Africa in Motion: Bringing Heritage to Life? AfricaMuseum reopening Tervuren, Belgium

When men die, they enter into history. When statues die, they enter into art. This botany of death is what we call culture (Marker and Resnais 1953).

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New glass entrance connected by underground passage to 1910 building.

Photo: © Philippe de Formanoir, 2019

As we know, Tervuren's renovation was an attempt to break with its old-fashioned image, one which conveyed both a century-old museography and a propagandist architecture. In the characterization of museums as sacred places, the threshold space is a marker that sets the tone. In Tervuren's case the entrance is now a building of transparencies (Fig. 6) with a vast, white-washed underground space that leads to the old building and gives the impression of crossing a border (Fig. 7). This temporal routing introduces one of the stakes of this renovation: a challenge to colonial history. In the new antechamber of the museum, panel information indicates that the collections to be presented are recognized as the heritage of humanity and are in the process of being digitized. These issues of memory, transmission, and new technologies deserve to be addressed.

One of the notable changes in mediation devices is the use of many screens, some of which are tactile. This introduction to the moving image, its sound equivalent, and a multimedia didactic approach brings an undeniable freshness (Fig. 8). Visitors, including the youngest, readily engage in touching at a distance, listening to music and to various testimonies, and even experiencing Kinshasa in 3D, while bound to their earphones and screens. These tools have at least the advantage of captivating a large number of spectators. But to what extent is it also a diversion from the expressive qualities of the objects and competition with their inherent power of attraction?

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Underground passage to old building.

Photo: © Philippe de Formanoir, 2019

The temporary exhibition Unrivalled Art, especially staged for the museum's opening, is a case study of the other well-known extreme, namely an overemphasis on aesthetics (Fig. 9). This room suggests that whole sections of African cultures are kept out of the digital world and have not yet entered contemporaneity. It concerns the special category known as "artworks" or, according to an old and tenacious terminology, the museum's treasures.¹ Here one can refer to text panels and a pamphlet that provide dates and provenances, uses, collection protocols of objects. But why is there no video of an act of masking or any other present-day context? Somehow, the most prized valuables have been submitted to the most conservative museography, and it is regrettable that living artists, regardless of their practice, are not entitled to occupy this space. The exhibit thus seems to be the preserve of collectors and their own regime of knowledge.

The room dedicated to music and languages and that on rituals and ceremonies propose an interesting alternative to this monolithic vision. Past and present merge, addressing changes as well as continuities, forms of appropriation and exchanges between complex cultures. From time to time, we are allowed to see similar objects shown elsewhere in the museum for their significant formal qualities in another network of experiences and to learn more about the societies from which they came to the Western world. Such a shift from the notion of masterpiece to that of mnemonic device, for example, is certainly a means for the museum to display its intention to involve the African diaspora, to take part in the process. With their many multimedia mediation tools and videos of women and men discussing a wide range of cultural patterns—sometimes a little simplified—these two rooms, nonetheless, constitute a platform for encounters.

Disparity of approach not only reminds us of the role of the AfricaMuseum in shaping our perception and interpretation of other cultures, but also that it remains an institution hosting different departments with specific agendas from which can emerge competing perspectives, as may be the case with the involvement of African communities. In this regard, the proposals more particularly relating...