Double screening + presentation by María Iñigo Clavo and Nuto Chavajay

In the film Les statues meurent aussi, Resnais and Marker wonder why some works (African art or black art, they say) are to be found in the Musée del Homme, the museum of anthropology, whereas others, such as Greek and Roman classical art, are exhibited in the Musée du Louvre, the art museum. Each museum inserts them in a different context and genealogy: the history of Western art, or the history of humanity and consequently of otherness. The museum: the place of categories. We sense that in the two museums the effects and consequences of death are different.

Ariella Azoulay with Un-Document. Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2019) departs from the work of Resnais and Marker and places it into the present, to claim that these objects, sculptures or statues looted in the imperial exhibitions, in fact, do not die. Un-Document. argues that there is a strong connection between the looted objects in European museums and the demands of asylum seekers trying to enter the countries of their former European colonizers. The rights of the undocumented are inscribed in the looted objects themselves: the colonizers did not steal only statues, but the rights inscribed in those objects. Even so, the statues are still alive and can be recovered, and the rights inscribed in them can be renewed.

María Iñigo Clavo is a researcher, curator and teacher. Her research interests are colonialism, curation and museology, modernity and its inventions of otherness, untranslatability and art in Latin America. On the occasion of this session, she will be dialoguing with Guatemalan artist Benvenuto Chavajay Ixtetelá to think beyond polarization and share positions.

The project is part of the exhibition Becoming Immortal and Then Dying, curated by Caterina Almirall at La Capella.