in Spain, the Minister of Culture launches the debate on the decolonization of museums

The controversy is mounting in Spain after a proposal to modernize the speeches of major cultural institutions.

European museums and their relationship to art from former colonies are being called into question. The proposal is not entirely new. In France, Emmanuel Macron formulated it in 2017 and materialized it in 2021 with the restitution of 26 works of art in Benin. But in Spain, when the new Minister of Culture took up the issue, a political controversy immediately arose.

These are two short sentences, pronounced by the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, before a parliamentary committee. The type of sessions that are usually not widely attended: “One of the challenges that we have set ourselves, in line with international recommendations, is to establish spaces for dialogue and exchange that allow us to go beyond a colonial framework or one stuck in gender or ethnocentric inertia. . We work to make visible and recognize the perspective of the communities and the memory of the peoples from whom the exhibited works come.”

The far right denounces a “woke cultural policy”

Fighting action on the right. The conservative People’s Party, the PP, accuses the minister of ignorance. He would ignore the history of Spain, whose empire would have been based on crossbreeding and cultural mixing much more than on exploitation and dispossession.

Vox, the far-right party, brandishes a term that we have not yet seen much in the Spanish debate: the wokism trial. Vicente Barrera is vice-president of the autonomous community of Valencia and regional minister of culture: “We want to send a message of tranquility. We will be a barrier against woke cultural policy and the attacks on freedom and cultural plurality that the new minister seems to want to impose.”

And where are the museums? Neocolonial macho reactionaries or incurable woke leftists? Carlos Chaguaceda is the communications director of the Prado Museum. His institution clearly did not wait for politicians to modernize its discourse, without ever sinking, he says, into controversy. “The minister makes a series of reflections that society has made before him. Our first exhibition on Clara Peeters dates from 2016. The women’s journeys are from 2021, he lists. We held an exhibition on works of colonial influence and inspiration in 2022, Voyage Retour. And at that time no one talked about it.” Restitutions are not on the agenda at Prado, which says it has not received the slightest request. In Spain, decolonization will mainly involve changing discourses.