In November 2021 activist theatre group BP or not BP? joined with ‘Earth-preacher’ Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir to launch a surprise musical action on the front steps of the British Museum. Dressed in bright colours and with fabric covering their faces, the protesters unfurled two black banners with a simple message across the entrance to the museum – ‘COLONIALISM X FOSSIL FUELS = CLIMATE CRISIS’. Timed to coincide with COP26, this action sought to highlight the close links between ending fossil fuel sponsorship, returning stolen artefacts, and the broader need for climate reparations. As the protesters argued, an oil-sponsored museum of empire “perfectly represents the historic damage caused by British colonialism and UK Carbon pollution”.

As concerns over climate breakdown have grown, many museums around the world have been forced to confront their own complicity in the environmental crisis. The deep and enduring connections between European ‘world culture’ museums and colonialism are but one dimension of this entanglement. Closely connected histories of racism, of extraction, of consumption and of subjectification also need to be brought to the surface when questioning the intersections of museums and the ongoing injustices of climate change. The separation of nature and culture; the marginalisation of Indigenous voices; the prioritisation of progress narratives and unlimited economic growth: museums have contributed to all these phenomena and more. In this light, they be seen as a paradigmatic apparatus of the Anthropocene, one of those ‘material practices of duration and arrival that brought this world into being’ as Kathryn Yusoff puts it in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. The key point, as Yusoff highlights, is that for a ‘certain proportion
of the world, the entire dismantling of this colonial apparatus is a desired state’ – a recognition that ‘launches a call for a different kind of world making’.

What would it mean for museums to become active agents in the project of worldly repair? What obdurate histories and modes of practice would they need to overcome, and who should get to
play a role in this collective reimagining? This strand of the Drifting Curriculum curatorial project aims to provide a critical cartography of possible museum worlds in and beyond the Anthropocene. Building on urgent calls to decolonise and decarbonise cultural institutions globally, members of the curatorial collective will share insights from ongoing work that aims to reimagine and reform museums to help shape a more just and sustainable future for the planet.