Reclaiming the Truth - Deconstructing colonial museums and public spaces

Collaborative visual project by Julio Etchart and Holly Birtles As a photojournalist who has been documenting global inequality issues for the international media and NGOs for many years, Julio Etchart has developed a collaboration with fellow photographer, photomontage artist and educator Holly Birtles, which informs the disruption and the manipulation of photographs representing traditional colonial spaces in museums and public areas. Throughout the process, Julio shares photographs taken in those locations with Birtles, who symbolically destroys the imagery utilising various mediums used within her practice, both established and corrupt processes of restoration techniques used to repair museum artefacts. Materials such as gold leaf, varnish, wax-resin, archival glue, spit, polish, and lacquering are applied to large format negatives that are juxtaposed with the original documentation, thus the notion of fixing or restoring is appropriately subverted. The resulting works are presented as diptychs; images are paired with critical text quoted from a range of influential research sources, such as the writings of Alice Procter, Rebecca Solnit, Jorge Amado and the late Eduardo Galeano. The goal of this intervention is to challenge the toxic inheritance of the plunder of the colonial era by the agents of former imperial powers, when invaders took local artefacts as a bounty of their incursions into the conquered regions and gifted them to their royal sponsors and/or sold them to museums and private collections. Many of those relics are now the subject of a worldwide debate on reparation and restitution, a conversation that this project is aspiring to join.