The National Museum of colombia Has No Owners

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, we human beings developed the capacity for symbolic language. With the development of symbolic language, we expanded our ability to learn, store information, and transmit it to future generations. For this reason, a museum does not simply store objects, but also the possibilities of learning about and interpreting the past, understanding the present, and projecting the future. That is why decisions made about its collections are so important: not only because they concern the stories we tell ourselves, but also because they are public in nature.

The exercise of public power cannot be justified solely by appealing to the personal convictions of those who exercise it; that is, the political and moral convictions of the government in office cannot automatically be established as standards of truth for all citizens. Decisions that affect shared institutions need reasons that can be subject to public discussion.

It is not true that the pieces were imposed by the previous government. Their incorporation into the National Museum of Colombia was the result of a process of research, discussion, and collective construction that lasted ten years. In fact, the galleries in question were not created exclusively during Gustavo Petro’s government. They were conceived during Juan Manuel Santos’s government and inaugurated during Iván Duque’s. So we are not looking at an imposition by the “left,” as De La Espriella has argued, but at the outcome of an institutional process intended to broaden the voices represented in the national history.

The removal of the pieces, however, was surrounded by irregularities. Although the minister of culture has maintained that the decision responded to a change in the National Museum’s curatorial script, the fact is that when the pieces were removed, no new script or technical evaluation justifying the changes had been made public. This calls the minister’s explanation into question, because how can the removal of certain pieces be justified on the basis of a new curatorial script if it had not even been presented?

This is about something more. We are not discussing only a few galleries in the National Museum, but the conditions under which an authority may intervene in the construction of our collective memory.

The fact that a government was democratically elected does not mean its decisions represent the interests of the entire citizenry. Much less does it mean that it can turn its convictions into standards for determining which events, experiences, and social movements deserve to form part of the national narrative.

Democracy does not require us to share the same convictions, but disagreement with a particular historical representation is not, in itself, a sufficient reason to exclude it from a public institution. Listening to the people, even when one disagrees with part of them, is a function of any government.

And this brings me to something that concerns me even more, and that is not exclusive to this government. For years, we have seen political leaders confuse the exercise of power with possession of the truth. Convinced that they are right, they make decisions without showing enough willingness to listen, weigh differing opinions, or acknowledge that they may be wrong.

It seems that coming to power grants them a kind of superiority over others, leading them to assume that what they believe is right and that the decisions they make are best for the benefit of the country, but that is not the case. Having the authority to make a decision does not mean that the decision is right or justified.

We have normalized a very specific way of exercising power, in which admitting mistakes is interpreted as weakness and listening to those who think differently as a concession. I don’t know about you, but I am tired of this attitude. Governing should not be about who is right, but about making informed, responsible decisions that can be reviewed.

The president, the minister, and so many others who came before them seem to forget something fundamental: they do not own the State or its institutions; they are public servants. Therefore, their responsibility does not lie in imposing personal certainties, but in exercising authority that comes from the citizenry and must answer to it.