About

As part of the nineteenth-century museum project, collections of natural history, such as the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London formed part of a colonial paradigm. However, the naturalised context of scientific value has often obscured such collections’ problematic history. It has also absolved them from repatriation and the implementation of explicitly decolonial practices. Nevertheless, direct links between colonialism, climate change and biodiversity loss point to the urgency of the area of examination for natural collections. This project explores how to promote ocean literacy through the interdisciplinary decolonial contextualisation and activation of coral collections. It investigates how historical and contemporary coral collections can be recontextualised within a postnatural decolonial framework. It also questions how these collections can perform as catalysts for public environmental care and transformative creative practices cultivating marine life's convivial conservation. It has been observed globally that coral reefs are declining and with them the diverse ecological networks they support (Eddy et al., 2021). The NHM holds an extensive collection of ancient and modern coral specimens. In the past few years, the organisation has been giving special attention to ocean ecology and contemporary discourses around extinction and the biodiversity crisis. This was exemplified by the display of ‘Hope’ the blue whale in the central Hall and of new interpretation material on evolution, biodiversity and sustainability. The project will expand on this, employing transdisciplinary methods including material analysis, interviews, public workshops and design interventions in the exhibition and interpretation space. These methods will evolve within a conceptual framework informed by feminist, decolonial and postnatural scholarship. The research will result in a publicly available repository of interviews and resources on the socio-natural history of corals as well as a toolkit for the creative and situated activation of collection and experience-based curation within the museum space.