ANA MENDES

In early 2024, museums across the United States scrambled to close galleries and cover displays as new federal regulations regarding the display of indigenous artefacts went into effect. The requirement caused broad impacts, but its initial focus was narrow. Rather than require the repatriation of all objects acquired from all indigenous peoples worldwide, institutions were met with narrower terms: five years to return funerary objects and human remains.

A decade earlier, Ana Mendes had begun a project to shift the power dynamics of museum collecting. Entitled The People’s Collection, Mendes’ work invites people from colonized countries to visit ethnographic museums, and to identify works they would like returned. The scope? Wider. The question? Identical. Rather than merely give colonized people voice, Mendes gives them choice: use agency to determine what should go. In the words of Australian band Midnight Oil, “It belongs to them/let’s give it back.” Her solution? A book of postcards of the works selected from each institution. And, in many ways, her decision could not be more apt. In many cultures the way to keep someone or something alive is to ensure it remains visible, in circulation, accessible. Of course, this is not always the case, particularly since the unexpected sight of objects can, in many cultures, break a gender, lineage, or initiation rule. Here, however, one might argue that by showing these works in their displaced state, she invites those with the power to do the persuasion, and those with the means to understand what each means. That Nigerian mask? Displaced. Its location? The Louvre.

Clearly, Mendes’s works question systems as much as they do spaces. They are sustained, open-ended, timeless, to the extent that the answers to the questions she poses are always already infinite. Those museum objects? Potentially the result of looting or smuggling. Their destination? As likely a private collection, perhaps never to be seen again, as to a public institution, where their true stories may, perhaps, someday be told.

What Mendes does, particularly subtly, is challenge cultural institutions to examine, if not necessarily defend, themselves. Her duration work, “a tale of Europeans,” places her literally and physically in the context of object, specimen, other. This same separation between colonizer and colonized, acquirer and acquisition, looter and looted, emerges elsewhere as well. Since 2014, in multiple iterations of her performance, Map Series, Mendes has used threads to map colonizers and their expansions literally and conceptually across the globe. To date, she has charted and plotted six empires – those of Portugal, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China. For certain empires, she has performed the act of critical interrogation on more than one occasion, and, as she explains, may still revisit an empire again in the future.

Yet Mendes has a dilemma – being Portuguese, she inhabits as space of continuous historic reflection, one in which her questions and demands of contemporary life and institutions – that they acknowledge and repatriate, if not even reparate – objects and lands whose trajectories were inexplicably diverted with the arrival of Europeans. Next? Her Map Series (China), begun in 2023.

Yet she does not shy away from the conundrum. In My father has a gun, Mendes tells a story of her father, a soldier in the war between Portugal and Guinea-Bissau: The Portuguese Colonial War in Portugal; the Guinea-Bissau War of Independence elsewhere, most particularly the colonized countries. War. Colonialism. Acquisition. Each of Mendes’s works challenge us to explore and assess our place and position relative to significant issues and events that are perceived as “in the past” but continue to define our lived experiences today. Yes, many former colonies worldwide have regained independence. At least physically. Now, the subjugation is more nuanced: trade; resources; alliances.  

In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon recounts the rapidity with which governments demanded restitution from Germany in the aftermath of World War II: “The governments of various European nations called for reparations and demanded the restitution in kind and money of the wealth which had been stolen from them: cultural treasures, pictures, sculptures, and stained glass have been given back to their owners.”  Perhaps Mendes’s most poignant truth is in differentiating that the outcome seems to depend not on the action, but on the injured. Somehow, when these cries and requests come from indigenous peoples, the colonized, or the disposed, they seem to carry less value, and to deserve less attention. Let us instead push more persistently into the narratives Ana Mendes invites us to create: to reflect, to consider, to acknowledge, to recognize. By peeling back the veil of transactional, capitalist, colonialism and its ethnographic and economic institutions, she invites us each to be a harbinger of possibility, and to recognize the binary difficulty of “otherness.” What once was “theirs” can never truly be “ours,” nor can what once was “ours” be given or taken for “theirs”.

Truth comes from perspective. In and through her works, Ana Mendes invites to have the ability and the willingness to have more than one.