AMSTERDAM.- Museum Van Loon launched its newest exhibition ‘Says Who? Creating space for histories’. In collaboration with Imagine IC, SpeakUpWorld and participants from their networks, the museum has joined forces to create more recognisability in the public spaces of museums. This exhibition is the poignant and vulnerable result of a joint search for meaning.

“We consider it important that there is recognition of the history that continues to impact the present, and to tell the stories of that history from the perspectives of the various communities. The permanent collections of museums often still focus on the white Eurocentric perspective,” SpeakUpWorld states. Imagine IC agrees that “this participative collaboration provides a lasting contribution to and enriches new narratives within the museum and the collection.”

In life-sized boxes, set up in the museum’s historic rooms, guests are drawn into the stories of eight narrators. The permanent collection plays a supporting role, visible only if it serves the story in the box. The stories are broad and diverse: In the Dining Room for instance, narrator Eartha Rodgers developed the theme of 'Power at the table' and asked the question: which rulers sat at this lavishly laid dining table, and who should have been seated there? In the house's reception parlor, pictures of narrator Wonny Stuger's ancestors are projected over the portraits of the ‘lord and lady of the house’, Dirk Andreas Ralf and Hendrina Heirath were born into slavery on plantations co-owned by the Van Loon family And in another salon, the 'old boys network' of 17th century portraits has been literally reduced to make room for the network of Nathifa and Zuwena Elshot.

Gijs Schunselaar, director of Museum Van Loon: “After Aan de Surinaamse grachten (2019), Says Who? represents the next step in the active role we play in the social conversation around the colonial past and its continued impact on the present. Built upon a deeply meaningful process of participation and presented in a visually remarkable manner, we hope that this exhibition will help boost new perspectives on the concepts of ‘space’ and ‘agency’.