USUS FRUCTUS ABUSUS (La Blanche et la Noire) -long

In Roman Law, ownership was defined as the absolute, perpetual, full and exclusive possession of an object or corporeal entity. USUS was the right to use it according to its destination or its nature, FRUCTUS was the right to receive its fruits, and ABUSUS was its disposition based on the capacity for modifying, selling or destroying the object or given entity. Museums originated as institutions more than 300 years ago, when certain royal collections were made accessible to the great public. They became instrumental for defining the identity of nations. And bearing in mind the outstanding colonialist origin of many of their collections, then conflict with History narrative, the creation of knowledge and, consequently, collective and individual memory, becomes unavoidable. Passing in review the historicity and the historiography of the relation between anthropology and the museum collections assembled from a despoiling colonial past, it becomes relevant how these spaces have reinforced exotism and distinction, intrinsically related to supremacist discourses. Is the museum concept universal? Let’s look behind the curtain. Responsibility for the risky and far-fetching representation of the black woman body in Western Art can be asserted. A persistent portrayal perpetuating stereotypes of black sexuality -bold, available and subservient-, reinforcing its exoticization, allowing cultural appropriation, marking out hierarchical differences and, as a result, constructing race. Eternal odalisques The odalisque leads to a broader discussion and revision of race in art and art spaces. Black female body has a long history of scrutiny under Western imaginary as early as the XVI Century, being labelled under the white gaze as a sexually deviant, primitive, subhuman, hyper-sexual, an uncontrollably erotic creature… The extensive records of its oppression are characteristically rooted in a history of slavery, colonialism and ethnographic display, creating a collective imaginary based on an overwhelming colonial archive. Over time, this same body has been stripped of its autonomy, purged from intellectual spaces and exposed raw as a "bizarre" public spectacle, being reduced to a mere sum of its parts. How does the colonial endeavour play out across the female body, aesthetically hiding the violence just beneath the surface? Then comes my enthrallment with La Blanche et la Noire, the painting by Félix Vallotton (1913). Inspired by Manet’s Olympia and Ingres’ Odalisque à l’esclave, it depicts the Sapphic love between a sylph and a black woman, but unlike his predecessors, Vallotton dispenses with all exotic references. It is the familiar reclining nubile nude of Art History, frozen in time and laid out for voyeuristic pleasure of a post-coital doze, cheeks ruddied from exertion. Embedded in this dyad before us comes an Orientalist fear and desire for interracial erotic fantasy, tempered by the suggestion of illicit and transgressive relations. Questions of spoliation, hegemonic narratives, race and gender are addressed based on the concept of ownership. Returning what has been plundered and looted, both in terms of objects and identity, is it an urgent, universal and feasible question for everyone? Restitution, reparation, recontextualization... who has agency to give, return, adjudicate, rename?