As a part of our project we wanted to expose the framing in museums. We wanted to highlight the terms that were being used in the descriptions of colonial art works. We wanted to tell the other side of the story, highlight the enslaved people by making descriptions that talked about them.

Our idea was to go to the Rijksmuseum, because it is the country’s most iconic museum. The idea was to go and post stickers of the alternative description on the wall right next to the original one. We all thought this was a bold but risky idea. The idea was indeed risky, because a good friend of one of us who works in law enforcement gave us the feedback that doing this would be a form of vandalism and that we could expect a “not so friendly” response to it and with that potentially go to jail and get ourselves a criminal record. After hearing this we decided on not risking the criminal record and changed our idea to protesting with t-shirts. We would print the descriptions on our t-shirts, stand in front of the paintings and document the reactions of other visitors.

This too was eventually canceled, after talking with this time someone that works at the Rijksmuseum and was working on an exhibition about the slavery history of the Netherlands. In this talk she suggested that we would could work together, our group could make a contribution to the museum and could organize something there. By just going to the museum and executing our own plan we would ruin our chances for such a collaboration. We did not want to just go and be activists for the sake of activism, we found that a collaboration would be much more fruitful in the grand scale of it all. Therefor we decided to then just write an open letter to the Rijksmuseum to suggest how they could implement some of our ideas into their exposition.

After looking up the slavery exhibition and finding that the information provided on their website went through all the points we wanted to make in our letter. Deliberation determined that it was unnecessary to send a letter now.

The concept looks promising and we are POTENTIALLY impressed. Now we must wait and see if they deliver.

A link to Slavery an exhibition:

https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/slavery-an-exhibition

RIJKSMUSEUM