About This Project

Gloria Oyarzabal

In Roman law, ownership was defined as the full, absolute, perpetual and exclusive enjoyment of an object or corporeal entity. USUS was the right to make use of the entity, FRUCTUS to receive the fruits, ABUSUS to dispose of it according to the power to modify, sell or destroy it. Museums originated as institutions more than 300 years ago, when royal collections became accessible to the general public, thus becoming instrumental tools in the construction of identity and the definition of nation. Given the colonialist origin of many of their collection’s narrative, then knowledge creation and collective/individual memory come into conflict. A review of the relationship between anthropology and museum collections assembled from a plundering colonial past,leads to the conclusion that for decades these spaces have reinforced exoticism and distinction, intrinsically related to supremacist discourses. Is the concept of the museum universal? Intrinsically related to “otherness” and the colonisation of the concept of woman, is the responsibility for the risky representation of black women in the history of Western art. Stereotypes of black sexuality: audacious, available and servile. The odalisque leads to a larger discussion of race within art and art spaces. And as a starting point my enthrallment with the painting La Blanche et la Noire by the French-Swiss painter Félix Vallotton (1913). Inspired by Manet’s Olympia and Ingres’ Odalisque à l’esclave, it depicts the Sapphic love between a sylph and a black woman. Unlike his predecessors, Vallotton dispenses all exotic references. Is returning what has been plundered and looted, both in terms of objects and identities, an urgent, universal and feasible question for all? Ownership, restitution, reparation, recontextualisation? Who has the agency to give, return, lend, adjudicate, rename?

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