Doing Design History | In Conversation with Ivonne Charlotte Marais

Doing Design History | In Conversation with Ivonne Charlotte Marais

Doing Design History is an interview series that shines a light on the work of members of the Centre for Design History.

In this instalment, CDH member Dr Andrea Potts is in conversation with PhD researcher Ivonne Charlotte Marais. Together, they discuss making visible the colonial violence that is embedded within museum archives and the strategies that Ivonne is developing to decolonise the archive.

Andrea: What is the key focus of your research?

Ivonne: My PhD is about uncovering the colonial violence that is still active in museums to this day. In particular, I look at the museum archive and the way in which it produces forms of knowledge that people then encounter in museum displays. My PhD is a collaborative partnership with the Horniman Museum and Gardens in south London and I focus on the museum’s South African collections, how those objects are recorded in the archive, and how they end up being displayed. So, I’m tracing colonial violence while also proposing a way to decolonise museum archives. There’s often this assumption that there is a factual integrity to museum displays. But museum archives are fallible, and there is not enough rigorous critique of how colonial knowledge remains embedded in the archives of museums that contain collections which come from those time periods.

A: How is colonial violence active in the archive. What does that look like?

I: So, for example, I am looking at how a certain group of objects – knobkerries – are labeled as weapons, as a bludgeon. But actually, these objects existed, and exist today, in a more liminal space, crossing barriers between being a sign of power, something of familial heritage, something which does hold the ability to be a weapon but is also so much more. These objects have been displayed as weapons alone, and that matters. For a long time, this taxonomy has presented the people they were taken from as “savages” and “primitive”, you know: they suggest that these are violent people that need to be suppressed. This language helped to justify colonial suppression and to this day these narratives continue. In an English context, and I say English specifically, it’s always interesting seeing South African ‘weapons’ in museums.

And, actually, a lot of the time there isn’t any information recorded about these objects at all. British collectors were not interested in recording what we might think of as interesting. Who made this object, why was it valuable to them? Or what was it made of? I’m interested in silences in the archive. We need to pay more attention to these silences. When’s there’s nothing recorded, that says a lot and that nothing needs to be recorded in the displays as well.

A knobkerrie in the collection of the Horniman Museum.

A: How are you approaching the notion of decolonisation?

I: I’m working with an approach to the decolonial that is theoretically and practically rooted in sub-Saharan Africa. Decolonisation is not a project that you take on. It’s not something that can be done quickly. It never ends. And whenever there’s been colonialism, there will always have to be the decolonial. They are sort of opposite sides of the coin. And it’s about changing a way of thinking and a way of engaging, of acting. So, that doesn’t mean relying on a community of origin to come in and do the work for you, or to rely on one staff member with a specialty in a certain part of the world to come and do work on that place alone. That might be one amazing project, but it needs to be an ongoing process.

A: Yes, it needs to be embedded across all facets of the institution, with everyone engaging with it. And, actually, that would hopefully avoid situations whereby a small number of individuals are tasked with interrogating and deconstructing, and perhaps creating alternatives to, forms of colonial knowledge. It’s a major task that carries a lot of weight.

I: Yeah, I think that this would help, rather than being a hindrance. I’m the last person to want to slam anyone who works in museums. I’ve worked at a museum that had very little funding, and I have so much respect for museum staff. I’m hoping that my work will provide a set of ways to engage with colonial archives from a decolonial perspective that really foreground social justice, both towards the people who made these objects whose stories have been lost and to the people and the countries that they now represent. One of the things that I want to help to address with this research is the fact that there is no general standard for what a museum archive should be. Often work on museum archives – which is often fantastic – takes the form of short-term, discrete projects. Knowledge is not embedded in an institution. And there is so much pressure on the staff who work in museums to take on these massive tasks: they are contending with archives that go back decades or centuries.

A: Let’s talk a bit more about the Horniman.

I: Yes. Its founder, Frederick Horniman, had a lot of family money from the tea trade and was an avid collector, as many wealthy people, especially men, in the UK were in the nineteenth century. Horniman decided to open a museum in his own home in 1890, and in 1901 the purpose-built Horniman Museum opened. One of his goals was to educate the public and he is an interesting figure because he wanted to share his collection with the people of Forest Hill and the surrounding area. He wanted to gift the collection to an area of London that he saw as poor and run down, where people were neglected. And he wanted to give them this rich cultural space so that people could become better, wealthier citizens. This is a very Victorian and Edwardian paternalistic idea, but it has shaped the museum in a rather positive way. Today, the museum’s staff are actively trying, at every stage of their work, to bring in the local community. So, that’s an important context to my work.

The Horniman Museum and Gardens, Forest Hill

A: What it is like being a researcher based in the university and a researcher based in the museum itself at the same time?

I: One of the challenges is that I’m attempting to be critical of a space while also becoming immersed in that space myself. So, I’m getting to know the difficulties that staff members face. You know, the everyday bureaucracies. And then bringing all that experience back to my desk, and having to think, let’s be critical.

A: I totally get that. But I think that gaining a sense of the realities of what it means to work with a museum archive on a day-to-day basis will only add depth and richness to your work. You can show how layered and messy this work can be! And hopefully that will help you to think through how you navigate working with the archive in practice. Let’s speak more about the museum’s collection.

I: Many of the objects in the museum’s collection were taken during a time of violent empire and they remain in the collection and on display today. In my view, how they came to be in the collection has to be on display. There needs to be a recognition of loss: the loss of knowledge about these objects and why this knowledge is absent from the museum’s archive. I don’t think that these objects should only be presented as knowledge about a group of people, or a culture. Often, the objects are actually doing the exact opposite of this. There is massive loss in the archive. There is so much information that isn’t there. I think that museums need to acknowledge this and recognise that this knowledge cannot be retrieved. So, I think it’s actually detrimental to make general and vague statements around what an object could be. It’s avoiding recognition of the rupture. Archives have been used in this way, as a way to cover up colonial violence.

I argue that we can present these objects through other forms of knowledge. We can bring in different forms of knowledge to the museum archive. As part of my project, I’m working on a methodology called object engagement. And what I mean by that is you gather forms of knowledge that come from the object itself. As part of my fieldwork, I went into the Horniman storeroom and spent time with a set of objects. Through close looking, I took written impressions, photographs and video recordings. I touched and lifted objects when that was possible. And through doing that, the objects presented me with lots of information. So, as an example, I spent time with knobkerries which, as I mentioned, have been classed as weapons. There is an example in the collection that has been mended multiple times, and the mend shows that this object could never, even from the start, have ever been used to bludgeon anyone. The mend shows that there was care taken, that there was someone who cared enough for this to think that it needed to be mended. This object had value for whomever it belonged to. The mending was done more than once over some time. It shows a generational movement of this object through multiple hands. In the archive, this is classified as just a weapon, but by going in and spending time with the object, it could not have been. I see this methodology as being a decolonial one that can disrupt colonial knowledge systems within museum archives.

I think, throughout our conversation, we have been hinting at the fact that in a European context, decolonising the museum has been viewed from a western perspective: it’s a one-off, let’s get the job done perspective. That’s very limiting and it’s a political act to frame it that way. Well, often it’s not even an act. And I’m hoping that my research helps to shift that perspective.

Ivonne Charlotte Marais is a third year Techne funded Doctoral Candidate at the University of Brighton. She has an MPhil in Anthropology, University of Oxford, MA in Art History, SOAS, Honours Art History, University of Witwatersrand and BA Art History and English Lit, University of Brighton. Her research interests cover African art, material culture, museum studies and decolonialism. She has worked as a curator across continents. Ivonne also practices as a writer of think pieces and poetry published previously in the Isis Magazine, performed in Brighton, and available on her Substack page ‘SkryfVars’.