Seven Easy Steps for Museums to Liberate the Plantations that Funded Them
CATPC on one of the plantations that funded the Stedelijk Museum
Developed by the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) and Human Activities, this toolkit draws from the perspectives of plantation worker communities and Western art institutions to help museums rethink their origins, responsibilities, and futures. A short A4 handout version can be downloaded here. The full version of the toolkit can be downloaded at whitecube.online/home/learn/.
Profits extracted from plantation workers provided critical funding for the Ludwig Museum, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Tate Britain, Van Abbemuseum, and many others. Yet programs to “decolonize” the museum or even return looted objects have had proportionally little impact on those communities whose involuntary investment financed — and, in some cases, continues to finance — these institutions. Present “decolonization,” restitution, and repair initiatives primarily advantage the institution. As a result, museums continue to benefit from systems of extraction, while plantation communities remain excluded from the institutions their labor helped create.
Setting a Precedent
The toolkit is the result of the past eleven years of CATPC’s direct engagement with several museums built on plantation wealth — and with the communities still living and working on the concerned plantations. This toolkit directly follows CATPC’s recent solo exhibition Two Sides of the Same Coin at the Van Abbemuseum (Netherlands), a museum funded by tobacco plantations in Indonesia. This was the first solo exhibition of a community of plantation workers in a European contemporary art museum. The toolkit was further informed by the presentation of CATPC’s member Ced’art Tamasala in collaboration with Renzo Martens at the annual “Bathtub Lecture” at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, an institution that was also funded by plantations in Indonesia.
After their invitation to exhibit at the Van Abbemuseum, CATPC members Mbuku Kimpala, Ced’art Tamasala, and Matthieu Kasiama traveled to the plantations that helped build this museum, and asked the communities still living and working on the plantations permission to exhibit at the museum. They then elaborated what the steps forward for museums could be to help liberate the plantations.