Collaborative Practices and Decolonial Media Production for Museums

How are collaborative media production practices in museums changing professional and communitybased heritage and representation practices? In my presentation I will highlight recent projects I have been involved in developing as a producer and designer. I ask, if the creation of new media for museums is to take culture seriously (Balsamo 2011) in design and methods of production, then how might museums be shaped by, or actively reshape the discourses and practices that maintain them (Hennessy et al. 2018)? As scholars Zoe Todd and Crystal Fraser (2016) have highlighted, the structures and policies that govern the organization of and access to colonial museums and archives have amplified Eurocentric perspectives that support on-going violence and dispossession. They argue that it is “essential that we continue to recognize archival spaces, especially state archives, for their original intent: to create national narratives that seek to legitimize the nation state by excluding Indigenous voices, bodies, economies, histories, and socio-political structures” (2016, pp.71–72). In this context, I will ask if collaborative practices of media making in the museum, which includes the creation of new digital collections networks and emerging documentary technologies used by memory institutions at a range of scales might move beyond what Robin Boast (2011) calls “neo-colonial collaboration” toward transformative instances of reconciliation. In particular, I will discuss how the creation of relationships between museums, multimedia producers, and originating communities in the creation of digital representations of history, culture, and belongings is central to collaborative work. 2. FEATURED PROJECTS