The project of decolonizing Anthropology and America’s museums enters its next phase. The work of the expert committees established by Ernest Urtasun, Minister of Culture, to “overcome and question the Eurocentrism” of these institutions has concluded half a year of work with the delivery of two projects containing concrete guidelines for the renewal of the museological discourses of these institutions. This is a decision to include an anti-racist gender perspective, with social justice and able to eliminate all the losses with which these centers have narrated the history of a continent and part of the history of humanity, as you read in the proposals. Therefore, it is not clear in the reports which terms entered into the debate, when not in a partisan struggle, where every few years the bearer of culture declared his intention to “overcome a colonial landmark or a landmark entrenched in the sexual or racial inertia” of the country’s museums.
At the presentation of these multi-year projects in Madrid, Urtasun stated, “The goal is for national museums to be children of the present and builders of the future. They will explain cultures as something alive and contemporary, which challenges us. We will also acknowledge the effectiveness of indigenous villages.”
The expert committees delivered their conclusions at the end of 2024, and since the beginning of this year, the museums, in collaboration with Culture, have been finalizing projects that will be put forward as of December for €4.4 million for Anthropology; And in 2026, 9.2 million for America. The expectation is the final transformation of the rooms housing the permanent collections will be listed in 2028.
“This is a success,” says Mercedes Roldan, deputy director general of the state museums. “They have a clear and obvious need to renew their museums with an average age of three decades.” America changed in the 1990s, but it did not include, as an example appreciated by experts, “the impact of dealing with slaves.” In the case of anthropology, which was established in the nineteenth century, “it awaits a comprehensive modernization of the way in which the discipline was linked to colonialism in that period,” as planned by the expert group.
The Museum of America turns 85 years old in 2026, and is marking 30 years with the same permanent exhibition, with minor changes. “We have to show American multiculturalism and end the colonial perspective,” says Andres Gutierrez, the museum’s director. To achieve this, the Foundation will develop a detailed program in four sections that will attempt to change the imagination built from the so-called desks of European art collectors: all these objects betrayed from the American continent, shaped into an illustrated encyclopedia, of which a single reading of human beings and natural resources.
This view has reached the present day through stereotypes such as those shown to women in an intentional way. “Savages, illiterate, savages, racial prejudices that we intend to dismantle in a critical and rigorous way,” Gutierrez recalls.
Urtasun then explained that this was the first foray into this new path of decolonization in 2024 when the museum changed 200 cards to make them “more respectful with some of the people and communities represented.” Derogatory terms disappeared and I stopped using their names, as in the case of the symbolic square Mulatos de Esmeraldas Which she has been calling for over a year Don Francisco de Arrupe and his sons, chiefs of Esmeralda“, recalls the director.
The processes of resistance of indigenous and African communities, the state of control over women’s sphere, and the “violence of conquest” will have a specific place in the museum. America’s Museum director warns that these reports will not be told chronologically, “without a report based on a chronological timeline.” “America is not sympathetic and does not end with the Spanish presence,” focuses on the Center’s program in which three sections are presented in which migrations and slavery are dealt with – also contemporary – where language and politics are used to renew and re-appropriate meanings, “the business of Europe that was America,” and how missionary and scientific expeditions were also means of “hegemony.”
The Museum of Anthropology has the ambition, in the words of its director Fernando Saez, to become a space for “community engagement and social mediation.” This translates into the transformation of the Foundation’s three stations on the ground through a new order of things, with the aim of engaging communities in “telling their own stories”, when the center turns 150 years old.
“His anthropology throughout its development has explored and promoted theories of political and social interests that have legitimized the world order now in question,” says Saez, putting it squarely in the space facing the museum he runs. The visitor is set to ask all these questions when entering the new permanent exhibition, offering, as much as possible, answers in the form of emerging communities from different regions on topics such as “the exploitation of natural resources, the hierarchy of people to cultivate their racial traits if race exists, there is a climate emergency and the recovery of marginalized narratives from a Western perspective,” according to the project.
Its challenge even amounts to trying to highlight one of the concerns that unites the CIS, and on which the extremist government is at the forefront of its campaign: immigration. “Humans have always enriched us,” he recalls.
“We want to treat the present with laboratories of the social imagination,” says Saez, who has also been taking steps in this direction for months. El Antropológico is the second museum with the largest number of human remains in Spain, which were removed according to law A letter of commitment to the ethical treatment of human remains in state museums, From the Ministry of Culture.
Currently, no one is faced with recovering and returning items. “We do not believe that there are works of questionable origin,” Saez emphasizes. Even the directors do not ignore potential petitions and agree that if they are produced, they will include and explain these demands in the exhibitions. “There are some moral and legal complaints and we have to plant them as part of the discourse, regardless of what happens next. We have cogido the toro por los cuernos,” Anadi Gutierrez said.
This happens with the Quimbaya Treasury, which will also form part of the new Museum of America. The 122-piece collection has been claimed by Gustavo Petro’s government in 2024, but there has been no response from the Spanish authorities who have always been angry about the issue because they consider the works to be national heritage and were a gift from Colombian President Carlos Holguín to Queen Maria Cristina of Habsburg-Lorraine.
“Everyone is not the problem of the past, so we have a social responsibility that contemporary museology requires,” the directors agree. In order to bring these discussions into the present, museums will receive works of contemporary art acquired by the Ministry of Culture. “We spent months purchasing the items needed to complete the lakes, and we always follow up on petitions submitted by the museums,” says Angelis Albert, general director of Patrimonio Culture y Bellas Artes, who explains that no specific purchasing budget has been allocated to these centers.
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