The new museum will host a collection called ‘The Survival Kit’, exhibits chosen for the preservation of human life rather than the preservation of dead art objects.
The collection will cover all aspects of society’s survival needs by using open- source technology—from 3D printing to house building kits to food, medicine and textbooks. The collection will also feature stories by the local Garifuna people, stories about their struggle with colonizers. The Museum of Care will also provide all visitors with the opportunity to download and, in some cases take away in physical form, its entire Survival Kit collection.
In contrast to regular colonial museums, where the owners are proud of their treasures taken from all over the world, our museum will take pride in how many times it is used and copied. We want to inspire a network of Museums of Care all over the world.
Museums, as places where the symbolic values of our society are produced, can become hubs for building a new infrastructure of care, as opposed to our current infrastructure of power-grabbing, deficit, and destruction.
Following David Graeber’s project of decolonizing the Enlightenment and his book, The Pirate Enlightenment, the Museum of Care will be created in a grounded ship on an island where the expanding Western Empire and the traditional cultures of Africa and the Americas met 500 years ago. We believe our ship is a symbol of the possibility of change, a place where we can start anew. Like the pirate ships of the enlightenment period, ships are signposts to autonomous zones specially designed for social experimentation.
The museum begins in 2025 with a five day conference on the Island, 8-15 April 2025.
