This lecture discusses a series of practices and experiments initiated by Françoise Vergès around the decolonisation of the museum for the ‘Museum without Objects’ (Réunion Island, 2004-2020), ‘The Slave in the Louvre: An Invisible Humanity’ (Paris Triennal, 2013), and for the Musée Delacroix and Musée de Rueil–Malmaison.
Cofounder of the French association ‘Decolonize the Arts’ Françoise Vergès is a an antiracist and decolonial feminist activist. In 2020 she published The Wombs of Women, Race, Capital, Feminism and Aimé Césaire, Resolutely Black. Conversations with Françoise Vergès. She grew up in the Reunion Island, a French postcolony, and has lived in Algeria, France, Mexico, USA and UK. In the mid-70s, she collected and published testimonies on torture, murder, disappearance and repression in countries under military dictatorship (Chile) or civil war (El Salvador). Following a BA (San Diego, 1986) and a PhD (Berkeley, 1995) she taught at Sussex in 1996 and Goldsmiths, 2000-2007. She was President of the French National Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery 2008-2012 and project advisor for Documenta 11. She has published extensively, worked with filmmakers and artists Isaac Julien, Yinka Shonibare, Kader Attia, Hervé Télémaque and is the author of films on Caribbean writers.
Organised by Professor Sarah Wilson (The Courtauld) and Professor Sussan Babaie (The Courtauld) as part of their Frank Davis Memorial Lecture series titled ‘Exiles and Émigrés’.
