Roundtable "Decentring Knowledge: Conversations on Colonial Legacies"
How can we confront and re-mediate the entangled memories and colonial legacies embedded within European cultural institutions? Within the framework of the Museum Fellowship at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR), Rosa Anna Di Lella and Gaia Delpino (curators at MUCIV – Museo delle Civiltà) propose a series of dialogical roundtables designed to critically interrogate institutional histories, disciplinary frameworks, and the power relations driving knowledge production.
Rather than a traditional sequence of academic presentations, this project utilizes the roundtable format as a decolonial practice in its own right, structuring the initiative into three central encounters: Conversation 1: Provenance Research in Museum Practices; Conversation 2: Critical Curatorship for Rewriting Colonial Histories; and Conversation 3: Memorialization and Re-signification of Colonial Histories through Literature. The central focus revolves around narrative authority: which histories are told, by whom, and under what conditions? By intersecting diverse fields, the series examines how museums function as sites of demarcation and how alternative modes of knowing can move cultural heritage beyond symbolic gestures.
This initiative is deeply grounded in the ongoing curatorial practices of the exhibition project Museum of Opacities at MUCIV (Rome), which addresses the progressive reinstallation of the former Colonial Museum collections by exposing historical fractures, silences, and archival violence. The programme is also connected to the process of critical reflection, research, and interpretation currently being carried out at MUCIV on its Collection of African Arts and Cultures, contributing to a broader discussion of the epistemological and historical questions surrounding African museum collections. The three conversations will unfold step by step: the first brings silent colonial trajectories to light through provenance research; the second bridges archives and contemporary art interpretations across Italy and the Netherlands; and the third explores family memories and rewriting through a dialogue with Somali-Italian women writers.
© associative image: Andrea Ricci