Anthony Shelton

The skeptical curator. Reflections on Nuno Porto's ‘Offshore’ (Museu da Antropologia, Instituto da Antropologia, Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal. 6th March–7th April 2006)

Nuno Porto, the Director of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Coimbra (MAUC) and curator of the exhibition ‘Offshore’, proclaimed at the exhibition’s opening that there would be no more ethnographic exhibitions, only installations practices he has since clarified as ‘experiments in contemporary anthropological practices’ (2007: 175). He justifies this audacious, but refreshingly innovative move, on two premises. First, ‘even if not conceived as such by their producers, the display of ethnographica has, historically speaking, implied installation techniques, in the sense that the organization of the ordering of objects, the exhibition text, choice of display materials, lighting, colors, sound, and so forth create an ‘‘environment’’ for the objects’ (Porto 2007, 182). Second, a ‘more pragmatic reason for the adoption of installation techniques in ethnographic displays may be thought of as deriving from the fact that, either as ‘‘cultural mediation’’, or ‘‘cultural critique’’, exhibition projects occur within the dynamics of social contexts, being necessarily tainted by the circumstances of local social life’ (Porto 2007, 182). His curatorial practice is therefore informed by a reflexive sensibility that, as an integral part of the production of exhibits, lays bear the curatorial presuppositions endemic to them. This implies a politically committed museology, albeit one which honestly reveals the intentions underlying it. His latest work, the fifth in a series of exhibitions he has curated at MAUC (Porto 1999, 2005, 2007; Shelton 2000), exacerbates this commitment by focusing on those would-be African immigrants who, trying to flee their continent to the shores of an increasingly unsympathetic Europe, find themselves caught ‘offshore’, suspended between two worlds, or else having failed the narrow Mediterranean crossing in their fragile boats, become the latest victims of shipwreck and drowning. This is an exhibition full of pathos that cannot fail to force reaction to the economic, medical and health problems that are often at the root of attempts to flee Africa, as well as the hypocrisy in our attitudes toward them. The exhibition is arranged along a long transversal that cuts down the center of one of the museum’s long white, vaulted galleries (Figure 1). First, is a canoe, followed by a long line of debris, the flotsam and jetsam that is regularly washed onto the beaches of the Mediterranean that was specially collected for the exhibition cans, floats, nets, broken plastic trays, flip-flops, a shoe, a plastic glove, trousers, smashed and battered plastic bottles, bits of toys and other remains of human existence all painted an intense cobalt blue (Figure 2). After the battered and broken evidence of human activities is a long bench, divided in the middle, covered with historical ethnographic objects from the Museum’s