In the 1970s, it was common for children from Barcelona who went on school trips to Banyoles to return with eyes as wide as oranges. In addition to a beautiful lake and a chocolate factory as authentic as the one in the story, the school took them to see the dissected man who was exhibited as if he were a beast in the local museum. Some still have that cold and glassy look very present (the eyes were made of glass). The poor Betchuana of today’s South Africa, the Negre de Banyoles, was not only dug up, gutted like an antelope and exhibited like a freak at a fair, but over the years they would turn him into the man in the sack of the nightmares of many boys and girls from Catalonia.

Those who had missed the trip to Banyoles had to make do with a couple of jivarised heads on display in the no less dark Ethnological Museum of Montjuïc. They weren’t as apparent as the prehistoric mannequins in the Archaeological diorama, just a couple of bends away, but at least they were authentic. Definition of jivarized: cut and reduced head.

Over the years, those boxed busts lost track. Most of the human remains were no longer displayed in museums and moved to reserve rooms. But now, pieces like these are back in the news through the Ethnological and World Cultures Museum, which assumed the funds of that historic institution. The fact is that it still exhibits, today, three decorated skulls from Papua New Guinea, which it plans to remove from the exhibition at the beginning of next year.

The museum has taken a long time to make a decision – the removal of displayed human remains – that has been applied for decades in other institutions around the world. The dissected Betchuana of Banyoles stopped being exhibited in the midst of international controversy in 1997. The Hottentot Venus followed its path, another criminal case of ethnological show business that had its epicenter at the Museum of Man in Paris. If we mention just another local example, the Igualada Skin Museum removed a jivarized head no less than 23 years ago, considering it a macabre trophy.

In short, what is progressive is not now to remove remains of corpses that should have been underground for decades, but to begin active policies of dismantling anthropological or colonial collections and repatriating them, as far as possible, of the bodies in reserve.

In some way, the museum on Carrer Montcada, barely visited despite the tourist maelstrom, has gotten in the way of the City Hall. It was already anachronistic when it was inaugurated in 2015, during the term of Xavier Trias, and the governments of Ada Colau, but it is true that they promoted interesting critical exhibitions, they let it vegetate despite the doubts it raised. Remember that in the headquarters of Montcada there are pieces that may come from the famous looting of Benin… And all this while on the sidewalk in front of another municipal museum, the Picasso, shut down due to lack of space (see the complementary piece ).

It is late, but at least the museum aims to make amends. In fact, the main meaning of museums with such colonial connotations (this one has them, even if most of its pieces were bought) should be, precisely, to become museums of decolonization, especially if among the holdings there are unburied corpses In other words, there should be a tendency to transform these museums into processes of deconstruction of a perverse imaginary, even if the ultimate goal is the disappearance.

L’Ethnológic seems to have taken the reflective and critical path when it comes to opening the funds on the net. The ongoing exhibition Do statues also die? is also a step in this direction. , which aims to “reflect on the future of ethnographic museums and the role they can play in contemporary struggles against racism, social exclusion and new forms of colonialism”. This is the most important. The act of removing from view the severed heads of an anonymous motley fell under its own weight.