What is a museum, and what is its purpose?
In October’s Catalyst Circle, Oscar Umganzisiwemuremyi took us on a virtual tour of the Museum of the Environment in Kigali, Rwanda, where he is Museum Management Specialist, sharing his reflections on the benefits of museums - not only for education and preserving heritage, but for dialogue, collective healing, and the economy.
The conversation that followed considered the role of the museum in and beyond colonial structures, while also questioning this binary. Partly inspired by the Museum of the Environment’s herbal garden, a question surfaced: If the modern museum is a colonial invention, how might we reimagine it as an institution, where artefacts are not extracted and separated from their contexts, but are - perhaps - kept alive?
The Catalyst Circle is a community of practitioners working across Africa, Asia, Europe and North and South America, who meet online each month for a series of recorded conversations exploring “radical ecology”.
Watch the session on Vimeo here.