Welcome to the Rivers Museums.
Matters of Policy podcast, this is a podcast in which we explore the museum's collections development policy,
speaking with guests from across the globe to delve into the language used and consider what really matters in this policy.
Hi, I'm Alexis. And hi, I'm Yip. And today we're talking to Echo Soga, a Japanese artist who has worked closely with EU communities,
and she's here to talk about her experiences working with the 5th Rivers Museum and City Collection development policies.
All right, so first question, can you tell us a bit about your experience working with the pet rivers?
How did you get involved? There are two stories to tell.
One is I had my first encounter with Pitt Rivers in 2016, when I was working as a freelance artist.
Also as a visitor to the museum. The second story is my experience of working with my anchor.
So these two are quite different experiences. Shall I talk about boss experiences?
Both would be great. Working with Marenco husband been really, really wonderful.
We met through our mutual interest in AI, in the community and the culture.
I think you have around 330 artefacts of the community.
Sorry, I can't remember how we met.
We haven't physically met because of the COVID, but we connected and we talked a lot about the idea of decolonisation.
And I was in Hokkaido, Japan, working on my fieldwork with their own community.
So I was sharing my experience with my rank and I was appreciating approach to the idea of decolonisation and how the museum can change or progress,
or basically what they can do to make things more positive for everyone.
My second point, but the more first experience with the museum,
I was a freelance artist and I was already working with the Asian community for my project,
and I knew Rivers had quite good collection of artefacts, so I got in touch with some museum and asked if I could engage with some of the artefacts.
And unfortunately, I was declined because I didn't belong to any institution or I wasn't formally a researcher,
so I didn't have any access or couldn't find anyone who could help me, so I just had to give up.
So that was kind of the first encounter, but I did go to the museums and that was great.
It seems like two different experiences. How do these experiences compare with your initial reaction to reading the policy?
So that's a very tricky question for me because when I first thing goes to the museum, I didn't go in enough.
Having read these policies, I had no idea about it.
But now, you know, I've been working with Marenco, so I have a better sense of what museum is trying to do.
I think there's a gap between what's written and what's being communicated through spoken communication.
I have dyslexia. And so for me, understanding policy and was quite specific language is quite a big challenge.
I don't know if I should pick up some specific points or really general response.
Yeah, I mean, go as specific as you would like, especially in regards to your experiences with access regarding the Pitt Rivers collections.
Do you think the Pitt Rivers is successful in maintaining a degree of access to its collections?
I think being us, if it's successful, is a little bit challenging.
So I'm just thinking about the idea of success.
Well, you know, we can always make changes and we can always have more and more conversations to make things better.
So, you know, when I read the policies in written for months, the language is quite somehow top down and very formal.
And I guess and there has to be formal, but it's not very accessible for me.
And I say this because when I work with the final community, elders often say, Oh, you know,
like all the researchers and academics come in to work with us, but they speak the language we don't understand.
And I really feel in a way they say what?
They said to me there's so much gap between human to human and pathetic language,
to what can be written as paresis feels like so much space in between.
So maybe there's room to fill that gap, whereas, you know, if I go into the museum in person,
so lots of beautiful, amazing artefacts that are created by people.
It's full of details and cares and human qualities.
I do wish the policy can be somehow returned in a more compassionate language if that's possible.
Yes, sir. Would you say that's the policies and sure to honour the emotional and spiritual connexion between the people and objects?
Or is it creepy bypassing this connexion between objects and people?
I was thinking, You know, I understand the format and common sense or in a policy culture, but often like if I were in the reverse,
artefacts come from communities and culture of people who didn't have written formal language.
To me, that's a really important aspect because if we I say we because we show who we work a lot for is like a written language.
And I'm Japanese, and I raised condition to don through written language.
For example, you're not school or even now as a researcher or, you know,
you can sit at Oxford and require to read a lot and make sense of the world through written language.
But how can we understand the people and culture whose social norm has been nurtured through non written language?
So I think that's the biggest gap between the facts and the policies written on the paper.
Do you think the bid for Everest Museum has done more to ensure such care between people and objects and currently reflects it's in the policy?
Or is this still absent in practise as well?
Well, my experience with museum is limited, so I'm probably missing a lot of things that is happening at some museum.
But I think we can do a lot more with effort to understand the culture, the barriers, the spiritual sense and emotional aspect,
like we need to unknown our social norms and learn from those communities that has very different cultural norms.
So these policies are a standard of the Western novel, right or the British norm.
But if you're working with different communities, we have to step towards their barriers and understand them.
So yeah, I think any agreements and policies means to have a space, to have long conversations that requires sensitive understanding,
ideally like invite people from the community and scholars and be open to keep working on differences.
Sorry, did I answer your question? Yeah, I think it also answered the question that I was going to ask on How do you think museums can
better incorporate indigenous ways of knowing into their collection policies going forward?
I just want to read you a quote by this scholar in Canada.
She's called the young Simpson, who wrote a book titled Dancing on Our Toddlers back in 2007.
She said the starting point to visiting indigenous theoretical frameworks, then is different.
Sounds from within Western Series, which is the spiritual world is alive and influencing.
Colonialism is contested, and storytelling or narrative imagination is attuned to vision as our existences
outside of the current ones by critiquing and analysing the current state of affairs,
but also by dreaming on visioning as a community.
And I really value what she wrote in that.
For example, invite this The Simpsons. She's like wonderful and like, organise a conversation or workshop someone like her.
She's both academic and an artist who has an insider point of view as an indigenous person.
But having said that, each community have different.
Systems and ways of sustaining their social norms and culture norms,
so whenever you have a different project or a specific project with specific communities,
best is to just have a conversation, ask them, like ask them barriers and then like discuss what's best for both ends.
Or people who are involved. So there's no one answer.
It seems like there's more of an emphasis on relationships between people rather than a sort of hierarchical exchange.
If that makes sense. Yes, I think we need to be open to unexpected conversations and unexpected needs.
You're right, it has to be like human to human conversation first before anything written on paper,
because the most important thing is when I work with own culture and culture is very diverse.
Traditionally, more and more region specific, that culture was region specific.
Considering their natural resources, they had an geographical condition.
So even like looking at the owner community, you can't just talk about them as one community.
There are so many different sorts wishes and different backgrounds.
This region specificity is really important as well. So anything written can be useful, but also become a barriers.
And so then we're looking at trying to get oral sources represented in the museum to right.
So not just focussing on written sources, do you have any artistic examples or any ideas of including oral sources within the museum space?
Yes. I think what I really wish to see when I go to the museum is the people's voice,
a strong voice and smell sound and like sensory stimulation or sensory information.
I do interview a lot.
We say in the community, and it is the voice that is so important to me because it includes feelings and the subtle nuances of their thoughts,
which can open up a lot of understanding towards their culture.
And also, the language like language is a really important aspect to me.
If you go to the museum now, everything,
it's written in English and I wish to understand different communities languages that would provide us different world view.
So anything next spoken in their own language is also important.
So speaking about different ways of displaying and representing objects in a museum, could you elaborate on the work you've been doing to represent?
I know objects in different ways. Yes, we saw some issues in your own right.
I wanted to think about ecology, of spoken words and feelings and how shared thoughts are such intangible and ephemeral
and tangible things that generate thinking and future and understanding the past.
So that's something I did through making a video work by recreating a pair of fish who I learnt to make my own community in Hokkaido.
There's another video work I made called Hunt one Chang also video work following an own hunter who is my age,
and he quit all of his nine to five job to focus on practising his tradition as Ian Hunter and I made the video work with him to
share my process of embodying his very system and his belief system because I've read about own hunter in books and read folklore.
I spoke with elders, but I never really understood it properly when they talk about the idea of Comrie,
which is often translated as spiritual beings or gods.
But this word commonly refers to like nature animals and you choose everything things get apart from humans.
And I do understand what this monster hunt meant when he first come me, but I went to the mountains to watch him hunt,
and I saw him praying to the fire gods and the way he engaged with trees or like plants.
So, or the sky. And then I finally.
No sense of understanding towards his firing system. It's really hard to recreate my embodiment of his various systems,
but I fear that making that walk or video work can maybe offer one more step to understand different codes, different values.
It's just an effort, and the attempt to try and do something is really important to me.
There are a number of passages that stood out to us.
One of them is, you know, the museum is committed to making its collections accessible to the widest possible audience,
as detailed in the museum's access policy in the CDP. There's not a lot of attention given to access to ensuring equal access,
especially in regards to indigenous stakeholder communities where a lot of these objects and artefacts are originally from.
So I suppose the question is what do you envision to make museum collections more accessible to indigenous
communities and what could be changed in order to better reflect the voices of indigenous communities?
The equal ownership of indigenous communities to their own artefacts, to their own heritage, specifically regarding in the CDP?
I think that is a very big question. But again, I go back to the idea of having a good conversation with the artists who make the artefacts,
have good conversation with community and understand that ferry systems have more and more conversation about,
I guess, critical theory around what it means to do field work, what it means to decolonise what those postcolonial routes means.
Those conversations to happen a lot more.
But in terms of the policies written, there are so many things, I guess,
important things that to make sure to document humans the artefact in which region,
because we see I arch [INAUDIBLE] up the Rivers Museum, most of them were documented.
As I know, Hokkaido, Japan, that's all. So it's really hard to track back where this artefact came from.
In Hokkaido, because there are so many communities, different tribes, different communities there,
and we can just guess from looking at the pattern of the kimono or the little details suggests some information,
but not enough to track down who made it. Also,
I was thinking that maybe more collaboration with different institution can be helpful
because I know in England there are two or three more institutions that hold own collections.
And once I came across this photograph of people and one person in the photograph looked so familiar or it was from 100 years ago.
And so I took the screenshot of the photo and sent it to my friend.
And he said, Oh my God, it's my uncle.
And you know, that is a very important finding, but that was a very unexpected encounter, like an intended encounter.
But those things don't open up so much at the moment.
A lot of information is so hidden or not exposed to the public.
You have to really dig so much to find out what's there, so maybe have open access to the information.
At the moment, you have to know what's the museum, have to find what you're looking for.
You can't just encounter them unexpectedly and you go to a museum.
But there's so much more in the story to write. Do you think that the current system of documentation forms a barrier to access to objects
because it's very difficult to even know what's in the collections and adding to that?
Have you had any other experiences or heard about experience from people like
trouble or for whom it's difficult to get to know what's in the collections?
I think the to begin with a lot of people I met in my own community, for example,
I've never been to England, many of them, many of them have been Typekit members,
but it's just a visit for a day or a visit for two days to like, check out the collection,
faisant enough times or chunks for the community to understand the museum and the wonderful collection.
It's not even a point of it. Don't have enough access to that, folks.
You know, they don't even know the existence of this collection at the museum.
So that could be maybe walked on. You know, when I was in Hokkaido, I spoke about your collection a lot to the people I was working with.
They're all fascinated. They're all wants to see them. But first thing to say is that we can't go to England.
We wish to see them, but we can't. That was always like the sadness we talk about.
So somehow maybe the collection can go to Hokkaido or can be arranged to have extremism and invite the people there or something.
Yeah, because I think the policy also states that the aim is to make sure that the collection is available to the widest possible public.
But like hearing from this conversation,
it sounds as if I knew people are not always included within this notion of the public, and that might be a problem.
Yes. No. Single public How much can museums step outside of the museum?
To engage with the community could be perhaps important and also invites those people to the museum.
I know these things are happening already. But as far as I know with the owner community, it's not done very much so far.
We are working on it, which of course, is the core of it.
It's this has become much harder task, even for me.
I still haven't seen the collection that isn't in the display yet.
So somehow I don't know how.
But if the access to the artefacts in the stores has become much easier, like I notice a list of artefacts on the database,
but a lot of them don't have photos just like written quite general information.
So that's not really helpful because if I want to see one thing culturally, I know how hard it is for the museum to like,
bring it out or to go and have a look at it just having like more photographs with help.
That's interesting. One of our I think actually a number of our other guests suggested digitisation as a way
of improving access to collections where the museum has such big large collections.
Yeah, I want to do as much as I can do on my end to find out what do you have and without knowing what you have, I can't ask for it.
Publicly open database. Transparency is key.
Collaboration is key. Access is key. Yes, definitely more conversations.
Was there anything else that you wanted to add?
Anything that sort of caught your eye when you were going through the policy that you wanted to talk about?
I mean, the most important thing is to actually talk with the community,
and I so much wish I was with this kind of guy who I've been working with for that since last year for about a year.
So when I had a conversation with this guy and my ranka over Zoom when I was in Hokkaido,
we asked Mrs. Comunque what kind of detail she thinks that should be included in the agreement.
For instance, one thing she said was she mixed in the kimono and she was talking about if only Kimono wants to go into the museum,
which you already have a part of your collection.
She said Kimono was meant to be worn, and if her kimono was going into the collection,
she wants to make sure if anyone wants to wear it, it should be worn and it should be open to her descendants like her family.
If there wants to come to revise and see that like, they should have access to the kimono.
And you know, those two things are something I couldn't say on behalf of them.
So the key is to speak with the community who practise the tradition or sustain the foreign system.
Really interesting.
I think that also ties in with the idea of access to objects because you can say if you're not using the objects in a way it was meant to be used,
are you really accessing the object that's a barrier to. So it's great that your highlights the that we really need to start this
conversations in order to hear how we should represent the objects in the museum.
Sir, anything else you want to convey?
Oh, one thing I want is to talk about is to maybe have more research on how each collection was collected, for example.
You know, unfortunately, a lot of like artefacts are spoken about through an idea of like they were stolen or taken and negatives.
You know, it's often talked about negative ideas, and the focus is on the negative aspects of past.
But I know that is an artefact. A woman called Isabella Abad, British woman who travelled extensively in Japan and spent some time with own community.
I think around the end of 9th century I might be wrong, but around that time and she's.
I talked about my community was quite compassionate approach, and people said she was a good person.
So what she collected was a genuine gift. Whether it's true or not, that's what people talk now.
So I think talking about both negative side of the history, but also understanding there are some positives too.
It's also important to me because I want to highlight the effort this woman has made and to understand the community.
Therefore, she had some gifts, and her approach suggests,
I think it's really important to remember those effort this woman made and save for a wonderful artefact is preserved.
While it could have been sold domestically, it was left in Japan, for example.
It shouldn't be mixed reviews and negative history. So I want us to be careful about that because it's not to justify the dark history,
but also like that shouldn't dismiss the positive things that happened as well.
Yeah, I think that well reflects the complexities behind the history of the collections.
And again, it highlights how much we need conversation in order to discover the real truth behind these objects and the stories behind these objects.
All right, let's wrap it up there as we don't want to take too much of your time. So thank you very much for the lovely conversation.
If the interview gets so long, editing gets really hard.
Yes, that was the Rivers Museum's Matters of Policy podcast produced by the Seward House IT Boom,
Mega Man, Alexis Barriere and Global Sound Music by Jack Forcett.
Voiceover Baiju, who let a special thank you to Muranga Thomas from Oakland and the Knowledge Exchange.