Towards reparative museology

As Édouard Glissant never ceased to reiterate, each of us needs the memory of the other. This is not a matter of charity or compassion. It is a condition for the survival of our world. If we want to share the world’s beauty, he would add, we ought to learn to be united with all its suffering. We will have to learn to remember together, and in this doing, to repair together the world’s fabric and its visage. (Achille Mbembe in Bangstad, 2019)

The reparative turn in museology is now well and truly upon us. An incomplete list of recent, ongoing and impending initiatives referencing this concept would include: Kader Attia’s curatorial vision for the 12^th Berlin Biennale, which built on his ongoing investigation of repair as a mode of cultural resistance; the international conference Repair: A Method for the 21^st Century? organized by the University of East Anglia department of Art History and World Studies in May 2021; the ‘Repair Labs’ co-ordinated by Chiara De Cesari in the Netherlands, which aims to explore new models for the ownership and return of colonial objects; ReConnect/ReCollect, a pilot project that is looking to develop ‘reparative connections’ to Philippine collections at the University of Michigan; a special issue of the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society focused on the subject of ‘trauma and repair in the museum’ (Walsh & Kokoli, 2022). While it would be wrong to try and locate a single point of origin for such disparate projects, it is also evident that the desire for repair – for some kind of reforging and remaking of the world – now animates a diverse range of creative propositions and cultural agendas. As the above quote from Achille Mbembe attests, repair in its various articulations and manifestations may well come to be understood as a defining feature of the present moment. Museums have a complex relationship to this phenomenon, one that deserves tracking and elaborating across multiple fields of praxis.

The reparative turn as we understand it here loosely gathers together a series of interlocking themes and questions in current museological theory and practice, including restorative justice, healing and wellbeing, restitution and repatriation, decolonization in its many forms, and the demand for more caring institutions. At the same time, this turn intersects with and in some cases directly builds upon comparable work in related fields, such as psychoanalysis (Klein, 1975), queer theory (Sedgwick, 2003), media studies (Mattern, 2018) and art history (Reeves-Evison & Rainey, 2018). Given the breadth and heterogeneity of such work, it is reasonable to ask what precisely defines the reparative as a specific mode of thinking and practice within museum studies. What is to be gained by naming these trends and genealogies as ‘reparative’, and what do we lose through this discursive gesture?

There is insufficient space in this short editorial to answer such a question in full, but some key components of the reparative within and beyond museums can be mentioned here. The first and perhaps most obvious claim that cuts across all the above is the sense that something – some object, person, collective or history – is in some way broken; the recognition of this rupture then gives rise to the need for repair, whatever form this might take. Understood as a process of mending what has been wrecked or damaged, repair encompasses a multitude of embodied gestures and physical interventions, from stitching and pasting to long-term maintenance and wholesale reconstruction. While repair can mean returning something to its ‘original’ state, it may also involve wholly new forms of symbolic and material production that seek to fundamentally remake the world. Such practices are of course never neutral, but rather emerge from and feed back into culturally specific systems of care and transmission. Concerns over materiality, authenticity and legibility surface in different ways across such processes, which cannot be disentangled from the political and ethical dimensions of repair. Who gets to decide what is broken and what needs repairing? Who is tasked with the labor of repair? To what extent should repair seek to ‘fix’ everything, or should certain scars and fractures be left visible? Although discussed in different ways and to different ends, these questions emerge in varied disciplinary engagements with repair, underlining the fact that repair is always “a political and moral intervention in the world” (McLaren, 2018, p. 138).

Thinking with repair in this way raises vital questions about its asymmetries as a discourse and practice, the different scales and temporalities of repair that might exist within and beyond the museum space, and the ethical and political dimensions of repair as a social rather than simply material obligation. When we launched the call for papers for this special ‘relaunch’ volume of Museums & Social Issues in spring 2021, we asked what it would mean for museums to become active agents in the project of worldly repair. Inspired by the work of Mbembe (2021), Azoulay (2019), Sedgwick (2003) and others (Graham & Thrift, 2007; Jackson, 2014; Rubio, 2020; Stuelke, 2021), this question implicitly sought to address the material, discursive, symbolic and affective dimensions of repair at multiple scales and across varied social and geographical contexts. To be active implies different forms of labor and agency, mediated through diverse practices of care and attention. To see repair as a project underlines the strategic and tactical benefits of this approach. The worldly scope of such a project meanwhile radically expands the political and aesthetic implications of repair. Following political theorist Olúfémi Táíwò, repair in this reading might be understood as “serving a larger and broader worldmaking project” that is ultimately concerned with “building the just world to come” (2022, p. 74). It is increasingly clear that the intersecting problems of environmental breakdown, racial and social injustice, economic inequality and the erosion of democracy speak to an urgent need for polyphonic forms of repair and reparation. The ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’ of repair from this perspective may stretch from individual artefacts and community relationships to the climate of the Earth itself, which in many ways has come to epitomize the ‘broken’ condition of our shared world (McLaren, 2018).

While museums have often seen repair as a back-of-house activity associated with specific skills and expertise, our reading of the reparative suggests that it is best understood as a collective yet differentiated project of critical and creative reimagining for individual institutions and the sector as a whole. Crucially, this approach aims to acknowledge that many museums are bound up with the “disaster-generating regimes” (Azoulay, 2019, p. 542) that have given rise to the need for worldly repair in the first place, from the nation-state system to industrial capitalism, but also that this complicity need not set the parameters for meaningful processes of reparation now or in the future (see Harrison & Sterling, 2021). If reparative museology is to mean anything, it must leave space for active reflection and a deep questioning of concepts and practices that lie at the heart of museums and their role in society.

To help navigate the varied dimensions and scales of repair alluded to above, we have divided the papers for this special volume across three issues. The first looks at ‘Repair and Museum Work’, focusing on some of the practical and grounded issues that museums must address when dealing with repair (although never forgetting the moral and ethical dynamics at play in such processes). This includes research articles and shorter ‘provocation’ pieces critically examining repair in museum conservation and digital infrastructures, as well as the broader social context in which such work unfolds, especially in relation to questions of harm and care. The second issue, ‘Museums and Communities’, stresses this social embeddedness further, with papers addressing reparations, colonial violence, repatriation, online outreach and mental wellbeing. The third issue, ‘Repairing Fractured Worlds’, includes case studies from Taiwan, Colombia, Bulgaria and the UK that show how museums and cultural institutions might play a key role in broader reparative processes related to the climate crisis, restorative justice and the loss of social bonds under capitalism.

We would like to extend a heartfelt thanks to the authors who submitted their work for this special edition of the journal, as well as the many peer-reviewers who gave their time and helped to sharpen and clarify the ideas put forward in these pages. Repair is always an ongoing process. Recognizing the inherent limitations of an open-call collection, we aim to build on this reparative work through further dialogue with scholars and practitioners in the field. No longer a task purely for specialists, the necessity of repair across multiple scales and contexts demands collective, participatory action. As Azoulay argues, such a “condition of plurality” is essential if we are to undo institutionalized violence, so that “the bliss of being active and repairing what was broken can be attained” (2019, p. 566).

November 2022