Instituting and Organising “From the Pockets”: A Field Report from a Museum in the Making

The Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd brought into stark relief the need for very honest conversations about the distance between the rhetoric of change in museums and the actual work of making it. As curator Yesomi Umolu suggests, “If we have now arrived at acknowledging the genealogy of violence and injustice in our institutions, public spaces, and personal lives, then the hard work of the days and months to come is to unlearn the practices and behaviours that have emerged from this condition, and seek to build anew along antiracist and decolonized lines.”[2] This article charts the collective process of making a museum that attempts to unlearn practices of museology from below. Challenging the universalising premises of the museum and its reliance on the liberal rhetorics of the public sphere, the article performs a situated analysis of museum making from the perspectives of the 'expanded private sphere' found in women's community organising practices through the example of the Deptford People's Museum in South London.