Mf D formed in 2019, based on the personal and professional connections of its members in New York, Singapore, and Shanghai. These museum professionals wanted to propose a different model of curating beyond the structures of their institutional training: budgets, collections, the pressures to be visible. As Ana summarized, “It would be easy for us to just replicate what we know, and we made a conscious effort to not do that at all.” A continual process of “unlearning” the institutional framework allows the Mf D “a more fruitful conversation which is based on care as opposed to result,” as Mohammad describes it.
Rather than centering their Museum on collections of objects or sites, creativity is fostered, discussed, and supported beyond standard timed deliverables. The results of the Mf D are instead manifested in artists’ residencies and programs developed over years-long engagement with critical topics and themes. By offering a platform for these ideas, the Museum for the Displaced proposes a space for those displaced diasporic views, over time and with care. “Our job is to be able to sustain that open space. That brings something that we don’t know, the unexpected. And it has to do with care. Like Mohammad said, we want to care, we want to listen to each other together. That’s the most important [thing].”
Yvette Mutumba: Thanks again to all of you for making the time and to agreeing to have this conversation for Stedelijk Studies. You decided to call your project the Museum for the Displaced, and I wonder if you could define that more? I think it was really intriguing when I first read it. I wondered why you chose that term, “displaced,” because I guess there are a lot of possibilities in expressing what migrating, transitioning, diasporic movements could mean and, regarding the notion “displaced,” there’s a very specific idea connected to it for me. For example, initially I would think it feels more passive, because someone is maybe rather being displaced than actively moving somewhere. So, I would be really interested in that kind of process. I know it’s really hard to find titles for projects, because there’s so much in there. And when it comes to visibility, is it also about how much this is a title that you felt is important to reflect something to the public? Or is it much more related to your internal conversations and relationships?
Ana Salazar: That was one of those very long conversations, actually. The title was something we were looking for and looking for, and we were not happy with what we had.
Mohammad Golabi: I think it took us almost a year!
AS: Yes! All of us have experiences of migration, displacement, and we saw all of these different ways in which forced migration was spoken about in the news, and not only the news, even in our art world, where it becomes a topic or trend in one moment and then not anymore, or this big conversation under Diaspora. The art establishment also has these big categories of Latin American Art, African Art, or Asian Art… These are really vast continents and it’s very difficult to bundle things in these categories while maintaining any meaning. We were looking for ways of breaking those continental categories, including the idea of Diaspora—it’s really so different in the different examples that there are. We wanted to have the freedom of being able to focus on specific contexts. As an example, the first assembly in Singapore was looking at Southeast Asia, the countries nearby Singapore, and the migration that happened historically there. At the same time, it was an international event that brought in stories from very different places.
We worked with the artist Jonas Staal, for example, who was talking about Kurdistan. We can learn from each other, but at the same time understand that the specificities of each place are very unique. And displacement can be so many things. It has to do with forced migration, too. You were saying the word “displaced” is passive, but it’s something that happens to you, because very often you don’t know how it’s happening in the moment. One day you look back and you understand, “Okay, this was a traumatic event that comes from ‘Dis place/meant,’[1] and this is why we chose this word.” From reading more, we understood that we preferred this word to many others that are used in relation to migration, because those were already so charged with other discourses and narratives.
MG: Another thing that was kind of an issue for me, or a subject to think about, was that in transition and translation between two contexts, the between life that I’ve lived in Iran, in Iraq, in South Africa and then New York… something was missing, something that I couldn’t put in a word, or I couldn’t put in a structure that I could show through my practice in the situations that I found myself in as a curator here in New York.
I figured, maybe I need to create this place where I can share what I have gathered in my life. It’s not only for me; it is also for many of the artists that I know. I think we feel lost in these situations when we are in New York or Berlin, you know, everything is very overwhelming. There is a huge gap between what they expect you to do and what you can do.
You have to have this moment of very intense preparation to just be able to say something that is, you know, maybe at best, an intro to your thought process and not even the end of your work. So, I think that is a necessity for many displaced artists. When I talk about displacement, it’s just the broad sense that someone who is forced out of their apartment might face. Or someone who had to flee the country because of a natural disaster, or… James Baldwin said it beautifully in an interview, which I’m not exactly quoting here, but the idea was that I cannot really betray the lives that I lived or forget the lives I have lived, because if I forget the lives that I lived, I betray many, many people.
In many situations, I found myself as an Iranian or Muslim or, you know, someone who is not born in New York, and if I do what is expected from me, I am ignoring many people and many lives that I have lived and seen. This kind of mediation is a necessity to be able to really see what the others have to say and what the other conversations out there are.
YM: Displacement is one part of the title, but then it’s also of course the question around the format. You described that you’ve worked with and within specific institutions and now you’ve set up a museum. Museums stand for very specific ideas and definitions, which are of course intensely questioned and discussed; one example would be the debate around the new official museums’ definition by ICOM. Museums are usually associated with collections, which is relevant for the Stedelijk. And in relation to that, there is the question around how what you’re describing as displacement also applies to objects and artworks and the lives they had before they entered certain collections. I would be really interested to hear more about what your definition of the Museum is, or how you apply that to your idea of displacement and how that works for you.
AS: So, maybe to say a few words about the format of Mf D . “Museum” is this very big, lofty name with a lot of space, a lot of weight as well. We wanted to hijack that because we know the museum is a place to create national narratives, for controlling national narratives, but it is also an international business, as we know, because millions of objects have been displaced for it.
We wanted to hijack that power, because when you come from underprivileged backgrounds, you don’t have access to power. We were wondering—maybe this is a bad strategy, we don’t know, but this was the one we chose—if we could hijack that power just by naming ourselves a “Museum.” And there’s also a history of other museums that have called themselves that; they were collections that happened for a cause. There was the International Resistance Museum for Salvador Allende in the 70s’. There was the touring International Art Exhibition for Palestine, inaugurated in Beirut in 1978 and intended as a museum in exile to be one day repatriated to Palestine, which never happened, and the Art against Apartheid Collection that was conceived as an itinerant museum in 1983. We wanted to be aligned with these movements.
Achille Mbembe in Necropolitics[2] talks about what the museum needs to be, and how an institution could, although not undo the whole history of colonialism and violence that happened because that’s impossible, but at least address it and be a force that pushes against that. He calls for the “anti-museum” and he thinks about the “anti-museum” as a place for the displaced. He quotes Fanon and says it’s for the “Wretched of the Earth,” but also a place for these transitions, these migrations, these movements. Movement plays an essential role in the “anti-museum.”
And it has to be a hospitable place. We think a lot about this idea of hospitality, of talking around the kitchen table. Now that we will have an exhibition next year, we want that space to be a space of gathering. That’s how we see the Museum.
MG: When we started talking about collections in the beginning, we asked ourselves what is our relationship to collecting, or to objects, in the context of what the Museum is. Over time what we realized and what came through was this idea that there are objects, there are artworks, there are events, but then there is a set of relationships that they create with each other and with the place where they’re hosted, wherever that place is. What we try to focus on as part of what makes the Museum for the Displaced are these relationships as the main body of the collection, if you want to name it. How would they perform in this structured way?
Every one of these relationships guides us to another one and another one. And it expands in an unclear way. Although there might be anticipations or expectations from every relationship that you build as to where it might go, it also has its own freedom to take you to unknown places.
YM: Yeah, I think that’s a very interesting aspect to think about collections in terms of being relations. I would see collections as kind of social networks in regards to the respective biography of every object in that collection. It’s interesting that, in a way, you’re kind of taking out the materiality of it and the rest stays, because the relationships are still there. So, I think this is a really interesting concept to think around what a collection can be and also do. In that context, it would be also interesting to understand better how that intertwines with a very specific or concrete work that you do with the artists, like the artists’ residencies that you’ve been running. You have said once that it’s a space of care and time, but how far does this also feed into your idea of what a collection can be? Do you see opportunities for leading ways for future ideas around museology or museum debates? How you work can be inspiring, too, by reflecting back on what is happening in other institutions that you have sort of hijacked.
MG: I’m here in New York and I’m thinking about what is happening at the Metropolitan Museum and to all its objects. Many of those objects don’t come with the relationships that you expect from them. They might have different meanings in another context, a whole set of relations to where it came from and all its uses in practice. If you take out all those relations that make an object, then what is the collection without them? In our work, we ask in what ways have we engaged with the artists? How do we relate to the objects they make, or to the work they put into those objects? Or, if there is no object, then what are we talking about? Which is relevant in many cases; there is no object or no product, nothing is produced. This is true specifically with our residency program. I think of the collection building or defining collections in terms of how effective or how fruitful those relationships are. Not in an instant way, but also thinking about it in ten years, maybe five years. Many of the artists that we work with, we’ve had relationships with them for years. And zero expectations of work.
AS: I think that a lot has been done in recent times in relation to the archives and what we call the living archive, where we make an effort to keep it alive. And we all respect archives very much; we know the importance of collecting, or of a library or the spaces that we have known and loved and have helped us survive many times. It’s not that we dismiss the idea of a collection or a collection of objects, but it’s important that it’s not the goal in itself. It needs to be a tool that you can use to open or create debate. It creates spaces that are needed for exchange, and that’s why we keep asking ourselves since the beginning, what is in it for us, what kind of archives are we building? Why, for whom? And we don’t have answers still, but we keep asking, and that, for us, is important.
YM: I don’t know whether it’s always necessary to have these answers, because I guess also questions can really lead the way and be very productive. I think this is something that museums and bigger institutions should take on much more, to be in a position of asking questions and not in the position of speaking that ultimate truth or whatever that is also often expected from institutions.
I think this is really important in a way, with the work that you do, that you can take that freedom, because it’s outside the structures that you are otherwise working in.
Leong Min Yu Samantha: To add on, with regards to the idea of having a collection or having objects, for us, it’s something that we eventually decided not to be a part of what we do. Often, collecting and putting works out there has a lot to do with ego, to further one’s agenda. With the Museum, what we would really like to achieve is to have it function as a space of possibilities that can be filled with whatever our collaborators would like to say, put out into the world, or make visible.
So, it’s really about offering the Museum as a platform.
YM: One final question. I’m just thinking about working collectively and at the same time reflecting that collectivity also into your ideas of collections, or rather, maybe non-collections. It has a lot of potential for conflicts or failure, in the sense that there are so many possibilities. That also means it makes it more difficult. Which I really like, because I like to make things complicated, but at the same time, maybe you could all just say something about how or where you position that aspect for yourselves, or how you deal with it or what your strategies are?
AS: That’s a difficult question. What I could say is that the more time passes, the more conflict-proof we are, because we had so many conflicts already. And somehow, because this idea of achieving something together or what we want to achieve together that we have defined for ourselves needs to always be bigger than these conflicts.
We really have a lot of respect and a lot of love for each other, I would say. The conflicts are about content, about how we see things. And, as I explained earlier, when you work collectively, you have to negotiate things to the end. At the end of that negotiation, that compromise, you just have to believe that the result is better than if you would have done it alone. It’s just a belief, and we work collectively because we believe in that.
MG: The conflicts of working together is the real part of working collectively. I think we try to look at it in a different way, as Ana said, to prioritize this friendship that we have, to many other things, you know, so you have this care in the back of your mind and then you move into other debates which are sometimes very heated. I think that’s expected from many human conditions.
AS: I also wanted to say that there’s not a secret to collectivity. It’s just a lot of work and time and effort, and you need to have the availability for that. A friend asked Ade Darmawan from Ruangrupa what his biggest fear about doing documenta 15 was. And what he said was very wise. He said, “My biggest fear is that we won’t survive as a collective. Because it does become really intense, even with so many years of collective work behind them. They’re really resilient and I’m sure they will survive, but there’s always this fear, you can never know. I mean, we are strong, but maybe tomorrow something happens and we have to say goodbye because of that. Collective work is a lot of work.”
YM: I personally found it very interesting to understand your trajectory and learn about your ideas around collections. I think that was great, because it’s so important to have these conversations and to bring them into various contexts, like the Stedelijk Museum in our case. It would be great to see how your strategies can hopefully reflect back on the strategies of this museum as much as other museums, by at least taking part in or at least looking at and seeing the possibilities for the future.
The Museum for the Displaced (Mf D), founded in 2019, collaborates with artists and researchers who are displaced or working within the topic of displacement through commissions, exhibitions, events, and publications. Mf D’s mission is to make space for a multitude of stories through a live archive, aiming at raising awareness and igniting conversations about displacement, while joining broader movements towards more equality, freedom, and social and environmental justice. Mf D has organised the Residency: Cultivating Lively Relationships (2022), the Listening Room: Seats in the Abandoned Theater (2021), and the Assembly: Chronicles of Displacement (2020). Its upcoming exhibition Emancipation of the Living opens in February 2023 in Lisbon. Propelled by Mohammad Golabi (Iran/USA), Leong Min Yu Samantha (Singapore), and Ana Sophie Salazar (Ecuador/Portugal).
[1] US-American theorist and poet Fred Moten’s spelling in his lecture Building and Bildung und Blackness: Some Architectural Questions for Fela, March 10, 2022. He puts together Amiri Baraka’s “Place/meant” and M. NourbeSe Philip’s “Dis Place”, in the hopes of operating within a “ruptural resistance and refusal to an ongoing history of displacement just spelled regular.”
[2] Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.
