Only Collections in The Building is a podcast series by researcher and museum activist Heba Abd el Gawad, and Associate Professor Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharp, as part of UCL’s Institute of Archaeology AHRC funded Mobilising Collections for Institutional Change: Egypt at the Horniman’ project.
 
Activists, artists, and indigenous practitioners are being invited to intervene in or disrupt museum spaces with the aim to bring change. But meaningful collaboration relies on much larger structural or professional changes that they rarely have the power to implement.
 
There is so much talk about museums, decolonisation, and social justice, but very little that is grounded in the day-to-day work of structural change and how it impacts the people who are relied on to implement it. It is in this everyday work that relationships can breakdown. Rather than having a breakdown, we will ask what it means in practice to put people before collections by sharing our experience working together on All Eyes on Her! (https://www.horniman.ac.uk/project/all-eyes-on-her/), a community-collaborative exhibition at the Horniman.
 
This series is produced by Maria Christodoulou, creator of From Root to Vine.
 
Episode 1 uses a packet of scarf pins from the 1990s to explore how everyday resistance is hidden through museum practice.

Episode 1: Unpinning Colonialism "Only Collections in the Building"

The UCL Institute of Archaeology is the largest and one of the most highly regarded centres for archaeology, cultural heritage and museum studies in Britain. It is one of the very few places in the world actively pursuing research on a truly global scale in the archaeological sciences, heritage studies and world archaeology. 

Episode 1: Unpinning Colonialism "Only Collections in the Building"

UCL Institute of Archaeology Podcasts