Más allá de las vitrinas: desvelando las narrativas coloniales y decoloniales de tres museos catalanes

Social and cultural anthropology, other related disciplines, some colonizing territories and museography face the challenge of decolonization. Several European museums have reviewed their colonialities and have proposed museographic changes to decolonize their spaces. We want to analyze the colonial and/or decolonial narratives of three Catalan museums and find the key points to formulate decolonizing proposals. To do this, we did an ethnographic fieldwork, visiting collectively the three selected museums, located in different places of the territory. We prepared a collaborative field notebook, which we analyzed with categories of decolonial studies. Thus, we detected a historical continuity in Catalan colonialism and the narratives of the museums, which exalt key aspects of the colonizing process of the modern mentality (progress, advance, technology), while omitting and forgetting the colonization of the being, imposed by the colonial matrix. This diagnosis leads us to suggest the need to rethink the narratives, avoiding the forgetfulness that perpetuate the modern/colonial discourses.