Date of Award
Spring 5-31-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Design (MDes) in Interior Studies / Exhibition + Narrative Environments
Department
Interior Architecture
First Advisor
Can Altay
Second Advisor
Silvermoon LaRose
Third Advisor
Ijlal Muzaffar
Abstract
When artifacts are returned, whether to their original sites or to communities with enduring cultural and ancestral ties, what might museums become in their absence? Once defined by possession, these spaces could shift toward empathy: not through institutional authority, but through shared presence and living memory.
This thesis critiques how Eurocentric museum practices have long sustained a colonial logic by detaching artifacts from the cultural, spiritual, and embodied contexts that gave them meaning. In doing so, museums render objects static, symbols of conquest rather than continuity, and reinforce historical narratives rooted in domination and erasure. Centering the British Museum as both a site and a symbol of imperial collecting, the project imagines the full repatriation of its holdings to the communities and landscapes from which they were taken.
Drawing on cultural theory, museum studies, and postcolonial critique, this thesis proposes a shift toward the post-museum: a spatial and ethical framework where heritage is not preserved behind glass, but lived, interpreted, and hosted by the communities to whom it belongs. These spaces would no longer function as monuments to imperial memory but as forums for cultural expression, shaped, governed, and sustained by those who carry their meaning. In the returning agency, the museum becomes a space for relation, repair, and multiplicity. This approach insists that museums must not only return objects but also reconfigure their foundations: how they relate to history, to ownership, and to the communities they have long excluded.
Rather than offering a new master narrative, this thesis intervenes through strategic exposure, opening walls, leaving scars visible, and resisting seamless renovation. Architecturally, these wounds become a refusal of closure. The result is not a resolution, but a framework: an architecture that remains open, fractured, and unfinished. A space that holds memory not in permanence, but in relation, evolving with those who inhabit it.
Recommended Citation
Girgin, Bensu, "The Afterlife of Walls / Reimagining the Museum Beyond Possession" (2025). Masters Theses. 1424.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1424
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