Work Package 5

Reclaiming and Redefining Heritage: Data Governance, Displays and Preservation in Collections and Museums

WP5 will analyse how Indigenous heritage emerges through the entanglements between people, other-than-human entities, things and environments. WP5 will also study how Indigenous heritage in museums is constituted by clusters of relations, including the life-worlds in which they partook before and after ending up in archives or on display, and that they may nurture foreseen and unforeseen possibilities for sustainability, research, education, and political action.

Special attention will be given to Indigenous reappropriations of museums and cultural heritage in Latin American countries and their effects on European institutions and in the work of museum and heritage professionals. Furthermore, it will be studied how Indigenous arts, namely Indigenous cinema and visual arts, relate to Indigenous heritage in terms of its transmission, transformation, and revitalisation.

WP Leaders

Bruno Brulon Soares

University of St Andrews, Scotland

Lecturer in Museum and Heritage Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He is a Brazilian museologist and anthropologist. Between 2019 and 2022, he was Chair of the International Committee for Museology (ICOFOM) and currently is co-chair of the Standing Committee for the Museum Definition of ICOM. His most recent book, The Anticolonial Museum (Routledge, 2023), explores the rhetoric of decolonisation in museum theory and its political and material consequences in Europe and Latin America. His research interests have focused on reflexive museology, community-based museums and the political uses of museums and cultural heritage.

Rodrigo Lacerda

Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia, Portugal

Researcher at the Centre for Research Network and coordinator of Politics and of the Practices and Politics of Culture research group in Anthropology (CRIA) . He has been an invited assistant professor at NOVA FCSH since 2017 and held that position at the University of Coimbra from 2019 to 2020. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology: Politics and Displays of Culture and Museology from the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (NOVA FCSH) and ISCTE-IUL. Completed a postgraduate degree at the National Film and Television School (UK) and a BA (Hons) in Film and Broadcast Production at London Metropolitan University. Co-organized the Amerindian Film Screening ¿ Paths of Indigenous Cinema in Brazil (2019), held at the prestigious Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and brought the Indigenous curator Ailton Krenak and several Indigenous filmmakers and artists to Portugal. His research areas are visual anthropology, Indigenous cinema, Indigenous ethnology, and heritage.

Ariruma Kowii

Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Sede Ecuador, Quito