Borja Franco Llopis
Borja Franco Llopis
Title: “Museums and Alterity. The Construction of the Other in the Museum Discourses of the 21st Century”
Abstract: Although the concept of ‘decolonization’ began to be discussed in the International Council of Museums at the end of the 20th century, it was only in the last decade that the most prominent museums have made significant efforts to promote a re-reading of works of art and objects from the past. These measures were firstly implemented in museums of anthropology, history of slavery and contemporary art. Later, they began to be developed in other types of collections, mostly related to collections of great Old Masters. Such initiatives have mainly begun through temporary exhibitions, which have served, in many cases, to restructure the museum discourses of such institutions. Projects such as Slavery at the Rijksmuseum or Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter at the Metropolitan Museum of New York are just two examples of museums reevaluating their discourses and sharing them with society. This paper aims to outline the main actions taken by Fine Arts museums in this regard. My work aims to analyse how they were criticised by the non-specialist press and compare them with the opinions of experts in the field in other more specialised media. A comparative study allows me to identify divergences between the museum’s proposals, societal perceptions, and criticisms from experts in museology and/or studies of alterity. Based on these conclusions, I will show the different cultural policies developed today on such a complex and politicised issue as the re-reading of the past through the pictorial collections of the most important Fine Arts Museums. Furthermore, I will discuss the new challenges facing such institutions decolonizing their collections.
Bio: Borja Franco is Professor of Art History at the UNED. His research focuses on the study of the image of Islam in the Mediterranean in the Middle and Early Modern Ages, as well as its repercussions today. He was the working group leader of the COST Action Islamic Legacy, which brought together 251 researchers from 36 European and North African countries, as well as the principal investigator of two international projects on Muslim-Christian relations in Europe. Based on these experiences, he has initiated a new line of research in relation to the decolonisation of museums and cultural institutions, as well as the study of their collections, which has already produced significant results by being invited by prestigious universities such as Columbia, Università di Macerata and the University of Split
He was a postdoctoral researcher in several prestigious institutions such as the Museo Nacional del Prado, and Research Honorary Fellow at Birbeck College (University of London). He has been a Visiting Scholar at the School of History and Archaeology in Rome, the Instituto Storico per el Medievo (Rome), the Warburg Institute, the Johns Hopkins University, the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, Columbia University and Universidade Nova of Lisbon, as well as Visiting Professor at the Università di Genova. He is an elected member of the Academia Joven de España and the Young Academy of Europe. He is a collaborator in the State Research Agency of the Ministry of Sciences of the Spanish Government, participating actively in grant management and evaluation of national projects.
Finally, he wrote the script and directed 16 documentaries screened on the Spanish National TV (TVE) related to the Islamic legacy in Europe, and others in collaboration with VisitFlanders, for the dissemination of the Flemish Art in Spain.
Affiliation: Faculty of Art History, UNED, Spain
