YVETTE MUTUMBA
Yvette Mutumba is a Berlin-based editor, curator and academic. This year marks the tenth anniversary of Contemporary And (C&), the magazine she co-founded to connect and acknowledge networks of cultural producers in Africa and the global diaspora. It and its sister publication, C& América Latina, aim to investigate the contemporary visual arts in an accessible and non-academic fashion. From 2012 to 2016, she was curator at the Weltkulturenmuseum in Frankfurt. In 2020, Yvette was invited to become a curator-at-large at the Stedelijk Museum, the Netherlands’ leading modern and contemporary art museum. Through her study and research, she has come to believe that Western museums cannot plan their future without acknowledging their history of legitimising racist and colonial violence.
Interview by Lydia WilfordPortrait courtesy of C&
LYDIA WILFORD How has your time at the Stedelijk Museum been?
YVETTE MUTUMBA I started in the summer of 2020, right after the wave of Black Lives Matter protests caused by George Floyd’s murder. It was coming over to Europe and a lot of institutions were pledging solidarity, which was kind of problematic. Many people assume that the museum decided to invite me at that point as a curator who comes from a different perspective, but they had asked me before. The idea was to be “at large”, meaning that I had distance from the conversations happening within the institution; as an observer, I was giving feedback and input. After a couple of months, I wrote a report that started with the website and their presentation of the museum as a “museum of icons”, without questioning who these icons are or acknowledging the fact that they are mainly white and male. Words like “canon” would be used, and I was saying – what is the canon? Who says what the canon is? There are a lot of canons. What possibilities are there to bring to light aspects of the collection that have not been considered or works that may be problematic and need to be re-examined? Shortly after I joined Stedelijk, Charl Landvreugd was appointed as head of research and curatorial practice, and I’ve been working with him and Gwen Parry on the Stedelijk Studies Journal. When we took it over, it was a very straightforward academic journal, with mainly white Dutch academic authors and a mainly white Dutch editorial board. So, we started by thinking about what Stedelijk Studies could be. We had an open call that, for the first time, was sent out to networks beyond the Stedelijk connections, like the C& network. It was uncomfortable, though, because writers would not be paid, it being an academic journal. I don’t know anyone who has the luxury of writing ten pages of text for free. However, someone based at a university with a university salary, who does this kind of thing only to add to their publication list, can afford to do that. The impossibility of paying contributors in that first issue of Stedelijk Studies that we did was reflected in who would send abstracts. It’s also a peer-reviewed journal, which is common in the academic sphere, but it became clear that with the few texts not written by Dutch people, the feedback was often super-critical. Peer reviewers would, for example, say, “Well, this author hasn’t quoted all the recent literature published on museum studies and collections.” I would say, “Yes, if someone is based in Johannesburg or Nairobi, even if they’re adjunct to a university, they don’t necessarily know all the publications that have been published in Europe on the topic and they don’t have to.” Their references are of equal importance; their text is not less valid than a European academic text. It became very clear that the norm for academia is very much Westernised.
LW Art history or museum studies has such a strong reputation for inaccessibility, in the UK, too.
YM Accessibility is what led peer-reviewing to be changed for Stedelijk Studies. We said, OK, we can have an excellent text that is also a speculative text; something that comes from performance. Next time, we may have artistic interventions. This is all knowledge production, just from various perspectives, and we don’t want to value one higher than the other. That’s the project of C&; the idea of accessibility is realised through no payment barriers when it comes to content, free educational programmes and paying stipends for mentoring programmes. The briefing authors get is: “We believe that you can talk about a complex topic in an accessible way.” It’s not necessarily easy – it might even be harder – but it is possible. We have a superb young readership aged between 18 and 35, which is quite young for an art magazine that doesn’t do fashion or film. It’s important for us to make the point that, although we don’t want to be didactic, this is connected to education. There’s an upcoming generation of people around the world that is really committed to the content that we provide.
LW Enos Nyamor, a writer for C&, states that, “as art writers, we’re not able to solve famine or cure diseases, but we can enrich our communities, by articulating, affirming or even negating aesthetic standards”. Is the idea of negating aesthetics important at C&, especially in the art writing you commission?
YM C& is more about providing a space to do that. If a person comes to us with a perspective that focuses on specific concepts – like negating existing aesthetic standards – then this is clearly important to make visible. It is a platform for a variety of approaches, for directions or perspectives that come from numerous voices. There is always the possibility for someone to say: “It is all about aesthetics as a political statement.” But we avoid this weird expectation or idea that certain aesthetics are connected to Africa or the “African Global Brand”. It is, of course, problematic, and more predominant than people would admit. I’ve been confronted with it many times; someone will say, “It doesn’t really look like that person is from Africa.” I would say we, as a magazine, strongly oppose that.
LW Do you have an idea of what the museum of the future might look like? A broad question, I know.
YM There is a speculative text by Ashley Gallant that I really love in Stedelijk Studies Journal #12. It’s about this idea that artworks or rather the idea or concept of an artwork become not only owned by everyone but shared by everyone; copyright wouldn’t apply. Instead of lending an object, a museum would lend a description of the idea of the object, and the museum would create it itself or get members of its audience to make it. Gallant speculates on that idea of what she calls post-copyright. For me, the museum of the future is a commonly owned space. There are ways of doing that not only with ethnographic collections but with contemporary art, too. In a shared ownership between certain communities, the public sector, and maybe still also specific circles of collectors, the dynamics would change a lot. This vision of the museum is maybe kind of utopian. I’m hopeful it would go in the direction of letting the art speak, giving artworks an agency that is beyond the moment. It should become a given that certain political aspects and histories are part of the trajectory of those museums. That’s the ideal. It will take some time to get to that point. We talk about the idea of “the museum”, but there is no monolithic “museum” because what happens inside is so complex. No museum can actually speak with one voice. You don’t know who wrote these wall texts, and they present a very subjective way of telling the truth or untruth.
LW [Curator] Clémentine Deliss has spoken about how the process of digitalisation can be invasive and even violent at times. Will Stedelijk digitalise its collections?
YM At the Stedelijk Museum I am not involved with this, but simply from the perspective of accessibility it would of course make sense. That is the main reason why museums do it. Clémentine was speaking about ethnographic collections, and I think there’s a difference between those and contemporary collections or modern collections. The basis of, for example, the Stedelijk collection is white male artists, and so digitalisation is not as violent an intrusion. Many ethnographic objects are not supposed to be imprisoned in a very specific collection or museum. New permanent exhibitions in the Stedelijk look critically at the artworks’ histories. Using a digital sphere can make sure that other narratives are acknowledged.
LW There’s an idea around “open storage” or “museum universities” that’s beginning to emerge, which would allow artists and eventually the public to interact with and even re-arrange objects usually not on display.
YM Contemporary art collections, not only ethnographic collections, have been financed by money that came from colonial exploitation. So, we all own it, right? The minimally appropriate response would be to make it so that anyone can have access. Within the walls of the museum, there are so many things happening that people outside are just not aware of, all these processes of restructuring, discussions, emotion and pain. Museums should be much more honest about it so that they can try to connect with communities that would never think of going there. It can feel like there’s this huge threshold that they have to cross. A museum can seem so inhuman, a huge machine. I’m always for access, access and transparency as much as possible. I worked as a curator and as a custodian myself, so I’m aware that institutions can be hesitant, simply because they don’t want people who are not experts to enter and make up their own narratives. But any narrative that can build around these artworks or objects that are defined within the collection is relevant.
LW If museums acknowledged the failures that come with all of this change, then people would relate to them a lot more.
YM That’s key. There’s a documentary, White Balls on Walls [2022], directed by Sarah Vos. It involves the director of the Stedelijk, Rein Wolfs, and it gets down to the key issues. There are moments where Rein says, well, up until now, I’ve only exhibited white artists.
LW I have one more question that’s not related to museums. Is there a book, piece of music or artwork that has made you think lately?
YM A book by Minna Salami called Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone [2020]. Salami manages to pull off a very difficult task: reflecting on such complex notions as art, beauty, liberation and Blackness by inter- twining these concepts with storytelling, academic study and social criticism. This methodology, which Salami calls “sensuous knowledge”, merges emotional intelligence with rational thinking. I find it very inspiring.◉