Addressing the Ellipsis. Art interventions & Decolonization in new ethnographic museums

(1)

ADDRESSING

THE

(2)

ART INTERVENTIONS

& DECOLONIZATION

IN NEW

ETHNOGRAPHIC

MUSEUMS

MONTSE PEREDA GRILLO

Date of Completion: 21 July, 2017

Supervisor: Christa Maria Lerm Hayes

Second Reader: Mirjam Hoijtink

Heritage Studies: Museum Studies

2015-17

(3)

INTRODUCTION

In the nineteenth century, museums were instrumental to the nation-state and to the Modern project. As such, they were meant to deploy a narrative of belonging through the articulation of a differential apparatus that produced colonial and imperial difference. The Modernity project was responsible for the dissemination of Western epistemology and aesthetics while its counterpart, Coloniality, was responsible for the classification and subsequent dissemination of the materiality of the world. Therefore, while national and modern subjectivities were produced in national and modern museums or galleries, ‘alterity’ as well as the notion of ‘race’ was articulated through the ethnographic museum, the key institution for the staging of cultures. As a result, non-western peoples were represented as ‘primitive others’ and western societies as modern, advanced subjects.

The process of decolonization and new migratory flows lead to the interrogation of Europe’s imperial past and called into question the politics of the representation of colonial and modern museums. Consequently, traditional museology experienced its own decay; challenged by ‘third world’ intellectuals, the ethnographic museum could no longer articulate cultural diversity through an hegemonic narrative that was based on culture, spiritual and territorial dispossession. Seemingly, the modern museum had become outdated, so its narrative did not contemplate a global production that would not follow any canon; that of contemporary art.

Since the 60s, museums have undergone a process of transformation, the effects of which can be seen in the museum practice as well as in the ‘museumscape’. A ‘new Museology’ took ground among museums and introduced self-reflexivity and multidisciplinary collaborations within the museum realm (See Vergo, 1989). The 90s saw the proliferation of contemporary art museums in Europe which would embrace new artistic manifestations resulting from a global political society. Likewise, curators who were aware that materials held in museum collections do not solely belong to museums began reconsidering their practice and started curating multicultural exhibitions and collaborating with artists and other museums. Among the different types of collaborations, contemporary artist interventions seem to have had a decisive role in the decentering of the curator’s role and the interrogation of museum politics of representation, especially in Ethnographic museums.

In order to embrace a post-colonial society and overcome traditional divisions among peoples, in the 2000s the phenomenon of the World Cultures museum began taking place around Europe. The new museum type aims to replace the Ethnographic museum in order to resituate colonial collections and connect them to the contemporary society. World Culture museum are characterized for their collaborative and reflexive museology. However, to what extent the new museum-type overcomes traditional differences needs further probing.

In 1992, artist Fred Wilson intervened the collection of Maryland Historical Society. In Mining the museum, Wilson succeeded in recoding the permanent exhibition of the museum to pose a counter-narrative about history. As a result, the artist brought post-colonial critique to the fore and highlighted

(6)

3 how colonial collections have been utilized to produce alterity. In a very similar fashion, but nineteen years after Fred Wilson’s Mining the museum, artist and activist Daniela Ortiz, intervened the collection of the municipal museum of Mollet del Vallès (Barcelona). The practice of Daniela Ortiz is aligned with post-colonial and institutional critique. She puts attention on the parallelism between colonialism and the current politics of bordering featured by the European Union and its institutions. In White Africa (2011), the artist aims to confront the viewer with racial jokes about black peoples that are incrusted in the oral history of Spanish society. She intends to explore which audience feels more uncomfortable; the white audience who can recognize the familiarity of the hateful jokes within their daily lives, or the black peoples who may recognize the religious meaning of the African masks and thus, became doubly displaced (Img. 1).

Last year in Medellín (Colombia), artist Núria Güell, together with a group of children victims from sexual exploitation, intervened in Fernando Botero’s show at the Antioquia museum. The girls, as if they were museum educators, provided guided tours to the Columbian audience. However, rather than reflecting on Botero’s work and life, the girls reflected on how the city rebranding has contributed to the growth of the child sex industry (img. 2). Likewise, using Botero’s paintings as a departure point, the girls pose their personal experiences while reflecting on how the internationalization of Medellín is affecting the most vulnerable minorities of the city. Núria Güell has dedicated her career to calling into question the effects of governmental institutions, globalism and their mechanisms of control and dissemination. Her work calls into question the structure of power of the nation state and seeks ways to subvert nation-state mechanisms of control and dissemination.

Notice that in 1992, artist and curator Fred Wilson intervened in a Natural History museum that used to be a white man’s municipal society. In 2011, activist and artist Daniela Ortiz draws attention to the musealization of African masks in Mollet’s museum while touching upon the colonial unconsciousness in Spanish imagery. More recently, in 2016 activist and artist Núria Güell travelled to Medellín to denounce child sex exploitation and claim patriarchal politics of representation and domination in Antioquia’s contemporary museum. The fact that art interventionism is still taking place in museums today begs the question to what extent the new museum framework has overcome traditional divisions and politics of representation. While Ortiz focuses on unveiling current colonial representation and dissemination in Europe, Güell utilizes blockbuster exhibitions to call attention to the connection between city rebranding with the exploitation of the most vulnerable collectives. I would like to investigate to what extent artist interventions differ when generated in colonial collections or other products of the public domain. To do this, I must draw attention to the transformations of the museum practice and the institutional landscape, as it remains the framework of contestation for contemporary artists.

(7)

4 My hypothesis is that the current geopolitics are the translation of the colonial agenda. As such, the museumscape of Europe is recoding colonial symbolic and economic capital into new narratives of multiculturalism and cultural tourism, which would explain the similarities between those who were displaced in the past by coloniality and those who are displaced today by political entities. Therefore, I will dedicate special attention to the World Cultures phenomenon which seem to have a major role in the global museumscape as well as in local landscapes.

I intend to answer my research questions through a multidisciplinary perspective, in which artworks are utilized to understand the effects of colonialism/modernism today and to judge whether the museumscape of Europe, and in particular that of Barcelona, succeed in overcoming traditional differences upon objects, bodies and subjects.

Theoretical framework

This thesis is situated between the fields of Museum Studies (first and second wave of New museology), Post-colonial studies, Decoloniality and Contemporary art. Although the core of the thesis focuses on the 90s onwards, the first two chapters provide the context in which Global Capitalism was generated (Colonialism seventeenth century) which may serve the reader to understand why artist intervention has taken place from the start of the process of decolonization until today. Throughout the thesis I utilize the notion of the ‘museumscape’ and ‘constellation of difference’ coined by Sharon McDonald to analyze how the museum landscape and the museum practice has evolved from the 70s until today (McDonald:2016). The selected artworks that appear as examples in the text are a post-colonial and decolonial responses to the hegemonic framework that has shaped museum politics of representation since the nineteenth century. Likewise, ‘decoloniality’ serves as the mediator element between the extra artworks that appear in the text and the thesis because it is a critical methodology that serves to re-situate hegemonic concepts embodied in the collective imagery into historically situated concepts. In a similar fashion, the decolonial perspective may allow the reader to review History from the perspective of the Global south, which becomes relevant if one attempts to unfold the history of colonialism.

Subsequently, the choice of the title is a decolonial statement. The term ‘ellipsis’ is utilized to provide a space to those histories, bodies and stories that have been displaced in the hegemonic narrative of history and of the world. In a grammatical sense, an ellipsis means ‘an omission of the story told’. To ‘Address the ellipsis in museums’ means to address what has been traditionally left out in the historical narrative of the museum and its politics of representation.

Structure

This thesis begins with the analysis of the hegemonic framework in which European museums and the notion of the ethnocentrism came into being. This framework is that of Modernity/Coloniality and it applies to the museusmcape of Europe at large. What follows is the analysis of how the hegemonic

(8)

5 epistemological framework was challenged by post-colonial theory, feminism and orientalism during the political “transaction” of decolonization. I argue that the process was a transaction as the mediator element (the difference) has remained the same under a different name (national cultural diversity) and because the accumulated capital of colonialism has been transferred to capitalism. Likewise the first two chapters are dedicated to illustrate how the museum narrative in post-colonialism shifted from linear history to multiculturalism and how the museum field has expanded itself into the public domain.

While the first part of the thesis focuses on the articulation and dismantling of the hegemonic framework on an international scale, the third chapter draws attention to a local framework. Owing to my background and nationality, that framework is post-colonial and post-Francoism Spain.

The 1990s in Spain was a decade marked by urban transformations, culture industrialization and the contested celebration of the 500th anniversary of the conquest of America. The artistic and curatorial practice of Mar Villaespesa, Antoni Muntadas and Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez Peña are artistic accounts that reflect on these events and contributed to bringing reflexivity to the Spanish museum realm.

Once the hegemonic narrative before and after colonialism and its effects on the public domain have been evaluated internationally and locally, the Contemporary Museumscape of Europe is addressed in chapter 4. The chapter provides an overview of museological advancement within and outside European museums and draws attention to the new museum phenomenon that must replace traditional ethnographic museums, the World Culture Museum. I argue that while the new contemporary framework allows for a better understanding of cultures, it still speaks to a specific geography and time frame.

Finally, in the last part of chapter 4, I move back to the local landscape. However, this time I focus specifically on the city of Barcelona in which a new World Cultures museum in the neighborhood of La Ribera was opened in 2015. As the chapter contemplates the global and the local museumscape, I utilize the study cases to draw some troubling parallelisms with the post-modern museum model as well as global patterns of museography that produce national-based notions of diversity. I focus on Barcelona’s World Cultures museum due to its contentious role it plays in society. I claim that the new museum is a neo-ethnographic museum in which traditional differences among western and non-western peoples can be found. As a response to that I intend to let the thesis culminate in a decolonial curatorial intervention, thus an exhibition, that may take place within the permanent exhibition of the World cultures museum (Barcelona).

(9)

A

DDRESSING THE ELLIPSIS

// A decolonial curatorial intervention in the text :

The curatorial intervention is intended to build a bridge between the academy and the museum and bring artistic collaboration to the ethnographic realm. I argue that while the new collaborative agenda of the World Cultures museum of Barcelona falls short in the

interpretation and presentation of their collection, collaboration with contemporary artists committed to the critical commentary on history and politics of representation, could play a pivotal role in the interpretation of the material culture in the museum today.

Due to this, along the present text the reader will encounter nine contemporary critical artistic accounts that draw attention to the renovated hegemonic framework of contestation in which museums are situated today. These artistic accounts build a ‘decolonial narrative’ about history and museum’s interpretation. It aims on one hand to expand the academic research towards other artistic formats, while on the other hand it aims to provide a visual outline of the curatorial intervention in which the thesis could eventually crystalize in the museum.

***

Since the thesis focuses on the analysis of colonialism at large and the value of collaboration in museums since the 70s, I argue that adding decolonial practices and new forms of exhibition within the academic museal realm becomes necessary if one intends to comment on traditional divisions and build a symbolic bridge between the museum-institution, the academy and hybrid fields.

Finally, and ideally, it would be the choice of the reader whether to follow solely the decolonial narrative, the academic text, or to pursue a simultaneous reading between the narrative of the intervention and the thesis. In so doing, the present publication may be accessible to different target audiences, which is my ultimate contribution to the field, being an artist-curator myself.

(10)

6

1. THE HEGEMONIC FRAMEWORK, COLONIALITY AND

MODERNITY

‘What were the names of the three caravels, do you think our (Spanish) society is racist, do you feel an immigrant?’

Margin of error, 2013. Magnetic Declination (See img. 3)

These are some of the questions members of the artistic collective Magnetic Declination ask secondary education students in their triptych project Margin of Error-How do you spell Western?1. The project was produced in 2013 and it has been exhibited in Matadero Madrid (2013) as well as in MUSAC2 (2015), within the frame of the exhibition Decolonial aesthetics and Apocryphal Colony respectively.

Margin of error delves into the Spanish colonial past, and its inherited traces in public

education, through the intervention of a History class. Together with teachers and students of Spanish secondary education, the collective proposes a series of critical exercises to interrogate the particular narratives of history given as ‘the truth’; and alter the official colonial discourse introducing a new grammar in which official terminology is confronted with terms such as ‘civilization’, ‘slavery’, ‘genocide’ and so forth. Juan Guardiola, one of the members of the collective and curator of

Apocryphal Colony, argues that ‘the colonial debate no longer concerns only the North of Europe’ and

the time has come to broaden the scope beyond the academy and towards new formats. Indeed, the concepts of colonial difference discussed in Margin of Error are not restricted to a Spanish educational framework nor its collective imaginary, but to the entire framework of Western civilization.

Firstly, in case the reader wonders, the three caravels were named La Pinta, la Niña and La Santa

María and Isabel the Catholic sponsored their infrastructure and arrival to the ‘New World’. Secondly

and sadly, Spanish society as any other former empire of Europe, has always been -unconsciously-multicultural though fairly racist. Racism when talking about coloniality is not an accidental force, so it was one of the principles of the colonial mindset. Neither is it the choice to begin this chapter with

Margin of error. Like Magnetic Declination, collectives such as Grupo Península (Portugal-Spain) or

exhibitions like The Potosí Principle in the MNCARS, The Baroque defect in CCCB represent some of the artistic accounts, that have remarkably contributed to the creation of a decolonial imagery in Spain while interrogating and problematizing the colonial legacy of Europe since the 2010s. The choice of addressing the practice of Margin of error here, responds to the fact that the collective aims to intervene in one of the instruments the nation state has utilized to promote its official discourse and episteme: the education system. Coloniality, the idea of progress and its pertinent imagery were once concepts to be constructed and to be taught. The implementation and distribution of such specific

(11)

7 body of knowledge was so successful that took over the planet through schools, museums, administrations and universal exhibitions. Let’s see how.

The Portuguese and Spanish colonization of the Americas was on one hand the prologue of the colonial power formation in Europe and on the other the prelude of a flexible enterprise that has been theorized as the colonial matrix of power3_{. To identify the latency of the colonial legacy today, it is} necessary to understand how it has been operating since its formation and how it has evolved. In Spain the colonial apparatus began to take shape with the reign of Isabel the Catholic and Ferdinand II (16th century). Back then, the Spanish expelled the Moors and the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula which was intended as an evangelizing mission. Its purpose was a theological cleansing in the name of Spanish unity. The imposition of a new faith and politics under the name of a particular (“universal”) deity and nation state has expanded towards the North of Europe and experienced several clashes in the Mediterranean. Taken as a geo-political tool, the logics of colonialism have been travelling over Europe. The logic has been adapted according to the needs of its perpetrator but the methodology has always been based on exploitation and domination. For instance, while the Spanish implemented the encomienda’s in Latin America, the British and the Dutch used the same pattern under the name of plantation in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Whilst the core mission was always the control, the exploitation of the territory and the extrapolation of the metropolis administration in the colonized region, what differs one type from the other was the theology and cultural particularities. To legitimate the colonial imposition, an intellectual project was created under the name of ‘progress’; that is the Modernity. The combination of the colonial logic and the modern rhetoric lead to the positioning of Europe as a universal center. Hence, a western epistemology, theory of politics, philosophy and aesthetics were created to be articulated as universal values in Europe and as imposed values for non-western peoples.

Since the early 17th century, Europe positioned itself in the cultural, economic and political center. The new agenda was articulated in three levels: the annunciation, the announcement and the difference4_{(See Mignolo, 2015). These levels were controlled under a panoptical structure, the} Modernity, and its institutional/administrative framework. The project of the Modernity was based in society taxonomy and the classification of the world. Such classification also applied to a smaller scale; European society was re-organized in five domains, economy, politics-authority, knowledge-subjectivity, gender-sexuality and nature, and governed under its specific discipline5_{. These five} domains were interconnected through a western epistemology (occidental values), racism, and capital6. The relation the modern project established through the parts was called the ‘annunciation’ and is rooted in the patriarchy, the Christianity and the secularization of the Christian theology (the philosophy). While the announcement controlled the production and distribution of knowledge, the annunciation headed the perception; Europe privileged eyesight over the rest of the senses, therefore it is not by accident that representation and denotation has been so important for western societies. As

(12)

8 a result, any type of knowledge or sensing derived from indigenous subjects was overlooked in the West and ended in a scientific institution (the ethnographic, natural history or the anthropology museum). As a result, non-western societies suffered from a temporary discrimination; the present time of history was central to a specific geography while the rest of civilizations were relegated to the periphery, the past. The project of Modernity, as an intellectual project that controlled the production of knowledge, was responsible for the appropriation of the materiality of the world and its convenient distribution. Coloniality was the downside of modernity for those who did not belong to the West. It was an act of translation through erosion, and its apparatus (the colonial enterprise) was responsible for the production of difference.

Colonial difference can be divided into internal/external colonial difference and

internal/external imperial difference7_{. An example of internal colonial difference can be found in}

the expelling of the moors and the Jews in 16th century Spain; Seemingly, as the colonial matrix was extrapolated to other locations and timeframes, in Europe and an account of colonial internal difference can be found in the expulsion of the Jews and the Sinti and Roma in the 20th century. The external colonial difference was firstly produced among Indians and Africans once the commercial circuit overseas was opened. In similar fashion, Europe had to face the great Ottoman Empire and the history of Islam. Roughly explained, if not considered barbarians a priori, the fact that Ottomans worshiped ‘the wrong god’ was enough for the West to finally acknowledge the Middle East as a primitive culture. That reasoning illustrates another account of external imperial difference. In the same light, Spain became ‘the empire were the sun never sets’, was fiercely called into question by the northern colonial powers. Theological clashes among protestant societies and the concern of Spanish monarchy and Christianity becoming universal values, lead to the opposition of England and the Netherlands to Spanish supremacy. That was the beginning of a crucial internal imperial difference that laid the foundations for the current division of the world between North and South.

One of the teenagers who appears in Margin of Error. Memory-1 (img. 4) is asked to memorize and repeat a small extract of Bartolomé de las Casas8_{text Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las}

Indias written during the Spanish occupation of the Americas. As a matter of unveiling a silenced part

of the conquest, the collective touches upon the notion of memory while interrogating the histories of the Spanish landing in South America. As in Memory, the text of Bartolomé de las Casas was also appropriated and assembled in the 17th century to bring light to the atrocities committed by the Spanish empire overseas. However, the reason to spread the message in Europe was not solely due to ethical matters.

Las Casas text, among other translations about the violence perpetrated by the reign of King Philip II, lead to the so-called “Black legend”. As a propaganda-alike document, the black legend aimed to demonize Spain and its sanguinary king Philip II. The legend was strategically used by Elizabeth I of England to unify and mobilize the North against the South. That is the internal imperial

(13)

9 difference, because it happens among colonial powers in Europe. The ascension of England to the power was not solely driven by political strategy for England but as a global strategy to allocate England above the rest of the colonial powers. The engine utilized was the difference in vanishing the threatening universality of Southern values.

After the decolonization of the former colonies of Europe, another type of imperialism arose as the unifying element on the planet: Capitalism. Although it emerged as a concealing option in fulfilling the needs of every part, the new system actually has exacerbated the difference among countries and peoples. Firstly, it divided the world between developed and underdeveloped

countries according to its wealth in capital, not in resources. And secondly, is a system that has its

groundings in colonial history. The geographer David Harvey, points at the deferral element of the capitalist system by claiming that the “new” economic format is a system of accumulation that works through two engines: The process of accumulation through dispossession (or as mentioned previously in the text, as erosion or translation); and the expanded reproduction through the exploitation of living labors in production. Both types of dispossession allude to expropriation and privatization of several forms of common wealth, colonial dispossession of indigenous peoples, “and any sort of raid driven by some financial institutions against vulnerable states in Europe itself” (Harvey as cited in Bouwhuis, 2014:58). Accordingly, the decolonization of Africa, Asia and the Americas, the vestiges of the history of colonialism and racism are still incrusted in the contemporary socio-political framework and the cultural articulation. At a time when the right-wing is taking ground in Europe and the US, the work of artists such as Magnetic Declination are relevant not only to problematize the colonial history but to create a new critical arena that responds to a global political society rather than a civil society shaped by the State and its apparatuses.

1.2 Counter-options to the hegemonic intellectual framework: Post-colonial and

decolonial aesthetics

As mentioned in the previous section, Modernity is how the western tradition structured itself until the Second World War. The colonial matrix of power is the substructure of the intellectual project and is meant to produce difference. What differs today from the 17th century is the fact that society is part of the economy and a power dispute among global empires while economy was part of society before.

The revolutions pro-independence in the former colonies took place in a scenario of political tension and geo-economic redistribution after 1945. The act of decolonization exceeded the political framework of the war towards the liberation of the countries subjected to colonial powers (France and England mainly) and evolved to its conceptualization within the academic/institutional realm.

Post-colonial critique9_{emerged in the 50s as a counter option of the hegemonic episteme and it} became a landmark as it made visible the limitations of the modern political project and its secular institutional structure, especially during the 50s-80s, when globalization began taking ground. In a moment in which the world became global, universal narratives of history, and the canonization of

(14)

10 culture were severely called into question by the peoples whose history was neglected in the heyday of colonization and after (black people, indigenous, women and so forth). Hence, a new framework to embrace a conscious multicultural population that was raising its voice was not only urgent but came to represent an important historical rupture.

One of the main representative voices that arose at such a moment of political and social agitation was Franz Fanon. He brought racism to the epistemological realm and his work challenges a theory of politics still governed by theology and/or left or rightwing biases. Hence, a new scholarly field emerged as well as a different option for learning the history of the world. Similar contributions to unveiling the logics of power in a supposed decolonized society can be found in the works of Michael Foucault, Edward Saïd, or Gayatri Spivak, among others. While Foucault works within Europe, he intends to analyze modernity and the panoptic as a system of control applied in western institutions (among other locations). Saïd developed his theory on Orientalism and the exotic gaze towards non-western peoples and he is one of the precursors of post-colonial critique in the Middle East. His work shows the western construction of the East into a homogeneous cultural entity and denounces the gaps of cultural and political understanding between both West and East.

Post-colonial theory was an important landmark for the academy but more importantly for the former colonized countries willing to deal with the world on their own terms. Likewise, post-colonial critique lead to the interrogation of Europe’s imperial past in and outside its borders and the proliferation of counter movements that generated new narratives for the world to consider. (e.g. feminism). Okwi Enwezor, has developed the concept of ‘post-colonial constellation’, which alludes to the post-colonial political re-distribution, the subsequent social agitation and a new multicultural consciousness. He claims that this has a strong impact on the contemporary artistic and curatorial practice in the museal/cultural field. Such effects will be addressed further in the next chapter (2.1).

1.2.1 Decoloniality

In the 21st century, the world has supposedly overcome the political process of decolonization, thus post-colonialism should no longer be the framework of contestation. However, I argue that museums are still struggling with accommodating post-colonial debates in their realms. The academy seems to have developed an educated view on racism, gender, slavery, cultural diversity and so forth but the institutional framework needs further probing as it seems that it is less shaped by the academy and society but rather by government funds, and in some cases, Europe’s. The current museumscape and that of the 19th century nation-state have troubling similarities; some ethnographic museums have been transformed into “new museums” even though they still feature someone else’s heritage and culture materiality under a different name (Tropen Museum of Amsterdam, Weltkulturen museum in Frankfurt, World Cultures museum in Barcelona). Other museums have been established as a symbol to celebrate a supposed new postcolonial and multicultural era that looks at the past through a prism of responsibility when actually the tendency is to frame all that into a wider national-oriented

(15)

11 narrative ( as is the example of the new-and controversial-House of European History of Europe in Brussels10_{). I claim that the methodological consensus on material culture and issues related to} colonialism and multiculturalism today are framed by European geopolitics which reflects the legacy of colonialism today.

Departing from the post-colonial critique of Fanon, on one hand decoloniality is a valuable option in understanding the background of today’s geopolitics and its apparatuses, hence to recognize the articulating elements, while on the other hand, is a methodology that departs from the dissent between the episteme generated in the academy and that resulting from global-politics. It recognizes that global geopolitics and global nationalisms have overlooked post-colonialism-since they are the continuation of colonial accumulation- and aims to work within that framework rather than against it.

Decoloniality works as a critical methodology to identify the imposed epistemologies to generate different narratives and political history activations that shape individuals as subjects. Initiated as well by so-called ‘3d world intellectuals’, it took place in Latin America. However, 'decoloniality' is not an oppositional theory as it is post-colonial critique and literature. What differs from post-colonial critique is that Decoloniality contemplates both modernity-as it is still the landmark of a powerful dominant class and corporations- and post-coloniality-as it represents the foundations in which the new political society and its consciousness have emerged-. The logic that lies behind the Decolonial project is to play out the differences among peoples to “recognize its distinctive locations, commonalities, tensions and horizons” (Mignolo and Vázquez, 2013:11)11_.

The first part of the Decolonial Manifesto focuses on the production and distribution of a new epistemology to address the genealogy of problematic terms contingent to western modernity; it then unveils its universality and finally turns it into a historically situated concept. In Memory12_(Magnetic

Declination, 2013) students are asked to memorize an assemblage of texts created from original texts written by those considered defeated according to Spanish History. Those texts were fragments of Bartolomé de las Casas but also Rigoberta Menchú13_{. Within the teaching mechanisms, listening,} reading and memorizing are the leading activities of History lessons. Conversely, the interrogation of the given facts falls into scientific lessons while usually History lessons demand a great deal of conformity. Who has not been told that “history is something that happened and onr just need to remember it the way it is”? By the appropriation and reformulation of the official narrative about the conquest given in Spanish history books, the collective re-situates the conquest through the perspective of the defeated. In so doing, the collective introduces a new narrative that interrogates the given history and its pertinent imagery and dogmas. In the last part of the project, the students are asked to question and identify those elements of history through a ‘decolonial glossary’ inspired by the conquest together with the official vocabulary (See img. 5). Rather than imposing its view on the storytelling of the history of the conquest, the collective complicates the given narrative and teaches the students the multiplicity of voices hidden in history and how to interrogate the whole through the parts. Precisely, the project of Decoloniality defends the universalism of totalities that coexist with

(16)

12 one another rather than a totalitarian universalism. As stated by the Transnational Decolonial Intitute (TDI)14, the project was intended as an option rather than a principle, because it does not seek to regulate a canon.

The second part of the Decolonial Project addresses the decolonization of aesthesis15 (perception). As previously explained, Europe has articulated the cultural canon of perception through the eye. In the same fashion, aesthetics (the ability to perceive and sense the world) became Eurocentric in the19thcentury. Together with rationality, modern aesthetics ‘became the regulator of the global capability to ‘sense’, (…) in this light, aesthetics colonized the aesthesis in two directions: time, so it established the standards in and from the European present. And in space, because it was projected to the entire population of the planet” (Mignolo and Vázquez, 2013:7-8).

Non-western subjects and producers had to deal with the imposed canon of perception that also affected the production of objects, and even artistic production. The acceptance or rejection of the cultural canon by non-western subjects, determined the classification of non-western objects in Europe. Similarly, the rejection of the canon has relegated the production of non-western cultures to the past, which explains the difficulty of indigenous art to fully enter contemporary art circuits in the 19th and even the 20th. Ethnographic museums saw how objects not aligned with the canon were under their custody and tagged as arts-crafts in the best case, as “traditional culture” or simply as untitled objects whose identity and utility was museumalized to reinforce their own idea of it.

In The statues also die16 (See img.6), Chris Marker and Alain Resnais call into question the

loss of meaning of African sculpture once they enter western museums. The dispossession of meaning of the sculptures is replaced by the imposition of a western canon of representation and interpretation. The African statues enter the museum with its local function (most likely religious). Once on display, the cultural specificity of the object is erased and replaced by western aesthetics that ‘elevates’ the objects to ‘primitive or ethno-art’.

Ethnographic museums were created to covey a self-serving idea of cultural diversity and disseminate the heritage of the world under a western system of value. As being contingent to the nation-state, ethnographic museums were meant to speak to western audiences through non-western objects. Therefore, non-western objects were utilized to produce an image of the West through oppositional means. Hence, the function of the displayed object was replaced to fulfil such oppositional strategy of representation that bordered western societies while erasing the original meaning of the object that aimed to represent ‘other cultures’ (see Fig. 4)

The process of decolonization and post-colonial debates brought the ethnographic museum into question and lead to its transformation. As being museums dedicated to address cultural diversity, ethnographic museums became outdated as soon as their content could not respond to a political multicultural society. Post-coloniality made evident that ethnographic museums and mankind museums were meant to speak about Western societies rather than about the societies the objects

(17)

13 came from. The relevance of The statues also die lies in the fact that some museums in the 2000s have used ethnographic collections to create artistic collections that keep speaking about western audiences (or art markets) rather than the cultures behind the original objects (See article on France colonial collections in Museé du Quai Brantly. Demissie in Thomas, D. 2010: 66-83). Hence, it highlights the urge to understand the new debates arising from “other cultures” and include them in museum display. Museology in the 70s was shaped by this concern and the museumscape experienced a radical turn in the 2000s. What is at stake is whether museology and museography have encompassed a post-colonial agenda or rather they remain the same under a new title and design when dealing with culture diversity. Chapter 2 illustrates how museums interpret the current context and how they have been transformed to re-formulate their collections to talk about the colonial past.

(18)

Elipsis Del lat. ellipsis, y este del g

r. ἔλλειψις élleipsis; literalmente 'falta,

carencia'.

(19)

14

2. POST-COLONIAL ARTISTIC & CURATORIAL PRACTICE

2.0 Institutional framework before decolonization

Before the turn of the century, the first -museum- collections were private and exhibited in salons of the European aristocracy. The socio-political climate of the French revolution led the way to the first semi-public collections. At the beginning, these collections were the accumulated “symbolic capital” of the traditional aristocracy and they were mainly addressed to ruling and professional classes (Bourdieu in Clifford, 1999:214). Entering the 19th century, museum collections were finally democratized to some extent, and nationalized. Their artefacts were classified according to the logic of the nation-state and the principle of rationality. Enter as a person, leave as a citizen was one of the foremost statements of museums at the time (See Marzo, 2013). As for being an instrumental institution of the state, museums were utilized to indoctrinate the general public into being well-behaved citizens. In several of her works, Carol Duncan has highlighted the aristocratic past of the institutions and the ritualized experience that has replaced the secular mission of the Church in the 18th century in shaping a specific type of citizenship. In addition to this, Michael Foucault unfolds the modern articulation of time and space that affects the museum practice. He argues that museums and archives can be seen as ‘heterotopias of time’ in which artefacts from all epochs and times are accumulated and organized through a certain timeframe contingent to certain geography, the West, and a specific logic, the Modernity (See Foucault, M, & Miskowiev, J. (1986). Therefore, museum collections in the 19th century were meant to convey a linear understanding of history on one hand, and to generate national, modern and imperial subjectivities on the other hand. While the institutionalization of knowledge in specific disciplines and the control of the perception were the pillars of Modernity, violence and cultural dispossession were central to coloniality. In the metropolis, museums were responsible for allocating and organizing the material culture of the world (of the colonies) to its pertinent institution.

The aim behind such administration was the control of the materiality of peoples and the production of national, modern and imperial subjectivities. Hence history museums and national galleries produced national subjectivities; and colonial and ethnographic museums were responsible for imperial subjectivity production. By implement of the ‘difference’ and obscuring of meaning of the collected objects, colonial museums were responsible for portraying non-western cultures as primitive societies far from modern advancement.

Finally, the modern art museum was created separately to allocate a new cultural production contingent to Western aesthetics and values. During the museum age, 1840-1930, Europe became the world's cultural centre and museums the main institutions of heritage production and distribution. But whose heritage and for whom? The division of the modern art museum and the ethnographic institution was central to that question. Any culture material that did not fit the western canon fell into the latter. As illustrated in the documentary Les Statues Mourent Aussi (see Chapter 2.2.1), the

(20)

15 meaning of the object was framed by museum politics of representation. While the strategy implemented in the objects of Les Statues Mourent Aussi attended the reification of the objects under the art-culture system, the most extended strategy in colonial museums was the staging of non-western cultures into in sittu and in context exhibitions17_{. In both cases, the aim was to convey a} primitive image of the colonized culture allocating them to the periphery, to the past, while legitimating the civilizing mission of colonialism overseas. Hence, the heritage produced in the West belonged (and still belongs) to non-western cultures and until decolonization was interpreted to respond solely to the western narrative of history.

Modernity was crucial for the appropriation and classification of native culture and people’s heritage; through the displays mentioned above, together with universal exhibitions, native culture was turned into a spectacle either in local or international frameworks. Museum concern with conservation and dissemination, reflected “the modern spirit of control and appropriation through classification and taxonomy” (Pieterse,1997:132). Ultimately, what is behind exhibitions is a structure of power that articulates social differentiation. Such articulation was held first by the patronage of bourgeois elites (18thcentury) and secondly by the secular democratic state (19thcentury). The mid-twentieth century art exhibitions also worked as a structure of social differentiation within the art circuit. The art-culture system came to control the authenticity, value and circulation of cultural materials. Objects expropriated from colonized countries were collected and distributed as ethnographic documents a priori, whose “primitivism” and purity was opposed in the western museums to urban, modern industrial western culture. Once in the museum, the objects specificity was erased and its function replaced.

2.1 Institutional framework after decolonization

“The post-colonial constellation comes out of the recognition made clear by the current upheaval evident in a series of structural, political, and cultural restructuring after World War II and which include movements of decolonization, civil rights, feminist, gay/lesbian,

antiracists movements. (…) is the site for the expansion of the definition of what

constitutes contemporary culture and its affiliations in other domains of practice, the intersection of historical forces aligned against the hegemonic imperatives of imperial discourse” (Enwezor, O. 2003:77).

Together with technology, decolonization and globalization in the second half of the 20th century opened up the framework towards the proximity of cultures. This complicated the relationship between culture production and interpretation. With decolonization, those who were being spoken for by the West started speaking by themselves and called into question museum politics of representation. Migratory movements brought new understandings about the world, a fact that problematized the universal narratives of history given by the West. The plurality of voices that

(21)

16 emerged after the 50s unveiled a present time that was for Europe, exempted of heritage, virgin of genealogies and freed of traditions (Bénichou, A. & Muntadas, A.2012:7-14). Europe alone was no longer in charge of the dissemination of culture and subsequent production of history. The post-colonial period made visible the silenced histories embedded in museum collections and emphasized the complex conditions of production of all cultural manifestation. That context of cultural re-adjustment meant the decadence of a representational field that was supported by canons together with politics of control over culture production and interpretation.

Without the project of the coloniality, the machinery of difference became useless and the western episteme outdated. Traditional museology witnessed its own decay. The main pillars that supported its existence were confronted by the so-called 3rd_{world intellectuals and a growing political} society. At the same time the modern debate was challenged by new artistic manifestations whose classification was impossible in such a traditional discourse. Ethnographic museums were perhaps the most evident case of institutional decay as they were created to harbour the material dispossession of non-western cultures. Similarly, the modern art museum found itself trapped in its own methodology. Modernity did not consider an institution to house anything but modern art. Therefore, the new political artistic practice, contemporary art, represented a historical rupture that did not fit in a modern narrative of continuity.

Given this context, museums from the 60s onwards undertook a critical transformation towards the creation of a new framework that would amass artistic plurality and a new configuration of history, aesthetics and culture interpretation. The emergence of the New museology18_{, brought}

discursive approaches that shifted the exhibition towards a more critical realm. The project of the New Museology evolved towards a cooperative museology that involves peoples from indigenous communities, diaspora communities and agents from different disciplines. All these are gradually being incorporated in museum narratives. What follows are artistic accounts that illustrate how the field has evolved since then. What the artists and curators analysed here have in common is that they all figure out new approaches to intervene the structure in which colonialism first and later neo-liberalism have articulated culture worldwide since the 60s and in the case of Spain since the 80s.

2.2 Post-colonial curatorial-artistic practice in problematic museums

From the 70s to the 90s, global claims against the imperial past and nuclear and ideological wars came together which led to the energy crisis and another geopolitical reconfiguration of the world. Colonialism was transformed into capitalism, and thereafter into neo-liberalism. The 80s witnessed the proliferation of contemporary art museums in Europe, which led to the creation of a bigger framework to address wider public targets. However, the growth of contemporary art institutions brought the art market, the gallerists, intermediaries, curators, collectors and the media to be in the foreground of the debate about the value and significance of contemporary art and culture.

(22)

17 The aftermath of the post-colonial constellation and the institutionalization of culture led artists to appropriate museum codes and dynamics calling attention to the development of new tools and a new operational framework within museums. Collections from ethnographic museums became the scenario for artist interventions and multicultural exhibitions were on the rise. The incorporation of critical texts about museums, the creation of interpretative frameworks within the exhibitions, the incorporation of localized themes was central for breaking with a traditional museology that was coerced by politics and capital.

It is in this agitated context that the institutional privatization (and culture instrumentalization) and the Institutional critique took place. Corporate funding began in the U.S at the end of the 60s and has expanded ever since; first to Britain then the rest of Europe. If in coloniality the authoritarianism in institutions laid in the administrative forces of the nation-state, within a neo-liberal framework it laid in the financial sector. Therefore, the exhibition practice, as a medium of communication became increasingly biased by corporations. Exhibition and institution bias was especially noticeable in the years of the Cold war. Artists such as Hans Haacke or Antoni Muntadas have dedicated their career to problematize the relationship between museums and corporations.

Spanish artist Antoni Muntadas who has lived and work abroad since the 70s (currently based in New York) is well-known for his research on contemporary structures of power, representation and the evaluation of culture-value. Bringing the debate further, Hans Haacke coined Enzenberg term of ‘consciousness industry’ to address the growing corporate-cultural museum practice. His essay

Museums: Managers of consciousness was published in 1989. Haacke’s argumentation and mission to

incorporate his critique within the institution had already begun in the 60s and became the corner stone of the Institutional Critique together with the work of other artists such as Marcel Broodthaers or Michael Asher. In the 80s Andrea Fraser, Joseph Kosuth and Louise Lawletr took over the debate and brought it into a different level; specially remarkable is the text work of Fraser in which the artist questions the role of the institutional critique once it becomes institutionalized.

Informed by Marxist theory, Haacke argues in his essay that “consciousness is not a pure, independent value-free entity evolving according to internal self-sufficient and universal values”. Rather, it is a social product in constant transformation. “A battle ground of conflicting interests” (

Haacke, H., Alberro, A., 2016

:116). For him, and for the collective of artists aligned with contextual and interventionist practices of the 60-70s, the codes of production implemented by contemporary producers are contingent to their work and life and they reflect the geopolitical moment rather than being shaped by it. Haacke directs the spectator’s attention towards the ability museums have in framing their contents and, ultimately, their public who are informed about what they should know. Notice that if a priori exhibitions, as a discipline of thought, were firstly curated by the Bourgeoisie, in the 20th century, exhibitions and even the use of artworks was articulated by global

(23)

18 powers who at the same time were supported by big corporations. Partisanship brought museums to operate under the authority to which they reported.

The artists within the movement of Institutional Critique are concerned with the fact that art and cultural manifestations have been reduced to leisure and entertainment. Hence, the specificity of their work is vanished to serve as a messenger of someone else. As any channel of communication, art was industrialized and absorbed by the governments or financial parties. What they unveil is the fallacy about museums assuming an educational mission that avoids dissent and leads to the creation of consumers rather than political subjects.

Given this compromised context, the main action fronts that needed to be developed by museums were the initiation of critique-based relations towards cultural and symbolic representation, to the historical past and to society. Although the adoption of the institutional critique in the museum realm may be contradictory to some extent19_{, institutional critical texts and artworks were central in} the transformation of the museum towards a self-reflexive institution.

2.2.1 The artists as curator: Multicultural Exhibitions

Central to the museum practice of the second half of the 20th century was the growth of multicultural exhibitions that intended to break with the division of art/culture, art/ethnography. Perhaps one of foremost accounts was Magiciens de la terre curated by Jean-Hubert Martin (Strasbourg, 1944). The exhibition took place in the centre Pompidou in Paris in 1989 and featured the work of one hundred contemporary artists of the world. It was meant to be the first truly international exhibition that included a balanced ratio of western and non-western artists.

Magiciens de la terre was intended as a counter show from the triad: Primitivism and modern art (MOMA, 1984/85), the Paris Colonial exhibition of 1931 (Bois de Vincennes,) and the traditional

Paris Biennial. The show at the Pompidou was opposed to these three displays because it intended to eradicate the colonial associations between non-western artworks and culture within European exhibitions; and secondly, it intended to vanish artistic differentiation between mainstream and ‘second rate artwork’ that had dominated the Paris biennial criteria until then. With the problematic around these three exhibitions in mind, Jean-Hubert Martin established a selection criteria based on a strict 50/50 ratio and, that based on the curator’s visual and sensual experience.

Although the exhibition intended to overcome the traditional selection criteria utilized by curators of the Paris biennial, Magiciens’ criteria did not go any further. Conversely it was reduced solely to the curator’s visual and aesthetic intuition; a feature that belongs to the articulation of the modern art and its distinctive source of perception. It was a positive attempt, though, in opening up the debate to interrogate the status and place of non-western art within the history of modern and contemporary art and its circuits.

As a reaction to the three exhibition models (one modern, one colonial and one modern and colonial) it would have been remarkable to have seen the relationship between art and

(24)

post-19 colonialism, thus a situated history. The artists were presented as individuals. Only their name was given together with the technical details of their work. By not showing the specificity of the artwork and the conditions under in which it was produced, the show failed in becoming another modern exhibition in which modern aesthetics and values articulate the objects and the topic in which they were put together. The use of the term ‘magician’ rather than ‘artist’, recalls ‘spirituality’ as a theme, whose historical background is well rooted in Modern exhibitions where objects were organized under ‘spiritual clusters’. Seemingly, the theme was problematic because it contradicted the core mission of

Magiciens; it resulted in a globalizing concept that totalized the perception of the featured artworks

and artists rather than situating them in time and space.

In post-Magiciens times, curators were uncertain about the presentation of works that did not usually belong to western circuits. Regardless of its ups and downs, Magiciens was useful in directing the attention towards the creation of a new glossary for the artistic practice that was breaking through the world as well as a new imaginary able to narrate the untold stories.

In “post-Magiciens” museums began developing their own critical discourses. Concepts such as the ‘nation as a construction’, post-colonial debates, and gender and race as a social, ideological and political construction were blooming in the 80s and crystallizing in the 90s-2000s. The global turn lead to the proliferation of more multicultural exhibitions, festivals and cultural events. Ivan Karp differentiates two types of multicultural exhibitions. The first type reflects upon how exhibitions determine what we see while the second consists of site-specific artworks that challenge the politics of representation within the exhibition itself.

In the 90s, artists were given the space and the opportunity to apply their practice in the exhibition space. Afro-American artist Fred Wilson (1954, Bronx) began intervening museum collections in the 90s. His practice revolves around the question “how the environment in which culture is placed affects the way the viewer feels about the artwork and the artist” (Greenberg, R., Ferguson, Bruce W, & Nairne, Sandy, 1996:252). In Rooms with a view: the struggle between

cultural content and the context of art (1990, Longwood museum) Wilson selected 30 artists whose

work was placed in 3 rooms that function as a gallery space, a white cube and an ethnographic museum. ‘Colonial collection’ was the display that took place in the room dedicated to the ethnographic museum (See img.7). He wrapped 7 African masks with British and French flags. Beneath the masks, there was a glass-vitrine display case which features insect vitrines, a jaw bone, museum labels and Harper lithographic depictions of punitive expeditions between Zulus and British; Ashanti and British. Through this assemblage of art, ethnographic object and museum furniture, Wilson appropriates museum codes of representation to call into question for whom these codes are intended. In ‘colonial collection’ Wilson touched upon the debate of colonial objects on western soil in a moment of post-colonial contestation. However, he addressed the restitution of the objects only tangentially. Instead he juxtaposes aesthetic neutrality to history. “I like to bring history to the

(25)

20 museum because I feel that the aesthetics anesthetizes the historic and keeps the imperial view within the museum and continues the dislocation of what these objects are about”.(Greenberg, R., Ferguson, Bruce W, & Nairne, Sandy, 1996:253). He argues that curators really create how the viewer is to see and think of the objects in the exhibition. With this in mind, he figured a new system of truth opposed to curatorial authority. As an artist, he began using the museum as a workspace and created site-specific installations for and within the museum.

In 1992, Wilson was invited by the Contemporary art museum of Baltimore to hold a show in the city. The Baltimore contemporary art museum is actually an art centre. As such, it does not have a collection and works through partnerships with other institutions to produce its exhibitions. Consequently, Fred Wilson chose to work with the Maryland Historical Society museum collection. He decided to re-contextualize it due to its past and mission. The Historical society was a museum central to the state of Maryland and the city of Baltimore. Since its foundation in 1844, the museum mission was to collect, preserve and study objects relevant to the history of the state. Wilson argues that the Historical Society museum was perhaps the most conservative environment in the city. The multiculturalism of the city, the decade in which the project was meant to happen and the fact that it was a city museum caught Wilson’s attention so the articulation within the parts was highly problematic.

Mining the museum was intended to alter the presentation of the museum history (and stories)

that attended mainly to a specific point of view; that of the white male American funding board20_{. The} exhibition took place in the rooms on the entire third floor of the museum. Wilson put on display objects that were related to the history of the city and the state but had never (or hardly ever) been on show. These were colonial and slavery accounts. One of the installations consisted of three portrait busts of Napoleon, Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson. None of them had ever lived in Maryland. Wilson presented them in the exhibition re-named as Harriet Tubman, Benjamin Banneker and Frederick Douglas; who were important African-American locals of Maryland. By displaying the white busts under black names, the artist intends to highlight two aspects. First, to address those who are deemed to be represented in museums and subsequently, what is deemed to be acquired and disseminated in exhibitions. Likewise, the intervention directs the intentioned absence of the African-American Maryland community in the museum discourse and subsequently to the history of Maryland.

Metal work 1793-1880, also in Mining the museum (see img. 8), is another account of

museum taxonomy and Afro-American historical and colonial denial. The installation consists of a glass vitrine in which the artist placed an ornate silver tea set and slave shackles that were hidden in the museum storage. The strategy to locate them together responds, on one hand, to thir historical link with the colonial past, so as Wilson puts it, the production of the one was made possible by the subjugation enforced by the other(See Greenberg, R., Ferguson, Bruce W, & Nairne, Sandy. (1996).

(26)

21 On the other hand, the presentation of these two elements together addresses the biases that underlie historical exhibitions and how these biases affect the viewer’s interpretation.

The following chapter provides an overview of some post-colonial artistic interventions that took place in Spain in the decade of the 1990s. After Francoism, Spain experienced a dramatic transformation in the public domain that aimed to wash away the traces of the recent past to introduce European city standards. The work of the artists who appear in the next chapter reflect on how the cultural field has been taken over by the private sector while calling attention to the lack of reflexivity towards the colonial/dictatorial past in a supposed multicultural and post-colonial new Spain.

(27)

1. f. Gram. Omisión de un segmento sintáctico cuyo contenido se puede

recuperar por el contexto

(28)

22

3. SPAIN: POST-COLONIAL ARTISTIC & CURATORIAL PRACTICE IN

PROBLEMATIC MUSEUMS

Los ochentas (...) un ambiente extraño, superficialmente moderno, pero con un fondo rancio. Lo mejor, el optimismo; lo peor, todo lo que el optimismo escondía21_...

Cabrllo&Carceller, 2013

The end of the dictatorship, the entrance of Spain into the EU and a new institutional framework aiming to embrace the increasing critical culture manifestations of the previous decades, led Spanish society to experience the 80s as the decade of the enchantment. Conversely, the 90s were experienced as a moment of disenchantment. After Francoism, the prelude of diversity and cultural celebration that came with the democratic transition did not find a consistent continuation in the 90s. As it happened during the dictatorship, art and culture were instrumentalized to conform to the country’s

identity.

The growth of international fairs and cultural events in the 90s pointed to an instrumental strategy led by the social conservatism (the rancid background Cabello/Carceller refer to in the initial quote) as well as the mutation of the art circuits that were dramatically influenced by the growth of the art market and a disguised institutionalization that began in 1983 and peaked in 199222_{. The 80s and} early 90s witnessed the rapid growth of the country and the creation of new museumscapes that came without a consistent cultural project. It was the prelude of a cultural consciousness ruled by financial forces. The responsibility towards the past in museums and the interpretation of cultures in Spain, did not become a reality until the beginning of the 2000s, however, the 90s saw the proliferation of artistic and curatorial projects based on historical reflexivity outside the museum realm. Accounts of that are

Plus Ultra (Sevilla 1992) and A couple in a cage (Madrid 1992). Both projects emerged as a reaction

to the cultural events that defined the 90s; that is the adoption of the cultural industry in order to allow Spain to be part of the new present: Europe and the Global Capitalism. Each project is addressed at the end of the chapter.

3.1 Barcelona and the new Contemporary Art Museum

Before addressing some accounts that illustrate how culture and history has been instrumentalized in Spain, I must address the framework in which that phenomenon arose. In the 90s, Spain and in particular Barcelona, experienced an urban metamorphosis, in which culture became the driven force23_{. The transformations are particularly visible in the city landscape in which traces of the} colonial and dictatorial past intermingle with new European and global guidelines, such as new museums (World Cultures museum, Culture and Memory centre of El Born), incorporation of festivals and the incorporation of cultural strategies to deal with the past.

I argue that the transformations of the city are partly informed by those that took place with the International Exhibition of 1929. The use of culture as a driver to transform the landscape of the