Q&A | ‘We are not anti-museum – we’re trying to build something new from the ground up’

The UnMuseum is a community-led heritage programme run by Black South West Network, a Bristol-based racial justice charity.

Backed by £1.25m from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, it is collecting, preserving and sharing the stories, objects and memories of Black communities across the south-west of England, and placing those communities in control of how their heritage is defined, described and accessed.

Over the next two years, the programme will deliver participatory collecting events across the region, with the aim of building a community-owned digital archive and supporting a new generation of Black heritage practitioners. This will culminate in a touring Festival of Black Identity and Belonging.

Museums Journal spoke to UnMuseum curator Adassa Dixon about the thinking behind the programme and what the future holds for Black heritage work in the UK.

Can you tell us a little more about the UnMuseum programme - what is the philosophy behind it?

Adassa Dixon: The UnMuseum came out of a question that BSWN has been sitting with for a long time: what does it mean to do racial justice work in the cultural heritage space? We had spent years working on housing, health, education and policy, understanding how systems exclude and diminish Black communities.

When we turned our attention to heritage, we found the same dynamics at play. The stories, objects and living memories of Black communities in the south-west were not being collected, preserved or told.

That is not because they don’t exist – they are extraordinary and abundant – but because the institutions that hold cultural authority in this country were not built for this purpose and have not, historically, prioritised it.

What we didn’t want to do was simply replicate those institutions or produce a version of what already exists. The UnMuseum is a deliberate act of refusal and reimagination.

We are asking what heritage looks like when you begin not with a building or a collection but with a community and a question: what do you want to preserve? What do you want future generations to know about who you are and where you come from?

The philosophy is rooted in a decolonial approach that insists communities must have genuine ownership and control over how their heritage is identified, collected, described and accessed. This is not consultation. This is not co-curation in the tokenistic sense that the sector has sometimes adopted. This is a fundamental redistribution of power over who decides what is culturally significant and who has the right to tell those stories.

The development phase involved extensive engagement across the south-west, and what communities told us was consistent: they wanted something that would last, something that would serve their children and grandchildren, something that would honour the depth and complexity of Black life in this region rather than reducing it to a moment or a movement. That is what we are trying to build.

Why did you choose ‘UnMuseum’ as a name?

The name is an act of critical positioning. Museums as institutions carry a particular history, one that is inseparable from empire, from extraction, and from the exercise of cultural authority by those who had the power to define what was worth keeping and what was not.

The objects in many of our great national collections were not donated. They were taken. The stories told around them were not co-produced with the communities they came from. They were narrated by those who held power, and they served the purposes of those who held power.

We are not anti-museum. We work with established cultural institutions, and we recognise the important work many are doing to reckon with these histories. But we wanted our name to signal clearly that we are operating from a different set of assumptions: that we are not trying to fit Black heritage into existing frameworks but to build something new from the ground up.

The ‘Un’ is a refusal of the gatekeeping, the hierarchies of significance and the institutional ownership of other people’s cultures. But it is also an invitation to imagine what cultural heritage could look like if it began with community rather than collection, with relationship rather than acquisition, with belonging rather than display.

There is also something important about the word ‘museum’ in the name. We are not trying to escape the conversation about museums and heritage institutions. We are trying to be inside it, to challenge and stretch it from within. The UnMuseum is in dialogue with the museum tradition, even as it departs from it.

What is the significance of this work in the south-west, specifically?

I think [the south-west] is sometimes underestimated. When people think about Black British history, they tend to think about London, about Brixton, about Notting Hill. The south-west is often absent from that story, or present only in relation to Bristol’s history as a slaving city.

But Black communities have been part of the fabric of this region for generations, in Bath, in Gloucester, in Cornwall and in Plymouth, and their histories are rich, complex and largely undocumented. The UnMuseum is the first project of this scale to take that seriously across the whole of the region, and I think that is significant.

Can you tell us about some of the projects Unmuseum has been involved in?

One of the most significant relationships we have built so far has been with Karl Ritchie, a community elder in Bristol whose personal archive spans decades of Black life in the city. Karl’s collection is the kind of material that institutions typically don’t pursue: family photographs, personal documents, and oral histories held in living memory. It is irreplaceable, and it was at risk.

Working with Karl has been one of the most instructive experiences of the project. It has taught us that community archiving begins long before anyone picks up a camera or opens an acid-free box.

It begins with trust. It begins with turning up consistently, listening carefully, and being willing to let the community set the pace and the terms. Karl needed to know that this was not another project that would extract what it needed and move on. That took time, and rightly so.

When he agreed to work with us to transfer his physical materials to Bristol Archives for long-term conservation, and to digitise selected items for the UnMuseum platform, that was not a bureaucratic transaction. It was a profound act of trust that we take extremely seriously.

What has moved us most in this work is Karl’s sense that having his collection recognised and preserved in this way represents a form of vindication.

The material he has carefully kept for decades is finally being seen for what it truly is: a significant body of historical evidence documenting Black life in the south-west. Crucially, the collection will be digitally accessible for his community and family to experience, and Karl hopes it will have a life and legacy far into the future.

The digital element also allows the collection to be diasporic in its reach. Like many of the Windrush generation, Karl has friends and family across the world, from Jamaica to Canada, as well as in cities across the UK such as Liverpool and London.

Without digitisation and online access through the UnMuseum platform, which is currently under development, his collection would not be able to reach these audiences, have the same impact, inspire further creative outputs or strengthen future research.

Making the collection accessible in this way ensures that its stories, histories and significance can be shared across generations and geographical boundaries. That is exactly what the UnMuseum exists to do.

We also delivered our first major participatory collecting event in Gloucester in June, at the All Nations Community Centre, a building established by Caribbean elders in the 1950s as a community asset and still actively used today. Holding our first major event in that space felt deeply right. Around 50 people came.

We had an immersive Windrush Front Room installation recreating a typical Caribbean family living room of that era, a portrait exhibition of local elders, community storytelling, oral histories, poetry, food and music. Twelve community members had worked with us beforehand to create a commemorative film for Windrush Day. Seeing it screened in that room, to that audience, was something we won’t forget.

What kind of impact has the UnMuseum approach had?

It is still early in our delivery, but the most important thing I can say about impact at this stage is that people are showing up. Communities are bringing their most precious personal materials – photographs, letters and family heirlooms – and trusting us with them. That trust reflects both the appetite for this work and the relationships we have been building.

What has been especially striking is the eagerness to share. There is often a sense of catharsis and ownership in telling these stories, alongside a recognition of their significance. People understand that by sharing their histories, they are creating a legacy, passing on wisdom and enabling intergenerational learning. Even at this early stage, that willingness to contribute feels like a powerful measure of impact.

Karl Ritchie’s experience speaks to something I hear repeatedly in our community engagement work: a sense that Black history in this region has been invisible, and that having someone treat it as significant, as worthy of preservation and care, is itself a profound act.

There is an emotional dimension to this work that I think the heritage sector sometimes underestimates. When we talk about archiving Black heritage, we are often talking about the traces of lives that were not considered worthy of being recorded. Giving those lives permanence, ensuring they survive for future generations, is not just a cultural act. It is a political one.

We have also been struck by the diversity of the stories being shared. They challenge the pervasive idea of a homogeneous Black identity, revealing instead a rich range of experiences, cultures, backgrounds and journeys. People want to tell their own stories in their own words, to describe themselves and to provide the context that gives their experiences meaning.

This commitment to self-definition will be reflected in the UnMuseum’s approach to tagging, metadata and licensing, creating more inclusive and community-led ways of describing, discovering and engaging with these histories.

Within our Regional Project Steering Group, the conversations have been rich and sometimes challenging in the best possible way. Members have pushed us on governance, on decision-making, and on what it means to embed genuine community accountability into the project’s structures.

Amanda Egbe, who chairs the group, has introduced principles of assembly-based and circular decision-making as a potential framework, and the group has engaged with this seriously. These are not abstract questions for us. They are about building something that is genuinely democratic in its practice, not just in its stated values.

The themes that keep surfacing in Steering Group discussions – healing, memory, loss, intergenerational exchange, living legacy – tell me something important about what communities actually need from a project like this. This is not just about preserving the past, it is about what it means to carry that past with dignity, to pass it on, and to find in it a source of strength and identity rather than only grief.

The past decade has seen a transformation in how Black history is told in museums. What have been the biggest changes – and what have we learned from them?

The past decade has produced some genuinely significant shifts in the sector, and I don’t want to minimise those. There has been meaningful movement on provenance, on repatriation, on the language of collection interpretation and on the diversification of curatorial teams.

The murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the toppling of the Colston statue here in Bristol accelerated a reckoning that many institutions had been deferring, and some of that reckoning has been substantive.

But we also need to be honest about the limits of what has changed. Much of the progress has happened on institutions’ own terms and at their own pace, in response to external pressure rather than internal transformation.

Co-curation has sometimes meant inviting community members into a process that was already fundamentally designed by the institution, and calling it partnership.

Consultation has sometimes meant asking communities what they think after the key decisions have already been made. Diversity in curatorial teams matters enormously, but it does not automatically change the structures of power within which those individuals are operating.

What the past decade has taught us, and what the UnMuseum is a direct response to, is that representation is necessary but not sufficient. The deeper question is not who is in the room, but who holds power over what gets collected, how it gets described, who has access to it, and on whose terms. Until that question is genuinely addressed, the sector’s progress will remain partial.

I am also conscious that we are having this conversation at a moment when the political context is actively hostile to this kind of work. The rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion commitments across the public and private sectors, the attacks on what is being called ‘contested heritage’, and the pressure on funders to step back from race equity work are all real and serious.

The gains of the past decade are not secure. That makes the work of projects like the UnMuseum not just culturally important but politically urgent.

What does the future hold for the UnMuseum?

For the UnMuseum, the immediate future is about building: the team, the relationships, the archive and the platform. Over the next two years we will be delivering participatory collecting events across all five sub-regions, commissioning locally led cultural heritage work through our Impetus Commission Fund, and working towards the Festival of Black Identity and Belonging.

By December 2028 we will have a digital archive that is genuinely community-owned, a festival that tours the region, and a body of practice and learning that we intend to contribute back to the sector.

But we are also thinking beyond 2028. One of the things that animates me most about the UnMuseum is its potential to be generative, to contribute to something larger than itself. We are already thinking about how the Capacity Building Programme can help develop a new generation of Black digital archivists and heritage practitioners, addressing a significant skills gap in the sector.

We are thinking about how the collections we build can form the foundation for future research, commissioning and storytelling. And we are thinking about how the relationships we build with communities across the south-west can outlast the project.

Where do you see approaches to Black history going more broadly?

We believe the future of Black history in the heritage sector is community-led, or it will continue to be inadequate. The most transformative work being done in this space right now is happening in community-rooted organisations, in projects like ours and in the broader movement represented by Black British Museum and Museum X, for example.

What these projects share is a fundamental conviction that Black communities are not the subjects of heritage work but its authors. I hope the sector is not just watching and celebrating that work from a distance, but genuinely learning from it and changing as a result.

You’re launching the Festival of Black Identity and Belonging next year - can you give us a taste of what to expect?

The festival is the horizon the whole project is building towards, and thinking about it fills me with both excitement and a deep sense of responsibility.

It will be an immersive, interactive and digital exhibition touring each sub-region of the south-west. What makes it genuinely different from anything I can point to is that it will be built entirely from what communities give us: the archives, oral histories, objects, photographs and stories that people are trusting us with over the coming months and years.

The themes that are already emerging from our community conversations give a sense of what the festival might hold, and they are profound: healing, memory, loss, intergenerational exchange, living legacy, cultural wellbeing. These are not themes we imposed on the project, they are what communities told us matter most to them. The festival will be shaped by those conversations, and it will be co-curated with the communities whose heritage it holds.

We will be working with established cultural venues including the Arnolfini, The Box and the Royal West of England Academy Bristol, institutions that carry their own complex histories in relation to Black communities and with whom part of the work is about building a different kind of relationship.

I am interested in what it means for those spaces to host something that was built entirely on community terms. I think that is itself part of what the festival is about: not just presenting Black heritage to a mainstream audience, but asking what mainstream cultural institutions look like when they are genuinely in service of Black communities, rather than the other way around.

It is still some way off, and we are deliberately holding the vision lightly enough to let communities shape it. But we are certain it will be something that people remember.

Is there anything else you’d like to say about the programme?

I want to say something about the people who make this work possible: the community members, anchor organisations and steering group members who give their time, their knowledge and their trust to this project. In a political moment that is increasingly hostile to race equity work, and in a funding landscape that is increasingly difficult for community-rooted organisations, the fact that people are showing up and investing in this is itself a form of resistance.

We do not take that lightly, and we are determined that the UnMuseum will be worthy of the trust placed in it.