In 2017 the CATPC (Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise) founded the White Cube: an art museum built on reclaimed land, intended to “restore agency, capital, and visibility to plantation communities. From there, CATPC presents a program that not merely offers the public a beautiful spectacle, but it ensures that the utmost positive impact is made – both material (economic) and immaterial (historical memory)” (CATPC website). Since then, the league has been engaged in numerous activist curatorial projects, using analogue and digital means to create a personal artistic and territorial narrative. One project stands out: a series of NFTs, created in collaboration with Dutch artist Renzo Martens, disrupting museum ownership and restitution practices. These artworks, created from images of an original wooden statue symbolizing a local uprising against Belgian tax collectors, carved in the early thirties, represent a concrete way of reconnecting with the league’s heritage, history and future. Starting from this project, the paper researches the impact of digital technologies in strengthening territorial museological projects, discussing how the communitarian grounds of physical museum spaces can be empowered through digital infrastructures. Operating at the intersection between material evidence and virtual accessibility, digital cultural projects can often respond to identitarian meaning making needs, which cannot be met by analogue solutions. Opening the landscape of collective cultural production to a new version of rootedness, through the designs of marginalized and peripheral communities. Across the paper, questions of museum epistemological dominance and decolonial educational paradigms will be addressed, attempting to highlight the crucial characters of these new museological forms, emerging in the cultural field. Keywords: CATPC, Collective Memory, Digital Heritage, NFTs, White Cube.
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