‘Decolonising museums and colonial collections is much more than returning’ objects, collections or parts of monuments, IHC – University of Évora / IN2PAST researcher Elisabete Pereira told Portuguese news agency Lusa with regard to the closing conference of project TRANSMAT – Transnational Materialities, held last week at the Santos Rocha Municipal Museum, in Figueira da Foz, Portugal. Under project TRANSMAT, the museum also hosted the opening of the exhibition ‘Facing colonial legacy in the Museum’.

The main goal of project TRANSMAT – Transnational Materialities (1850-1930): Restoring Collections and Connecting Stories is the production of new knowledge about the history of colonial collections such as the ones held at project partners National Museum of Archaeology, in Lisbon, and Santos Rocha Museum – both of which the team headed by Elisabete Pereira was able to document over four years –, but also the complex processes of their construction, and the profiles and trajectories of the agents involved, identifying cultural/ scientific practices and learning more about objects and their life-paths.

During the ‘Decolonizing Museums and Colonial Collections: Towards a Transdisciplinary Agenda and Methods’ International Conference, around 70 participants from Angola, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Ecuador, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, Peru, The Netherlands, Uganda, UK, USA, Zambia, South Africa, Spain, Tanzania, and Portugal, focused on discussing the complexity of this necessary dialogue process between all agents involved, towards apprehending the multiple meanings over time in the various spaces in which colonial collections circulated, revealing the connections between local and national histories in transnational contexts.

The closing conference of project TRANSMAT was held at the Madalena Biscaia Perdigão Auditorium in the Santos Rocha Municipal Museum from March 12th until the 14th, 2025. The exhibition ‘Facing colonial legacy in the Museum’, an intervention in the 2014 museography of the museum’s Ethnography Room which will be on show until the end of October, opened on Wednesday March 12^th.

The installation, designed by architect Miguel Figueira, invites visitors to write their comments on the glass of the display cases that contain part of the museum’s colonial collection, thus ‘putting transdisciplinary methodologies into action’, says Elisabete Pereira. Conference participants were among the first to pick up a pen and share their views regarding the artefacts, the exhibition, the 2014 museography or the contents of the research project.

‘Is this intervention part of the ongoing process of reinventing “the west”?’, ‘the first stage of objectification’, ‘”small drum”. don’t have all shown instruments indigenous names?’ or ‘a olhar para pertences que não nos pertencem…’ (‘looking at belongings that don’t belong to us…’) are some of the phrases they chose. Check out the gallery below.