Decolonising Museums is the second thematic publication of L’Internationale Online; it addresses colonial legacies and mindsets, which are still so rooted and present today in the museum institutions in Europe and beyond. The publication draws from the conference Decolonising the Museum which took place at MACBA in Barcelona, 27-29 November 2014 (among the contributors to this thematic issue, Clémentine Deliss, Daniela Ortiz and Francisco Godoy Vega participated at this seminar), and offers new essays, responding to texts published on the online platform earlier this year.

Division is the characteristic habit of humanity: ēthos anthropōi daimōn, as Heraclitus had it. Demons for division, we divide and are divided. Taken over by divisions within ourselves, the demonic appears as the divided self. Wherever the self realizes an apparent struggle, whenever one is possessed by another, the demon is present. Possession dramatizes self-production as a fight for local control. Demonology is the science of these heteronomous selves, these others inside us. “From the beginning,” Boris Groys writes in this issue, “the contemporary artist is demonic: he is possessed by himself and cannot be relieved of his demons.”  

This issue of OnCurating takes political resistance and sanctuary as its subject, with Herman Melville’s nineteenth-century literary avatar Bartleby—famous for his refrain “I would prefer not to”—as its tutelary spirit. Forms of civil disobedience and tricksterism are coterminous agents in artistic and curatorial practices, both historical and contemporary. How to subvert and subvene, how to recast structural mechanisms of suppression and oppression, how to avoid, deny, magnify, spatially disjoint, and refute (earnestly, comically)? By what means can we, as cultural producers, refuse, while fostering a discourse of reparation? The activism now crucial in the face of ascendant political forces bent ...