The bientraitance of colonial collections: a mobilizing utopia?

In recent years, the Geneva Museum of Ethnography (MEG) has begun to decolonize its collections and practices. As part of this process, the Conservation Department has undertaken to reassess its own practices of caring for objects. This has led to questions about the relevance of terms such as conservation, preservation, and restoration. Is there a vocabulary capable of articulating a new form of care while accounting for the relations of power and dependency intrinsic to collections of colonial provenance? In the 1990s, a term was coined in the French health and social care field, bientraitance, as part of a similar process of reassessing care practices. Bientraitance encourages the consideration of issues of dependency, conditions of vulnerability, and the risk of mistreatment, as well as the potential links between them. This could be a useful approach to examining institutional practices in relation to collections.