 Alberto López Barragados, anthropologist and professor of the University of Barcelona. And he's the main researcher of this project called Traders, which is a very current study and project, a pioneer study from the Spanish perspective, talking about the connections of different museums of Catalonia, a study of traceability, but also the study of incidents and dialogue with different results that will be developed and have been developed. But it will also be developed next year, so let us hear from him. Well, first of all, good afternoon everybody, those of you who are here, thank you for your presence and the Ethnological Museum of Barcelona, represented by his director. Thank you for welcoming us. This is the third edition and I hope it's not the last one, because in a way I want to think that we'll take advantage of common reflections such as the one we are starting now and we've been doing for a long time. My intervention will be quite institutional. My task is to present a project and we are convinced that this is a pioneer project. At least we are convinced that it's pioneer in Spain. And this project is framed in this sprit of time, which was opened from the Black Lives Matter movement and also the different memories in public spaces and these metropolis with colonial legacy. Of course the project is the result of this background. It's fed from this and it's growing from this and it wants to participate because it wants to offer some of the first examples and a reflection around repairing and how this repairing can happen from the collections of public museums of Barcelona that have been selected according to the quantity and quality of the collections and the importance of the colonial collections, not without debate within the project and outside the project. At least this is the idea and the spirit of our project. In summary, we have opened for some time a series of reflection from a European perspective about repair, how this repair has to happen, museums, construction of collective memory and of course these are museums centered in this process of repair. Up until now, I don't think we are exaggerating if we say that museums have been very not very sensible to the memory of the past and collections, especially those coming from the colonies. Most of them are aware of the fact that in a way we have to reformulate this course related to the presence of these minorities in the metropolis and this project wants to participate, what wants to offer instruments to the communities and museum institutions so if they think it's convenient to prepare, to unify and to transform the discourse that museums are using around these collections to which we will refer. So more or less this is to skip on this introduction, I prefer to be synthetic and then when I present the project I usually use other arguments that I will explain here. The main objective of our project is to gather information about the origins and conditions of arrival of a series of pieces and collections that are currently in some public museums of Catalonia. So the idea is of research from a conventional perspective which is integrated within these studies that everybody talked about in Europe, provenance research that just recognized a task that museums as institutions had to do a long time ago according to their principles which is do some research about their own collections but also due to the cuts in the different budgets of museums for the last 25-30 years the same museum's trying difficulties for their own personnel. In a way we have to see how this has been outsourced because we are deploying research that the museum had to develop and deploy but in reality it is not like this. Museums, some of them with exceptions are not able to take on this dimension which is central from a pedagogic didactic point of view. And this is, we can say, well then this is good to know, is delegated to transfer in this case to a group made mainly by researchers of the university and different universities, some of them Catalan and others such as the UNED. And the objective basically is to do provenance research on these collections and to prepare and gather this information to systematize it and the first step is dissemination and making it available to three different actors with the hope that they will coordinate among themselves and they will reach an agreement but it's not for us to control this agreement because it just to reach these agreements. These actors are on the one hand museums that are initially when we thought about our project because it was a prejudice, you cannot deny it. We had the suspicion that we will encounter difficulties in the museums so the idea that they come from outside and they open the boxes that we had not open there was some resistance, passive or active resistance to initiatives such as the one that we wanted to develop. And with very few exceptions it has not been like this. The welcome has been extremely cordial, even I would say comfortable for us because what we encountered in many cases was from an institutional perspective the realization that this had to be done and if it has to be done it's better that it's done now. So if we start from this initial refusal I think that now and reluctance I think that we have encountered more difficulties than we thought so the first main actor is the institution where these collections exist and another one are those institutions and public organs of the ex-colonies that in a way have responsibilities on this heritage and assets in their country or part of the collections that are part of the old colony therefore I think that we have to inform the general direction of heritage or patrimony of three of the colonies that are central to the project Morocco and Guinea Equatorial, some of them have been done already this is a project which will last for three years so this is a way of describing the project that is the first stage therefore this project cannot achieve yet not even provisional first results so the first actor is the museum the second actor is for the colony in order to give you an example that the Ministry of Culture of Philippines has to note that in Catalonia are two important Filipino collections which one of them is this museum and the other one is the Víctoro de la Re of Villanova we think it's important for them to know because we are convinced that they are not informed or at least they are not confirmed in a general way about the scope and the quality and also the conditions that allow the arrival of these collections to these museums therefore the second actor which is fundamental and then a third actor and in these studies of provenance research and repair it's an actor which is fluctuating which is usually mentioned and the most important factor is to count on them are the diaspora communities those communities that come in from the old colony live here and they are citizens of our country and part of them in legal conditions the other one unfortunately not but we look forward for them to change and often they are not aware of the existence of this collection they have not been informed about these collections and in a way they are often mobilizing elements of the repairing processes but once we start this repairing process since these agreements are bilateral between the states they are actors which become uncomfortable and in these repairing agreements it's difficult to know what to do with them and they end up I don't know why on the margins of these processes of repair so three actors and our will, our wish is I don't know if this time or next time that they don't feel marginalized and part of the process therefore the project is gathering information systematizing the information this information wants to create and organize a series of dissemination activities transparency, etc. there is an exhibition, there is a catalog that somebody has conceived there is a diennial so they incorporate a series of projects providing content to this but the most important aspect and the political will in which their frame is just this one we are researchers most of us have experienced working maybe not directly with these collections but working on the cultures that were part of these colonies in this case Spain we have a specialist in Guinea and Morocco not so many of Filipinas but I think that here we have two or three people with some expertise and this is the result of the research that they've done and we gather all this information and we place it on the hands of the actors hoping that they will agree they will agree so we look forward to the deployment beyond the project it's not our task to do it but we want to offer everything available for the actors to agree among them if I can make some summary of the synthesis of this project I think that more or less I think that I have been quite clear therefore which are the ex colonies which are the objectives and the countries that we are talking about which are part of our project and where these collections come from three colonies I've already mentioned them two of them related to Africa not by chance most of the members of the project Traficants in Catalan traders in English are related to Africa they provide a lot of importance to Africa because most of the researchers coming from this African context in the university anthropology of history almost all of them are from Guinea and Morocco also the north part of the protectorate that was object of a more intense colonizing process and the Spanish colonization was from the Sahara more than from Tehwan therefore if we talk about the Spanish colonies we talk about the protectorate of the reef which was a colony until 1956 and we also added the Philippines to this context and this project when we designed the project we discussed whether Philippines had to belong or not to the project first taking into account due to some intellectual humbleness that we had not any expert in the Philippines Philippinologist I think is the name we didn't have one so this is uncharted territory virgin territory and we don't have a previous knowledge of this research but precisely because the Philippines was the greatest island forbidden and the colony the presence of Spain in the asian southeast of the Pacific was the big forgotten one and the fact that we had collections from the Philippines that we had already knowledge in Catalonia meant and we reached the conclusion that incorporating the Philippines was a good thing we did not incorporate the American context to the project due to a couple of reasons maybe you can correct me we thought that the Philippines was a little known territory which is easy to make a mistake and be unadverted so if you make a mistake during a research is more difficult to be unadverted or to remain unknown and this is the most arguable question because it seems like collections coming from pre-Columbian and post-Columbian times in Barcelona are not comparatively cannot be compared to what they have in Madrid they are not as important so you have to work on American funds Madrid is much better plays more logical than Barcelona maybe we are wrong but that's what many people think about that with a well based opinion so when we incorporated the two most well known colonies Sahara was left aside Sahara is an open affair it's not a closed affair pending to be solved and where in any initiative scientific initiative and they have a lot of experience on this immediately is connected through or interpreted through the political sphere and it becomes some sort of self puzzle qualitative qualitative and qualitatively speaking they were hard to determine it went beyond the political expectations the Philippines we did and we incorporated two different realities that are another part of the Spanish colonial past Senegal Senegal as you want to call it Senegal was never a Spanish colony obviously it was a French colony and the fact that there were some Senegalese collections not extremely important but some of them had the Senegalese origin and a very important fact that the Senegal and Gambian group of people in Catalonia was very important and we thought that it was reasonable to incorporate these Senegalese collections what we try to do is play between quality we were able to determine collections and the importance of our spokespersons with the Senegal Gambian community we had important spokespersons and if it was not a Spanish colony it was necessary to incorporate this group we wanted to incorporate the Senegalese group into the world of museums and then Nigeria Nigeria we incorporated not because of the amount of works of art but the quality of these all their very valuable pieces of art and also speaking about the bronzes there is a big project called restitution of art in Benin and the most advanced project has to do with the bronzes of Benin this is happening through a project headed by Hamburg University of Hamburg but it includes Germany, UK et cetera and this museum the museum of Dunge and the cultures of the world in Barcelona I think we have two pieces here connected to the treasure of Benin in 1895 it was an expoliation and since it's an open highly visible project internationally speaking we thought that incorporating no matter how modest the step of this treasure was in Catalan context so Benin to show how things are done in the big restitution project that we already have here well we thought that it was good so colonies are there and now I'll speak about the museums because they are important actors in this project I'm not following the power point even better well pay attention to the power point not to me so what we have to do is to listen what I say and not to watch what I show a person here this power point and I would like to thank him for doing that well in this museum that is hosting us and we've been working with them for quite a long time one of the beginnings of the project included the exhibits that we had the privilege of heading in this museum next to this one if need the military service of Spaniards in Africa in the background of this project and we have other things one of the most popular experts in the project worked on the democratic memorial project and the background is very intense but we've been working there and in that respect there was little to explain in the museum cultures of the world little to explain that we didn't know because we know most things there was a certain degree of complicity I think there was some degree of insidious complicity with the goals this project has in mind in Barcelona we also were able to have including the collaboration of the museum of natural science old museum of zoology we're speaking about the team formed by anthropologists historians that won't work with specimens we had the first meeting with this team and we had to stop stopping about pieces they talked about specimens so it's not just the obligation we have Aida Memba who's the person in charge of the research of the museum of natural arts or natural sciences I'm sorry but the first operation and the first intellectual operation that we had to undertake when approaching this collection was to take a distance from the language we use and adopt a new language a different language that is directly connected with the kind of collection when we speak about ethnological collections well in Catalonia can be counted by hundreds or thousands or a thousand maybe not thousands but a thousand out of the theological collections we have in Catalonia we don't have more than one thousand pieces but the specimens in the natural museum we have thousands or tens of thousands of specimens butterflies, insects a bunch of things I studied this in my secondary school and I had forgotten that language I had to recuperate it expressed in a different way the type of collection and the bottom of collections was challenging the type of work we normally do and this was a logical challenge that forced us to practice approach methodologies to different to different collections if we have time or interest we can talk about the differences in the approach we had in Barcelona these two museums plus the collection the Savadipi collection which is a private collection of Dr. Savadipi which can be found at University of the Fine Arts in Catalonia it includes a very interesting set of records of Dr. Savadipi and a small collection of objects that is integrated quite harmoniously with the collection the museum the logical museum has or that you can also find in the rest of museums that hold donated or purchased through the actions of Dr. Savadipi in the museum of Iwalada for example we have the results or fruits of a donation so then we have museums outside of the metropolitan area of Barcelona first of all we have the Mander de Museum in Banyolas a very special museum connected to the activities scientific activities of Mr. Dardee an old distant activity in the last third of the 19th century and that was taken to Banyolas in a random fashion in 1916 when the Dardee Museum was open and we have a difference between the archivistic volume that the museum institutions have in Barcelona in Barcelona versus the smaller museums and here we're speaking about the museums that lack information around their collections they have very very small amount of information or they are lacking information and that is a good example for the circumstances or the setup of the collection connected to the commercial activity and commercial activity of Dardee and in the museum the museum openly determines that it has little information about this collection so it's very difficult to have little information about how these pieces appeared in the Banyolas Museum we also have the big museum connected to a collection a collector a big entrepreneur of a first and a leather in Europe for some time even some people say that he was the most important in the world he had different sources of supplies in both Morocco or Nigeria and by a parent chance as it usually happens with collectors he started to connect to gather a collection connected to leather and for a collection that is connected to a strong and difficult administrative regime a museum that includes a three-headed ownership the family on the one hand the big city council in Catalonia the administrative circumstances made it very difficult to work with them and the personality of the collection is had a very specific personality very polyadric person an extremely interesting person and a person who started collecting at a very early age and this is a museum of information they don't have many records about the circumstances or at least up until now these collections came to life maybe the interest includes Colomemo Mindic Collector as a paradigmatic character and he's a brother well known in Catalonia the museum of in Igualada connected to the technique and the industry of leather of looking at the list because she is the person in charge of working on this collection highly connected to the production of local leather products with a little ethnological collection before it was called exotic collection we could wish to get rid of these words exotic maybe we are the most exotic elements and extravagant characters so this is a small ethnological collection the most interesting component is the element connected to what Giordice so we will integrate this small but very important guinean and African collection to the research we do about Icunde and Giordice Batepi and I think that I am only missing one museum which is the Vitor Balague library museum from Beloved Le Joutro a very singular museum connected to the activity of Vitor Balague a person very well known in our country minister of foreign affairs connected to the interest that Vitor Balague had with the Philippines and the Filipino collection that is very interesting that the rival in importance with the Filipino collection that our museum has here and it turned it into a very interesting museum so I think that I've given you a range of possibilities explaining to you the museums and what justifies the incorporation of these museums and not others and before I finish because I am sure I had to finish because I ran out of time quite a long time ago well before I finish just an issue that I think is very important that I could be totally sincere about when we designed this project we did so at the end of spring of 2022 right Jose if I'm not mistaken one year and some months ago and as usual in these cases the project was designed in a hurry in a rush I forgot to tell you that the headlines or the institution that support this project are the Catholic agency of cooperation to the development of the government of Catalonia and this project he's co-headed between Saudi Arabia and Europe agencies without which this project would have never happened and Greece most of the researchers belonged to who co-headed this project I said this about the co-direction of this project because when we designed it in rush as I said before we were unable to and I am the regular responsible of these initial lackings or missing elements well we forgot to include these diasporic communities that are present in our country and that in the initial design of the project were not there but they were there with a minor role not very meaningful role not very determinant and many of the diasporic communities say that this project had to be perceived or probably was perceived that these communities were used as a pretext to go on with the project so we asked these communities to achieve their support but then we forget about them we scientists at the university do our research and we forget about those people who are directly connected to the collections and that gave us an initial support that seems a kind of well it seems unconditional support and it should be a conditioned support so when we started this project we realized that surely these communities were not well represented in our project and the role was not very important and we believed that it was necessary to reformulate some of these elements because these communities had to be better represented than that project was part of their own roots well we don't really know if we achieved our goal this is something that we cannot answer or I cannot answer it's the balance that we'll do at the end of the project and once again communities will have to determine if they have been treated as flower pots of a project or they've been incorporated not with the dignity they deserve but with enough dignity and the crystallization of this well was the transformation of a group that we had in the project we called it GOAS which is the group of group of observation action and follow up of the project that was given some of the attributions and responsibilities that required a transformation we had to hire the merit of this organization so we required or this required an important set of information we have the logistics of creating this transformation which is rather complex but it was necessary to do it and basically the GOAS as it is designed now it's an organization that has to watch over the different products in the widest meaning projects or elements that stem from this project including social networks where some of the members of the project or the GOAS members can be invited to participate or to intervene while controlling the discourse or the dissemination of information through all possible pathways and taking an important role considering all the pieces that are going to be part of the collections and we present the results of our selection to GOAS so that they can approve them and to determine which are the pieces or specimens that the most relevant elements that need to be studied and an important role is the decision on the level of colonial art which is the end of the project the closing of the project where we will have to choose curators that take care of it and the GOAS will be the jury of the different alternatives presented in the contest in order to determine which one will be in charge of the biennial and we believe that we won't be marginalized because we are the origin of it all but we have to have a certain degree of control but in national there will have to be conceptual and artistic decisions GOAS will be the determining group so that this biennial includes the first session and a succession of future biennials that can be one way or another give a continue to this project that we are now designing that intends to be an area, a meeting point between different actors that are now participating in these processes to repair the colonial memory in this critical reivindication trying to overcome the amnesia and to offer a critical discourse around some collections that are part of our legacy that oftentimes we either have a false neutrality on or simply or they are stay in the storage rooms of museums without anyone can open and see what we can do with these collections the project is good for opening these boxes to put the focus on these elements so that everyone can participate and express an opinion welcome, thank you