Musing from a museum

Just a reflective piece on my most recent visit to the Musée D'Ethnographie in Geneva paired with a photo I took of the flowers outside.

I live in central Geneva. I have access to the city’s bars, cultural spaces, restaurants, university, hospitals, parks, rivers, and lake, all within a 20-minute walk. However, the closest institution to me, which I see when I open my windows, is the Musée d’Ethnographie (MEG). It looms across the street, or I loom over it, on tiptoes from my bedroom window.

Last year, the MEG gave the Genevan population a bold exhibition: Mémoires, Genève dans le monde colonial. It examined the history of the museum’s collections with a focus on provenance, inviting visitors to reflect on where the objects they had long seen behind glass, accompanied by carefully curated texts, truly came from. One of the central features of any ethnographic museum is its collection of masks. Masks, masking, metamorphosis. Whenever I visit the MEG, I am drawn to them. However, recently, I’ve been differently drawn. Possibly because I ended my 20s and entered my 30s in the defining era of the pandemic, where surgical masks entered the public imagination, enabling social veiling, prompting social outrage, and governing new social contracts.

And so, yesterday, I returned to the MEG again - this time for its temporary exhibition called Afrosonica - soundscapes - an exploration of the role of music and sound in African societies and their diasporas, co-curated by Madeleine Leclair and Mo Laudi (Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape). A few days earlier, I had visited with a friend, finding the exhibition dense and difficult to connect with. I then saw that there was a guided visit by one of the co-curators, Madeleine, and decided to give it another go. I enjoyed it much more, but left the MEG full of other questions.

Notably, one on legitimacy. Whose right is it to tell the stories of objects that have been historically exoticised and brought to the Western imagination largely through colonial conquests? My visit also prompted questions of collective memory. This summer, I spent several days in the Mauritian archives, hoping to find, among dusty papers, fragments that could help me reconstitute my own memory, and in that quest, write about what we remember and what we forget (forthcoming, no fear!). Museums have long relied on displaying decontextualised objects, but now, in a process of decolonisation, they are curating new forms of collective memory. In the context of the MEG and Afrosonica, we’re being asked to look and listen, as the museum curates, or attempts to, new forms of collective memory. My question is: how revolutionary is this shift, truly?

The reason I ask this question is that identities are still being masked. While the MEG asks itself bold questions about legitimacy and its colonial anchoring, would the more radical path to reconciliation not be the repatriation of those very objects? Should ethnographic museums still be sites of historical and cultural awareness?

As I walked through the four central axes that organised Afrosonica, one object, with its accompanying photo and text, made me pause for slightly longer: the bullroarer, or rhombe in French. The co-curator explained that they had dug through the archives to find one donated to the MEG in the 1970s by an individual (unnamed), who had bought it in a market in Bamako, Mali. At the MEG, a recording of the bullroarer’s sound is available to visitors - its vibrations said to signal that “things are taking place”, alluding to energies of the otherworldly and immortal kind.

To produce the recording, the MEG invited a Malian collaborator to Geneva to play the museum’s bullroarer. But the story goes that the instrument in their possession did not make a sound. Unable to know why, and fortunately for the MEG, the collaborator had brought another bullroarer with him, whose sounds they ended up recording instead.

These sounds were captivating; it almost felt surreal to hear them in the basement of a building in central Geneva. I did some more research into the bullroarer and its use among the Dogon people of Mali. I found that, in a rare event, every 60 years, the Dogon people celebrate Sigui. The last one began in 1967, and if my maths is correct, the next is in two years. This event, tradition, or spectacle is fascinating, filled with dances, rhythmic sounds, and rituals. It is a festival that lasts for seven years, offering spiritual renewal and the passing of ancestral and ancient secrets.

So, to return to my question: should ethnographic museums still exist today? Perhaps, yes. If only, to prompt imaginations to run wild, to invite interrogation, and to discover - not gorge, not exoticise, not passively imbibe, but to shape one’s relation to the several unknowns that surround one’s existence.

A quick Google search with the words “Sigui” and “dogon” gives me an AI-generated summary with all I need to know about the festival - yet, the sources are dubious. Much of ethnographic or anthropological recounting is from an outsider’s perspective. The bullroarer made me stop in an exhibition of 26 different objects, all with a unique sound, story, and context. What I then learnt about the Sigui festival has been even more fascinating, and yet, I know that I have only scratched the surface.

Returning to the idea of masks and masking - also a tenet of the culture and customs of the Dogon people, especially during the Sigui festival - I ask myself how identities are told. If my conclusion today is that perhaps ethnography museums, hosting a multitude of masks, should perhaps continue to exist, I still wonder to what extent the objects they display and the stories they tell remain a fascination for the outsider, rather than offering authentic recollections of their provenances.