This week a reader from South Africa has sent in a Facebook link to “Architecture of Return“, an artwork of the floor plan of the British Museum on a blue deer hide, along with symbols for the artefacts that are held in the Museum’s collections.
This piece references the hide paintings that convey histories across generations of Native people, and the lineages that are carried in such objects. This artwork’s pictograms of textiles, tools, baskets, weapons and the like, signify the objects that are holdings of the Museum but that are contested. By drawing an escape route on of the floor plan the artist, Nicholas Galanin, a Native American (Tlingit/Unangax̂) proposes an escape plan for his ancestors.
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