Curating cultural heritage – The Finnish Senegalese community and the Helinä Rautavaara Museum
Kristina Tohmo, MA cultural anthropologist, Producer, Helinä Rautavaara Museum
My presentation is a case study of a collaboration between a Finnish Senegalese community and the Helinä Rautavaara Ethnographic Museum in Espoo, Finland. In 2017-2019, the museum’s Senegalese artefacts were curated as part of a new collection exhibition together with members of the Senegalese community in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area. I discuss the reasons why both parties considered the joint museum project important. The presentation describes the Senegalese global diaspora in Finland and opens the meaning of one’s own community.
In the 21st century, the social and global responsibility of museums is highlighted. A more egalitarian way of doing museum work implies an awareness of the links and power imbalances between museum institutions and colonialism. Themes of decolonization and repatriation, as well as Black Lives Matter and other anti-discrimination campaigns, are nowadays visible not only in all domestic and international social discourse, but also in the Finnish museum field. Museums are increasingly working with their reference groups and the communities that created their collections, while also collecting and documenting the history of local minority groups.
The theoretical framework of the presentation emerges from museum anthropological and museological research on the subject and addresses themes of decolonization with an emphasis on internal decolonization, i.e. the representations of museums and the determined elimination of the structural colonialism that underlies them. Exhibitions are the public faces of museums. They convey powerful messages and act as experiential encounters.
Holding on: Collaborative heritage work between Somali diaspora community and cultural institution. Case studies from the Helinä Rautavaara Museum
Ilona Niinikangas, Helinä Rautavaara Museum
For more than twenty years, the Helinä Rautavaara Museum has collaborated with local migrant communities in greater Helsinki region, including Somalis. Between 2010 and 2019, 11 different projects celebrating living heritage involved more than 300 members of local Somali communities. The museum has also provided a space for joint exhibitions with Somali associations and other associations that have links to Somalia. For example, Mogadishu Now and Then (2018) combined Somalian poetry and photographs of the capital of Somalia before and after the country’s war.
In addition to that, over the years, dozens of trainees of Somali background, most of them women, have been recruited to work in the Helinä Rautavaara Museum and in projects focusing on Somali culture. The museum has also offered short-term employment, helping young and elderly Somalis for whom finding jobs or internships in the Finnish labour market is more difficult than for their native peers.
The presentation looks at multiple ways of building trust and maintaining the dialogue as well as community’s contributions to museum decolonization. The presentation is based on the article Rastas Anna and Niinikangas, Ilona 2023: With and Beyond Museums: Cultural Heritage Work in the Somali Diaspora. Museum & Society, 21 (3).
The Atlantic as the knot of the world: Research in Archives of the African Diaspora
Osvaldo Santos Falcão, Tampere University
This presentation which is linked to my doctoral dissertation project on people from the Quilombola community of Ipiranga, in the Brazilian state of Paraíba, emphasizes the importance of documents and archives of the African Diaspora in understanding the Colonial Matrix of Power (CMP), as proposed by Quijano (2000). The Brazilian Atlantic, especially the Northeast, has been a stage for five centuries of colonialism (Gonçalves, 2003).
The analysis of “historical-structural knots”, according to Mignolo (2017), is crucial for unraveling the power relations inherent in the CMP. Mbembe (2003, 2017) highlights the need to preserve Afro-Latin heritage, avoiding the historical erasure of its culture of resistance against colonialism, as documented by Moura (1988).
Through a methodology that combines the synchronic approach of history with the diachronic approach of anthropology (Sahlins, 1976), my ethnographic research on quilombola communities and their museums applies the notion of historical-structural knots to colonial archives. This focus reveals the richness of intercultural encounters between Africans and Indigenous peoples in the anti-‘colonial fight. They shape the current contest for land and social justice of the quilombola remnants.
Theoretically, my Ph.D. project aims to elucidate the historical and cultural dynamics that structure the CMP. Empirically, it investigates how quilombos and their museums constitute ethnic territories of cultural reference.
People of African descent in Finland. Presenting local minority histories, re-thinking national and global histories
Anna Rastas, Tampere University & Leila Koivunen, University of Turku
In our presentation we will introduce the premises of our ongoing research and book project on the history of people of African descent in Finland. The starting point of our project is the idea that the epistemic advantage of marginalized communities concerning particular topics should be the starting point in research on their agency and cultures. Our previous research has shown that the inclusion of the African diaspora in both local, national historiography and the narrative of Europe and Europeanness requires a decolonial and intersectional framework that acknowledges both the diversity of the global African diaspora(s) and the heterogeneity of (local) diasporic communities. It also requires understanding the various transnational and diasporic ties and linkages that shape diaspora subjects’ experiences and knowledge of what their histories “here” are, and how these can and should be written.
Our study is based on our long-term collaboration with different African diaspora communities and our earlier research projects on African diaspora subjects’ and their communities’ cultural activities and cultural heritage work. We will also discuss how exploring and writing minority histories on diaspora communities highlights the need to rethink and reform academic traditions of history writing.
