Towards a polyphonic museum. Integrating aesthetics, epistemologies and peoples in Chile's art museums

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In a context of widespread protests in 2019, a message appeared on the wall of Santiago's Museo de Bellas Artes: I will believe in art when it is made for the people. The proposed project addresses how Chile's art museums have tackled the rising socioeconomic inequality that caused recent civil unrest, and focuses on how a divide between high and popular culture affects institutional efforts to share power and encourage participation. This divide, enshrined by the colonially imported art museum model, typically augments the power of hegemonic social groups while belittling the aesthetic value of everyday rituals, traditions, and artistic expressions alive within disenfranchised communities. My three case study museums play prominent roles in Chile's artistic and cultural milieu. Founded at distinct historical moments (1910, 1971, 2001), each has different values and a specific institutional framework, as well as diverse collaborative working strategies focusing on different publics and demonstrating varying levels of commitment to inclusion, participation and power sharing. Combining an analysis of existing initiatives with findings from interviews and focus groups with staff and communities, I will draw from popular culture studies and decolonial theory to identify and analyse both the conflicts inherent to collaborative work and its potential to blur established boundaries and acknowledge marginalised aesthetics and epistemologies.The potential of collaborative work is demonstrated by studies of small, community-led museums (De Carli, 2004; Pinochet, 2016), but no studies have addressed how aesthetic hierarchies affect large art museums engaging with disenfranchised communities. Although low culture is recognised as an emancipatory site of resignification able to imagine and play out alternative worlds (Rowe and Schelling, 1991; Riviera Cusicanqui, 2018), the established art museum model maintains a divide between high and popular culture that produces an ontological hierarchy separating and classifying art and people. Seeking to question and destabilise boundaries in a Latin American context, this project connects debates on popular culture, cultural democracy, participation and consumption (Garcia-Canclini, 2014) with contributions from decolonial theory including Mignolo's delinking from European epistemological universalism (2007) and analysis of aesthetic and aesthesis (2010), and Vazquez's reflections on decolonizing the museum (2018). To understand museums' potential agency in this process, I draw from Pinochet's analysis of performative museums (2016), Sandell and Janes' understanding of museum activism (2019), and Garcia's articulation of museum-as-laboratory (2019). The overarching aim of the project is to evaluate how collaborative strategies might enable Chile's prominent art museums to morph from entrenched colonial roots to become critical and transformative instruments. I will achieve this by: Drawing from Museum Studies findings and theories of decoloniality and popular culture to establish a framework to evaluate the effectiveness of collaboration in sharing cultural power and broadening participation; Carrying out interviews with museum staff to establish how museums understand, plan and implement collaborative strategies; Completing critical analysis of the aesthetic and written language museums use to frame the outcomes of collaborative strategies; Conducting focus groups with community members to establish how those targeted by collaborative work perceive both the process and its outcomes; Evaluating which museum practices and processes are best suited to allow for fruitful collaborative work, by comparing and contrasting the strategies used by each museum and their reception in their communities.The research offers an empirical study of the value of aesthetic polyphony and cultural democracy with the potential to influence the policies of Chile as a nation undergoing cons