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.

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.