«Desarmar un aparato técnico colonial»: Maritime museography and slavery

The slave ship is conspicuously absent from maritime museum displays. This omission is particularly problematic in museums located in port regions historically and economically linked to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. The absence of this object in museum exhibits is not a minor oversight: the modern slave system deported at least 12.5 million people from Africa to the Americas.

The "Desarmar un aparato técnico colonial" (Dismantling a colonial technical apparatus) project focuses on the Barcelona Maritime Museum and questions when and how the ships and themes of the slave trade disappeared from the institution's exhibition halls and educational projects. However, the problem it raises cannot be resolved solely within the framework of museological debates. This project proposes an interdisciplinary approach encompassing the history of science, critical museological studies, and the history of slavery, paying particular attention to the politics of the body involved in colonial domination. Its aim is to offer tools for analyzing, beyond the museum setting, the function of the production of ignorance surrounding colonialism; the implications of structural racism in shaping epistemic frameworks; and the reach of identity-based, nationalist, and patriarchal conventions in heritage narratives and the dissemination of knowledge about the past.

"Desarmar un aparato técnico colonial" looks inside the slave ship to challenge, first and foremost, museography focused on the object's splendor. How can we contextualize the ship beyond a history of technology? What stories of the transatlantic voyage have been eclipsed by the narrative of "the great adventure of the sea"? What ways of life have been excluded from maritime museography? What stories of care, reproduction, medicine, and health have gone untold in the ship's history?

In this "Work in Progress" seminar, independent researcher and PhD in the history of science Anyely Marín Cisneros will present her work at the Barcelona Maritime Museum on museography, slavery, and the history of science. Professor Jaume Sastre-Juan (UAB) will moderate, and afterwards there will be time for questions and general discussion.