cultural memory through an instrument and to extend its music-making tradition into the 21st century, we had to acquire the object — a Dong Son Drum — ourselves through an auction house (Nguyen & Pham 2020). For us, navigating the museum to create new work, make noise and to expand the rigid boundaries of sound, performance and participation demanded an external solution. The project strove to address the silent repertoire of museum exhibition of objects by providing collaborative options for objects to live and exist as part of ongoing traditions. The drum, an object that is usually displayed as silent, now sings past time. 

However, the self-repatriative solution Nguyen and I resolved upon is not a sustainable option for most collections, institutions or individuals. Instead, I wish to frame listening deeply as the key disruptive factor to the ongoing colonial tendencies of museum practice. There remains an unseen and unheard presence that commands from us quietness and sombre acceptance for the silencing of an object’s lived experience. When we consider the sounds of the past and of other cultures whose harvested objects are presented in the spirit of the ‘conserved relic’, the disciplines of archaeology, anthropology and art history deny the opportunity to listen to an object’s lived experience. We are thrust into a relationship with the object that is reliant on what we can see. With the prior critique of linearity and the need to unsettle the reproduction of these ideals of silent acceptance, we rely on vision to build our knowledge of the past. We see to believe. Therefore, relying on a line of sight needs to be reformed. For example, if we are to refocus a museological approach into one centred upon listening, it will blur and, in some instances, eliminate our current reliance upon modes of linearity to make and display historical truths. The Western academic conception of objective truth has long stifled other forms of cultural exchange, such as oral traditions. To decentre whiteness, we must literally move towards a methodology of listening — to objects, to the past, to one another, and to the excluded that have been erased or dismissed from records and collections. Instead of continuing to trace the same lines back and forth through time, the museum has an opportunity to evolve alongside the processes of decolonisation. Listening moves beyond the two-way transaction of sight, often requiring a host of textures and timbres from the spectrum of sounds that surround us. Unlike seeing, we cannot hear in lines.

By eliminating the sensory expressions of objects, even those that are not sound-producing, our knowledge of their cultural meaning and knowledge is similarly reduced. However, in activating the museum space using sound, either through literal music-making or collaborative inclusion of voices, we alter the relationship between viewer and object. We no longer need to rely on spectatorship as the primary transaction of knowledge. By forming a space that encourages freedom of movement and dispels the Euro-centric partnership between time and progress, the viewer is given agency in action and thought.  By combatting the absence of sound, we can generate change, to probe and advocate for it. The museum can exist differently: as less of a stage for imperial glorification, but one that is transparent with its colonial roots.  

If we begin to move beyond the lines, and erupt from the prescriptive choreography of museological norms, perhaps what will emerge is a more nuanced and sustained practice of listening. At all levels of museology — ranging from consultancies of indigenous bodies and bodies of colour, commissions for research and contemporary art through to exhibition curation — I urge for us to make noise by listening more attentively and compassionately. Through shifting a circular entanglement of history beyond the visual to include hearing, we can activate forms of noise-making that overcome the traditional limitations of time. 

As I visit the MAA in Cambridge, I continue to engage with conversations regarding decolonisation within a colonial and regional museum. A recent exhibition, ‘[Re:] Entanglements: Colonial collections in decolonial times’, springs to mind. The exhibition sought to interrogate the ‘Thomas Collection’ of objects collected by colonial anthropologist Northcote Whitridge Thomas, acquired from Nigeria and Sierra Leone in the early 20th century. To provide a holistic presentation of the exhibition and the expansive collaborations involving communities and researchers from West Africa, objects from Thomas’ collection are interwoven with contemporary commentary and artistic commissions. Activated by works of sculpture, video, documentary film and sound paired alongside a collection object, the exhibition created a confronting juxtaposition between the colonial, ethnographic gaze seeking to verify imperial depictions of Other, with the lived experiences and realities of the cultural traditions that these objects continue to exist in. Although the temporary exhibition did concede the unresolved nature of repatriation and I found the phrase of ‘decolonial times’ unrealistic, it did position the voice of contemporary peoples at the forefront and did not deny the ongoing violence of colonialism. In colonial museums such as the MAA, these confrontations are necessary steps towards breaking the mold of objects and their associated cultures as still, silent and frozen in time. 

My insistence upon listening as a method of colonial disturbance is because it provokes new modes of collection, display, and conservation. Listening as a form of engagement that circumvents the restrictions of traditional or accepted research disrupts the current consensus for silence. Perhaps then, the museum might become a body for improvisatory interactions rather than one that predetermines movement. We must listen deeply to penetrate the systems of silence and stillness that museum collections all too often perpetuate. Through hearing, the museum can nurture instead of display, thus servicing contemporary concerns by collaborating with communities and peoples whose objects are caged behind glass.   

Let us listen deeply to make some noise.