TOWARDS NEW INTERPRETATIONS: A postcolonial remediation of ‘Chambers of Wonder’ in the Zeeuws Museum

Abstract

In the current tendency of ‘Decolonize the Museum’ efforts, activists have criticized the problematic reiteration of colonial representations in the museological context and questioned what to do with such colonial heritages. In this thesis, I analyse the exhibition ‘Chambers of Wonder’ at the Zeeuws Museum in Middelburg. The collection contains an important part of Dutch colonial heritage that was acquired when Middelburg became a prominent port town of Holland in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Decolonization programmes have used the concept of ‘remediation’ in order to engage feelings of discomfort, doubt, and melancholia that concern the representational field of colonial history. Remediation is used to question the colonial representation in the contemporary environment and aims search for new ways to construct meaning. Remediating the representation strategies in ‘Chambers of Wonder’ thus gives insight into which knowledge is both presented and silenced by structures of power. By discussing both the collection and the way this collection is displayed, we aim to get insight into how knowledge is produced for and through the visitor. I propose to take objects from non-Western cultures, displayed in ‘Chambers of Wonder, as ‘diasporic’ identities. Taking these specific objects as diasporic, we draw attention to their contemporary identities that both refer to a cultural history as to the history of cultural encounters and power relations up to the present day. By doing so I aim to use insights from the post-colonial discourse to offer new interpretations on the relation between the collection and the display strategies in the ‘Chamber of Wonders’. Thus, we provide a remediation of the current exhibition in Zeeuws Museum, based on a post-colonial stance.