Can Silence Speak? Cabinets of Curiosities as a decolonial strategy.

This presentation is intended as a provocation, articulating the concept of cabinets of curiosities with decolonizing strategies. In 2022, at the Science Museum of the University of Coimbra, the exhibition Cabinets of Curiosities: An Interpretation was inaugurated. Immediately it was the subject of strong critiques and media debates. All people saw was how bad it is to “revive” this concept. But – even thought this particular exhibition was not conceived with that in mind – it was also a lost chance to discuss a key-point: could a cabinet of curiosities be a sensorial and conceptual strategy to decolonize the way we look at objects in museums and exhibitions?
I intend to challenge Western orthodoxies, through the articulation of the concept of cabinet of curiosities with decolonial strategies of display. In order to do that, my proposal is to imagine a cabinet of curiosities without legends or captions, without a cultural mediation of museum professionals or academics; I ask myself if this could be a way for visitors to question themselves about what they are seeing, and about why they are seeing it, and if a cultural mediation can be so reactionary as silence can be liberating. Setting from the questioning of remains from an obsolete world, from its deconstruction and reinvention, and from an absolute disorder, maybe the silences in what is being presented to the public – and not represented, as an edited victim of mediation – could result in an introspection based in an absence of a priori explanations. This way, instead of being given an interpretation map about how to navigate the exhibition, maybe visitors could find their own coordinates to critically navigate colonial objects in Western institutions.