Historically, universities have been foundational to promoting and shaping European culture, knowledge, and values including democracy, human dignity, freedom, human rights, and equality as a global project. They have also been leading institutions for promoting dialogue and building strategic alliances between the global north and the global south in the fields of science, heritage, and cultural and creative industries.

In recent years, universities and museums in Europe have increasingly developed innovative approaches to address the colonial entanglements in their collecting practices, material legacies, understandings of national and transnational identities, and the production of knowledge.

However, unfinished conversations with former colonies about colonial legacies in and beyond Europe remain barriers to cooperation and exchange as well as the promotion of European values. COLUMN brings together partners from the creative industries, seven European universities from the Coimbra network, including some of the oldest research universities in Europe, and partner universities from the global south to rethink, reframe, and refresh approaches to European and postcolonial arts, culture, heritage, and societal values.

Botanical Gardens are prominent sites of scientific research, education and public engagement. It was in the colonial era that botanical gardens became truly global phenomenon, and hence their history is intimately connected to the history of European expansionism.

This work package features an interdisciplinary team from Suriname, Italy, and the Netherlands investigating the roles of universities and botanical gardens in the domestication and spread of non-European plants in Europe. We analyse whether scientific and practical plant knowledge, along with the trade and exchange of living plants, seeds, and herbaria, are linked to colonialism. Based on this historical research, we seek to determine whether, how, and to what degree botanical gardens today still carry colonial legacies.

The goal of our work package is to develop new terminology to describe the coloniality of botanical gardens and to create an innovative educational programme that teaches children and young adults about the complex and intertwined history of botanical gardens from a decolonised perspective. In this programme, pupils learn how environmental issues and socio-cultural histories of colonialism are interconnected.

Our team consists of members from the Utrecht University, the University of Bologna, the Anton de Kom University of Suriname. We work as historians, heritage experts, and biologists, and as curators, teachers, and researchers at the National Herbarium of Suriname, the Botanical Garden and Herbarium at Bologna, and the Utrecht University Botanic Gardens, supported by Amsterdam-based design studio Studio Louter, and artists-in-residence from different continents.

Members:

Utrecht University

Mette Bruinsma (PI)

Richard Calis (PI)

Gijs Steur

Rosa de Jong

University of Suriname

Eliza Zschuschen

Dorothy Traag

University of Bologna

Monica Azzolini

Juri Nascimbene

Designer and creative partner:

Studio Louter

Historically, universities have been foundational to promoting and shaping European culture, knowledge, and values including democracy, human dignity, freedom, human rights, and equality as a global project. They have also been leading institutions for promoting dialogue and building strategic alliances between the global north and the global south in the fields of science, heritage, and cultural and creative industries.

In recent years, universities and museums in Europe have increasingly developed innovative approaches to address the colonial entanglements in their collecting practices, material legacies, understandings of national and transnational identities, and the production of knowledge.

However, unfinished conversations with former colonies about colonial legacies in and beyond Europe remain barriers to cooperation and exchange as well as the promotion of European values. COLUMN brings together partners from the creative industries, seven European universities from the Coimbra network, including some of the oldest research universities in Europe, and partner universities from the global south to rethink, reframe, and refresh approaches to European and postcolonial arts, culture, heritage, and societal values.

The intangible dimensions of knowledge production, identity, and representations are essential for understanding and addressing colonial entanglements. These issues differ from the decolonial acts of restitution and repatriation often linked to museum institutions. Instead, they concern how heritage is conceived and presented through knowledge representations and museological practices.

Learning from postcolonial universities and heritage institutions in Asia (with a focus on Vietnam), our working package explores the interface between European and Asian approaches towards decoloniality and heritage. Recent scholarly work underlines the complexity of decolonial practice in sedimented post-colonial legacies. In collaboration with Vietnamese colleagues, we reexamine the (de)colonial entanglements of heritage visions, values, and voice. We aim to explore new pathways and re-present intangible heritage visions, values and voice through collaborative engagement with heritage communities, culminating in a travelling multi-media exhibition that will be presented in both Vietnam and Switzerland.

The working approach includes collaborative research and the participatory preparation of an exhibition. The joint team comprises Peter Bille Larsen from the University of Geneva (PI) and a seconded Senior Researcher and Postdoctoral Researcher affiliated with the Institute for Cultural Studies (ICS) in Vietnam. A part-time Post Doc will also work with the University of Geneva.

Members:

University of Geneva
Peter Bille Larsen