Decolonisation in cultural heritage is often discussed through the language of return, representation and repair. But the deeper work often happens in less visible places: in cataloguing systems, archival descriptions, metadata fields, search results and the institutional habits that decide which stories are easy to retrieve and which remain buried.

Following the positive reception of the previous webinar, Decolonising Museum Practices: A Dialogue between Brazil and Europe, the Europeana Network Association Communicators Community continued the conversation with Decolonising Museum Practices: Collections, Interpretation and the Invisible. This second discussion moved into what might be called the engine room of heritage: the mechanics of memory.

In my opening remarks, I framed the session as a space for learning and unlearning: a moment to look not only at what museums, archives and heritage institutions preserve, but also at how histories are recorded, described, retrieved, interpreted and sometimes left out.

The discussion made clear that decolonisation cannot be reduced to adding missing names or correcting outdated terminology. It asks us to rethink three connected areas: how institutions understand memory, how metadata amplifies power, and how communities can shape the interpretation of their own heritage without being extracted from it once again.

Memory is not still

Museums often work with memory as if it were stable: something that can be collected, labelled, stored and displayed. But memory is not a sealed box. It moves.

Scholar and artist Kwame Boafo invited us to think of memory as embodied, emotional and active. It is not simply the recollection of the past, but a way of living with it. This matters because many forms of knowledge do not enter history through writing. They are carried through ritual, performance, dance, oral tradition, gesture, food, smell and touch.

If institutions privilege only written documentation, they risk mistaking one form of memory for memory itself. The archive then becomes a narrow doorway. What cannot pass through it is treated as secondary, informal or invisible.

A decolonial approach asks institutions to widen that doorway. It means recognising that community practices are not just ‘data’ to be collected and translated into institutional language. They are knowledge systems in their own right.

Metadata is not a technical detail

Metadata can look neutral because it is structured. It appears in fields, standards and controlled vocabularies. But every catalogue record contains decisions: what is included, what is omitted, what is prioritised, and whose authority is assumed.

Archaeologist and museum curator Peter Jegede reminded us that many museum records created during colonial periods reflect the priorities of colonial administrations, missionaries, collectors and museums. They often focus on collectors, acquisition dates, materials and classifications, while paying far less attention to source communities, local histories and Indigenous knowledge.

In the past, this power was often contained within institutional catalogues or exhibition labels. Today it travels much further. Metadata feeds digital collections, search engines, common data spaces and AI systems. If incomplete or biased records are simply digitised, their omissions do not disappear. They scale.

This is why improving metadata is not just a technical exercise. It is a way of making knowledge more accurate, more representative and more accountable. The question is no longer only: how do we describe this object? It is also: what worlds do our descriptions make searchable, and what worlds do they erase?

Restitution is more than return

The discussion also complicated the idea of restitution. Physical return matters deeply, but restitution cannot end when an object crosses a border.

For communities, objects may carry cultural, spiritual and ritual significance. They may be connected to memory, identity and dignity in ways that institutional records do not capture. If an object returns without knowledge, without dialogue, or without reconnecting with the community it came from, the process remains incomplete.

Digital restitution adds another layer. Digital copies, online access and shared records can support reconnection, but they cannot replace the work of relationship-building. Access alone is not the same as repair.

Restitution, in this sense, is not a single act. It involves return, repatriation, reparation, remembrance and the rebuilding of relationships between communities, objects and institutions. It requires museums to move beyond ownership and begin thinking in terms of responsibility.

Consent must be negotiated

One of the strongest points to emerge from the conversation was that community involvement cannot be treated as a box to tick. Consent is not something obtained once and stored forever in a project file.

Communities change. Narratives change. People within communities may disagree, and power is not distributed evenly inside them. This means participatory heritage work must remain open, reflexive and reciprocal.

Kwame Boafo stressed that communities should be involved from the beginning and throughout the process: from gathering knowledge to processing, interpretation and digital dissemination. Better still, institutions should invest in training community members to use digital tools themselves, so they can document and share their own realities on their own terms.

This is slower, more expensive and less convenient than extractive research. That is precisely why it matters.

The right to opacity

Finally, the webinar raised a crucial ethical point: not everything needs to be revealed. Some knowledge is sacred. Some knowledge belongs only to certain people or certain contexts. Some silences are not gaps waiting to be filled by curators, researchers or AI systems. They are boundaries.

The idea of opacity helps us resist the assumption that all heritage must be made visible, explainable and searchable. In some cases, respecting a community means acknowledging that silence itself can be a form of knowledge.

This may be one of the hardest lessons for digital heritage. We are trained to increase access, enrich records and make collections discoverable. But ethical stewardship also requires restraint. The work is not always to expose the invisible. Sometimes it is to recognise why something should remain protected.

About the event

This article draws on the insights shared during the webinar Decolonising Museum Practices: Collections, Interpretation, and the Invisible, organised by the Europeana Network Association Communicators Community as part of the Decolonising Museum Practices series.

Speakers:

• Kwame Boafo: Scholar and artist from Accra, Ghana, exploring how ritual, religion, embodied knowledge and African cultural expression intersect.
• Peter Jegede: Nigerian archaeologist and museum curator working across exhibitions, heritage research, provenance research and community engagement.
• Maria Kaggali: Moderator, communications manager at The Heritage Management Organization.

You can watch the event recording on YouTube:

Get involved

To continue the conversation and be the first to hear about more events like this, we invite you to join the Europeana Network Association. The Communicators Community will continue exploring how cultural heritage institutions can move from intention to practice, building more ethical, participatory and representative approaches to decolonial work.