Don Giovanni!
to have dinner with you
You invited me, and I have come.
(…)
You invited me to dinner,
You know what your duty is now.
Answer to me:
will you come to dinner with me?
We are in the last act of WA Mozart's popular opera, Don Giovanni.
Whoever speaks, provoking the terror of the protagonist, is a sculpture that represents the commander.
His horror does not come from the fact that the famous patrician comes to collect his debts; a proud and quarrelsome individual like Don Giovanni is quite used to this.
It comes from the fact that whoever questions him is a monument that has come to life, a spirit that has unfinished business in the human world.
“What unusual dread/takes hold of my faculties!
/ Whence come these / whirlwinds of horrendous fire?”
–exclaims, at the end, the mocker from Seville.
Modernity consolidated the cult of monuments.
Sculptures, triumphal arches, fountains and other ornamental pieces have recalled the figures and anniversaries of the past, while at the same time they have omitted many others.
Monuments are devices of memory and forgetting.
They celebrate the dead, but when they have not been properly veiled, when their wounds remain open, their ghosts haunt the societies that created them, demanding payment of their debt.
Perhaps this is the reason why, currently, conservative forces incessantly raise cries of alarm at what they consider a danger to the country's identity.
Like the ominous character in Mozart's opera, they panic in the presence of certain voices.
For the extreme right, historical memory, restitution and decolonization are a threat that can lead to the denaturalization of a supposed national culture.
More information
Looting and misinformation, protagonists of the March issue of 'Tintalibre'
With the arrival of the peninsular kingdoms to America, a global order was established that was based on racism, heteropatriarchy, class privilege and extractivism.
However, in recent decades, the questioning of these certainties by Afro-descendant and indigenous communities, by those who fight for the rights of trans and LGTBI people, the crip theory or the movements against climate change has entailed a bankruptcy of that epistemological paradigm.
The conviction in the truth of a single story has ceased to make sense, as has the supposed universal knowledge, which was structured around what the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano called the coloniality of power and responded to a particular and interested conception of the things.
We know that there is no document of culture that is not, at the same time, a testimony of barbarism.
It is indisputable that a part of the collections of the great museums, such as the British, Louvre or Pergamon, come from war loot.
It is also evident that colonialism has changed its strategies over the centuries and that the instances of domination are multiple and complex.
Frantz Fanon was well aware of the often invisible mechanisms through which coloniality endures.
In his book Black Skin, White Masks (1952), he stated that colonial violence is exercised by making us believe that it does not exist.
The metropolis educated the racialized elites of the Caribbean so that they felt, above all, French, imported the uses and customs of the continent, and defended the interests of the latter.
Given their symbolic nature and material value, works of art were the object of desire of empires.
By seizing the treasures of the conquered peoples, the colonizers increased their heritage and stripped the colonized of the ability to construct their own narrative, expelling them from history.
For decades, European institutions have resisted the repatriation of these riches, arguing that only they could guarantee their conservation, study and dissemination.
The persistent theft of pieces that belonged to the British Museum, without its directors realizing it, grotesquely shows that Europe is not a safeguard of anything.
However, restitution continues to suffer from all types of obstacles and administrative obstacles.
The official report commissioned by the French Government from the Senegalese writer Felwine Sarr and the French art historian Bénédicte Savoy established, in 2018, that 86% of the sub-Saharan collection of the Musée du Quai Branly came from looting.
Three years later, of the seventy thousand entries in the catalog of this department of the museum, only twenty-six had been returned.
Nobody doubts that museums comply with current legislation.
The problem arises when we ask ourselves if these guidelines are fair, based on what criteria they were written and who their mentors were.
When the British Museum was founded in 1753, its board accepted the possibility of discontinuing certain items from its inventory.
However, in 1963, when the forces rebelling against colonization broke out, the statutes were modified and deaccession was prohibited.
They did not want to set a precedent, nor induce the loss of their most precious possessions, those that had distinguished and turned this museum into a world reference.
Focusing on the Spanish context, is the presence of certain pieces in public museums defensible, even if it is constantly safeguarded within the legal framework?
Is it enough to know the story that accompanies the arrival in Spain of Camille Pissarro's painting
Rue Saint-Honoré, dans l'après midi.
Effet pluie
(1897), or with knowing that the Treasure of the Quimbayas was a gift from the president of the Republic of Colombia, Carlos Holguín, to the queen regent María Cristina?
Historical events cannot be understood in a Manichaean way, from a specific present or past, because they are relational.
Perhaps it should be agreed that it is not a question of cultural institutions conforming only to law, but to ethics.
Two divergent temporalities
Modernity and coloniality have gone hand in hand since the 16th century.
They configured a world governed by positivist principles.
Any knowledge that did not adhere to its codes was considered less evolved than Western knowledge, and could even be prohibited as heresy.
James Cuno, director of the J. Paul Getty Trust from 2011 to 2022 and a very active member of the American Association of Art Museum Directors, asserted in 2006 that the encyclopedic museum was a source of knowledge, tolerance and an instrument to dispel ignorance, superstition and harm (1).
For Cuno, the universal scope of European thought implied that any other type of approach lacks “scientific” rigor.
Modern aesthetics regulated the way we perceive the world and, in doing so, defined the way we inhabit the earth and imagine other universes.
It established a mode of control and assertion of what can be accepted as beautiful, good and true.
He removed a multitude of peoples from history, eliminating in the process their communal narratives and their conception of the land.
With modernity, two temporalities were implemented, that of the colonizers and that of the colonized.
The former placed themselves in the center, the latter were relegated to the periphery, permanently located in the past.
This opened a wound between two divergent temporalities, that of the dominators and that of those who suffered oppression.
A walk through the collection of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin is eloquent in itself.
In some display cases, the gaps left by the masks and sculptures that have been repatriated to their places of origin are evident.
In all rooms the works are contextualized.
Their origin is described in detail, explaining whether they have been the result of plunder, genocide or even if some of their scholars were members of the Nazi party.
The feeling is that exhaustive and detailed work has been done to reconstruct the biography of the pieces.
However, at the end of the visit, one question remains unanswered: Why do only the Germans speak? Where are the other voices?
Although in Europe there is quite frequent debate about the need to heal wounds, it is not always kept in mind that, when it is the colonizer who decides who is healthy and who is sick, the wound remains.
We are shocked at the prospect of massive restitution and the consequent loss of heritage that this would mean for that invention that is the encyclopedic museum.
However, any act that is not accompanied by the alteration of our frames of reference is insufficient and ends in condescension.
The stolen goods must be returned, but if they continue to be displayed and studied according to the criteria that, in the West, are understood as “scientific” and “universal”, their magical and “living” nature is lost, amputating an essential element. of the history of those who manufactured them.
As reflected in the extraordinary film by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais,
Statues Also Die
(1953), at some point in the decolonial debates, it was questioned whether objects produced by native communities would no longer be in ethnographic museums and would become art museums.
The intention was laudable, but what to do when we realize that, in some languages, such as the Mayan and others, that word does not even exist in their vocabulary?
The restitution of a precious item does not consist only in its return, but in the regeneration of the existing links between traditions, bodies and lands that colonization interrupted.
It is not a return to the past, but a return of it to the present.
This entails the right to reject Western standards regarding use value, ownership, access and control.
On the contrary, it demands solidarity and that the concept of restitution be added to the concept of redistribution.
In a process of social justice, it is essential that the benefits obtained from the study or exhibition of the belongings of other cultures be taken into account and that the return be accompanied by a process of cooperation and support.
Only in this way is it possible for the colonial wound to be closed and the systemic differences established between the north and the south to be overcome.
Museums must be inclusive, but that does not mean uniform.
The contemporary art system vigorously promotes projects by Afro-descendant or indigenous creators.
However, if these do not imply a change in model, they end up building an image of homogeneity in a world that is extremely unequal.
It is, therefore, not enough to incorporate the experiences of others into our story.
It is essential that the parameters of the latter be changed, and move from an encyclopedic museum to another situated one, which does not mean national or local, but rather in relation to the others.
The Franco-Argentine artist, Alejandra Riera, expresses this with great lucidity in her work
De ella A reddish-orange sky
(2024).
In it she combines two seemingly antagonistic natural environments: the Sahara and the Amazon.
Thousands of kilometers away, both ecosystems interact.
Desert winds carry nutrients from the soil across the ocean to the Amazon rainforest, which needs those same minerals to exist.
If one suffers, the other resents.
Things and beings are not isolated.
Only by learning to live together is healing possible.
Decolonization is often considered to only concern those countries that have had a colonial past.
“We show solidarity” – it is said – “but it is not our problem” or “we do not have any object to replace.”
However, the coloniality of power challenges this false assumption.
The Western world is not separated from the rest.
The history of European countries is not independent of the colonies.
There is no British or Spanish nation separate from the communities and peoples of America or India.
Decolonization is a two-way street, since when restitution is discussed, discourses, devices and, especially, the governance of institutions are also deliberated.
*Manuel Borja-Villel is an art historian and exhibition curator.
1 James Cuno,
View from the Universal Museum,
included in John Henry Merryman (ed.),
Imperialism
,
art and restitution
(Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).