Words

Cultural heritage

Cultural heritage is a term used to describe the tangible and intangible legacies that a culture inherits. Cultural heritage often plays a role in the construction of national and regional identities; its genealogical understanding of culture presupposes a stable lineage. What counts as cultural heritage is therefore easily confused with establishment and if a lively debate around the terms of inclusion or inclusion is missing, it risks to become a tool for sedimenting conventions. In Belgium, cultural heritage is also an administrative term that sets apart cultural production from work being done at museums and archives. It is exactly these borders that DiVersions would like to blur.

Decolonial

A decolonial practice rejects everything that was taught by the system of racial oppression we are all born into. Decoloniality calls for an active, intellectually strong and unapologetic disobedience in the pursuit of dismantling this centuries-old system. In Belgium, the ongoing vigorous presence of the regime of Leopold II in public space and the general lack of critique on the Belgian colonial rule, demonstrates that the decolonial process has not reached the collective conscience yet.

Diversity

Diversity literally defines a condition of having or being composed by multiple elements. It can be considered as a synonym for "variety". Although, diversity has gained other connotations that "variety" does not have. It became the leading word for defining groups of people composed by diverse sets of humans, diverse referring in general to race, religion, ability or gender. The increased use of this word, has slowly displaced its meaning into the realm of corporate vocabulary, very close to marketing. In that transformation, the condition of diversity has become deeply institutionalized with instances of diversity training and diversity officer. This process frames diversity in terms of aesthetic, hence the focus on visible traits such as race or ability, instead of fundamental changes in the way oppression and power work in relation to these traits. Diversity acts as an agent of recognition for everything that is not white. The general narrative surrounding diversity managed to create feel good politics by obscuring a topic that is generally not-feel-good at all, racism and by placing, once again, the focus on the non-whites so to prevent the uncomfortable formation of white guilt. Diversity is a white word, as Tania Canas argues, "It seeks to make sense, through the white lens, of difference by creating, curating and demanding palatable definitions of ‘diversity’ but only in relation to what this means in terms of whiteness."

e-collection

e-collection or electronic-collection can mean many things (from debt collection to on-line gallery). In DiVersions, it refers to digital or digitized collections brought together by cultural institutions.

Intersectionality

Intersectionality is a framework developed by afro-american feminists to analyse how interlocking systems of power impact each other. It considers oppressions not as forces which exist separately from each other but understands that the entanglement of for example class, race, sexual orientation, age, disability and gender produce complexer forms of marginalization. Kimberlé Crenshaw explains: "Originally articulated on behalf of black women, the term brought to light the invisibility of many constituents within groups that claim them as members but often fail to represent them". To say that DiVersions is a site for 'decolonial and intersectional practice' means that we try to pay attention to different interfering patterns of inclusion and exclusion that are acting on the digital archive so that the violence of these archive effectively emerge from the obscurity preserved by cultural institutions' operating.

Permission

Free Culture licenses make sure that we do not need to ask for permission if we want to consider, interrogate and discuss the technical details of software and hardware, or when we want to engage with its concepts, politics and histories. For DiVersions, it Free Culture offers a framework to interrogate the often proprietary behaviour around cultural heritage to change. In addition, if digital imagery and infrastructures would be available under conditions that would allow re-appropriation and re-use, we might have a better chance of developing proposals with institutions rather than against them. At the same time, we also become increasingly aware that we need to rethink default assumptions about the relations between permission, ownership and access. As this selection of stills shows, there are many questions to be asked about the alliance between Free Culture and white privilege. What does it mean to assume that everything should potentially be available for (re-)use? xxxx Geneology, property. Asking.