100 Histories of 100 Worlds Project: Museums are under increasing pressure to decolonise, to repatriate and to better represent. Over ten years on from the British Museum’s A History of the World in 100 Objects, this new project seeks to reframe this narrative to focus on voices from ‘the Global South’ and the formerly subaltern people it left out. Where are the stories of the objects presented as seen by people who once used them? How was knowledge about an object informed by colonial collecting practices; and how is this context presented in museums today? This multi-format project hopes to achieve more than an alternative history of the British Museum, but also recognise and empower diverse ethnic audiences and their material past.
With Laura Osorio Sunnucks, Project Curator: Santo Domingo Centre, British Museum
In this event, Laura introduced the 100 Histories of 100 Worlds project, for which she is the editor for Latin America. Laura demonstrated how research developed by the British Museum’s Santo Domingo Centre (SDCELAR) intersects and diverges from its theoretical curatorial model. The SDCELAR project Laura discussed concerned items in storage that were (mostly) collected at the turn of the 19th century by Anglican missionaries Wilfred Barbrooke Grubb and Seymour Hawtrey in the Paraguayan Chaco.