The Ethics of Display: Recontextualising Colonial Objects in Public and Enclosed space

Written by Lilia Foster.

The toppling of Bristol’s Edward Colston statue, that once gazed pensively from his plinth in the city centre, set in motion a fierce debate over the implications of removing monuments of controversial figures across the UK. Colston, who was deputy governor of the Royal African Company and oversaw the transportation of almost 100,000 enslaved people, was felled by protestors of systemic racism in 2020. Boris Johnson, Priti Patel, and many others in government deemed this a revision of history an act of vandalism. To tear down statues of controversial figures was to lie about our past, they argued, and would impoverish the education of generations to come.

Integrated into our public spaces, colonial commemorative statues like Colston’s are rarely accompanied by context beyond a nameplate. Passersby do little more than glance at it, continuing none the wiser about the specifics of their actions. The only impression on the viewer, inherent to their public display and largesse, is that the subject is still revered. This context does little to address our colonial past or present. Now, however, Colston’s statue is permanently displayed horizontally, graffitied and defaced, in Bristol’s M Shed Museum as part of their exhibition on the history of protest in the city. A survey of 14,000 Bristolians found that 80% supported the new means of display. Still accessible to the public, it acknowledges, not erases, the facts of history that led to the erection of a statue of a major actor in the slave trade. But it also recognises the coexisting historical truth of the statue’s toppling as part of the Black Lives Matter protests. It is entirely possible to educate without indirectly perpetuating the glorification of an enslaver. The “erasing history” argument thus falls away to reveal the apathy and inertia of Johnson and voices in agreement.

The answer, then, is to alter the way we take in the colonial, a process which is already underway. The West’s historical plundering of cultural artifacts to fill our museums and galleries has been a topic of debate for a considerable time, and now more nuanced discussion over how to best teach about these systems has arisen. It is not just about simply showing that empires were built and populations exploited. Exhibiting these images carelessly, particularly when they deal with structural violence against indigenous peoples, can come to be another means of othering. It is an exercise for Western audiences to comfort themselves, by inducing compassion under the guise of ‘educating themselves’. Certain groups have reclaimed custodianship of sensitive material of this kind and now restrict access to it, as is the case of some early photographs of Aboriginal Australians, in which the subjects were stripped of their clothing and photographed next to measuring devices, completely dehumanised. Our education should not be facilitated by persistent dehumanization and othering.

While museums invite learning, enclosing the colonial in spaces so associated with the past can overlook our continued benefit from these systems. Indeed, our focus on decolonising our landscape does not undo the maintenance of modern-day colonialism by our government through arms sales, alliances and political silences. For a century now Britain has supported the systematic genocide and dispossession of Palestinians, and continues to intervene across Africa and the Middle East, demonstrating an enduring belief in their own moral and civilizational authority, to disastrous ends. In this vein, a second argument has emerged in criticism of the removal of statues because of its potential redirection of focus away from systemic issues and towards more superficial ones. The protest that toppled Colston was against racism and police brutality. Even so, it was the debate over Colston’s toppling that dominated headlines. Decolonising our public spaces matters, but it should be part of wider debates about our continued engagement with colonial legacies.

In the wake of the statue debate, journalist and classicist Charlotte Higgins 2020 Guardian article mapped the practice of “damnatio memoriae,” across history. This phrase translates to the condemnation of a person’s memory, through removing statues or scratching their name from public inscriptions, that was common during the Roman era onwards. Higgins notes that figures subject to this practice often feature more heavily in public memory than others, Nero among them. Statue removal represents the continuation of our age-old desire to shape our visual landscape as power changes hands. These spaces are shared by all of us, and while this debate should not obscure conversations over continued subjugation, there is no reason that we should not curate public spaces to align with our values.