The Museum – A Conversation

What follows is a gathering of whispers exchanged as we have visited galleries, instant views we have made immediately after leaving a museum, and thinking we have shared with each other over voicenotes, upon reflecting on glass boxes, a framed image, sculpted vessels. We come to the archive and probe the archive, based on our experiences as critical legal scholars, writers, as storytellers. Here, we consider African and Afro-diasporic art more in terms of storytelling and memories. Instead of offering a definitive interpretation to black aesthetics, something we worry many museums in the UK have succumbed to doing, we think about the archive in relation to black aesthetics – and we attempt to be responsive to what we cannot collect and grasp.