Decolonial Touch: Photogrammetric Digital Modelling as Conceptual Framework and Practical Tool in Fine Arts Museum Curiosity Cabinets

Author: Sophie Cooke, McGill University

Editor: Iris Bednarski

I want to first recognize my position as a white settler art historian writing on a topic that has been historically dominated by white settler scholars. In her 2004 article, “Anticolonial Strategies for the Recovery and Maintenance of Indigenous Knowledge,” Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist, Leanne Simpson, describes the increased interest of non-Indigenous scholars and policy makers in Traditional Indigenous Knowledge (IK) systems since the turn of the century.[1] She speaks of non-Indigenous researchers who “often repeat the mistakes of the past” as they “forge into this new territory” of IK.[2] Non-indigenous researchers have perpetuated “Eurocentric analysis” that “fails to recognize how and why Traditional Indigenous Knowledge systems became threatened in the first place.”[3] In this essay, I aim to center the perspectives of Indigenous and decolonial scholars and take a decolonial approach that explains the curiosity cabinet as an instrumental agent in the process of colonization, and as an originary site of simultaneous “erasure,” “discursive silencing,” and appropriation of Indigenous knowledge.[4] This analysis and proposal do not claim to undo this erasure; nor are they intended to excuse, delay, or replace continued further research into the historical realities of these objects’ collection.

Additionally, I want to define two key terms I will use throughout this essay: ‘the archive’ and ‘decolonial.’ When I talk of the archive, I am referring to the West’s record of history and referencing Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s use of Michel Foucault’s “cultural archive” to refer to the “body of knowledge of the West” which is composed of “a ‘storehouse’ of histories, artefacts, ideas, texts and/or images” appropriated and stolen from Indigenous communities and then “classified, preserved, arranged and represented back to the West.”[5] The ‘cultural archive’ thus represents the West’s conception of knowledge and is predicated on the appropriation of Indigenous knowledges. When I speak of touch as a decolonial tool, I use ‘decolonial’ to refer to the process of confronting and breaking down colonial ideological structures as they endure in museums today. I do not claim touch as a means to actively decolonize the museum institution.

Photogrammetry is a digital modelling technique often used in geographic analysis. To develop a model, hundreds of photographs are taken of an object or surface from all different angles. These photos are then stitched together to build a point cloud. A point cloud is composed of thousands of data points positioned within virtual three-dimensional space; together they form a digital three-dimensional replica of the photographed object. Figure 1 provides an example of an in-progress point cloud. This digital three-dimensional replica can be manipulated by the computer or touch screen user, rotating and zooming in or out. Through this manipulation, the model effectively recreates the interactive experience of touch between user and object.[6] Photogrammetry and other forms of digital modelling are increasingly used on a small scale in museums and university collections to create three-dimensional models of objects that can be ‘touched’ by visitors and online catalogue users.[7] This digital ‘touch’ “subverts the museum ‘do-not-touch’ diktat,” an ideology fundamentally grounded in imperialising constructions of the museum institution.[8] It further serves to materially connect visitors to artists of the past, offering a chance to “‘touch the past’” and through that confront the enduring colonial realities of the present.[9] Touch thus functions as an initial decolonial tool in the museum space.

I propose that the point cloud can also be thought of as a conceptual framework. Rather than build a literal point cloud of a real object, one can use the metaphorical abstraction of a point cloud to visualize history. In this visualization, history is represented as a collection of points spread across geographic space and through time. The metaphorical ‘point cloud of history’ thus functions as a three-dimensional map, where time replaces elevation in the vertical dimension (Fig. 2).

In this essay, the point cloud serves as both a conceptual framework for visualizing history and a proposed practical tool for re-introducing touch to the museum. Specifically, I consider the seventeenth-century curiosity cabinet, as it manifests in modern fine arts museums today, as a potential site of decoloniality through digital touch and object handling. In 2003, art historian Stephen Bann wrote of a “historical ricorso to curiosity” in museum studies.[10] The 1990s saw the temporary and permanent recreation of early European curiosity cabinets in fine arts museums across Europe and North America.[11] Twenty-five years later, fine arts museums are still replicating the curiosity cabinet model to display their collections. I focus on two case studies of modern recreations of seventeenth-century curiosity cabinets in fine arts museums in North America: the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) Cabinet of Curiosities (Fig. 3), opened in 2016, and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art Cabinet of Art and Curiosity (Fig. 4), opened in 2015. I begin with an analysis of the history of these cabinets through touch, structured around the ‘point cloud of history’ visualization. I then consider how digital modelling can replicate the experience of touch in the cabinet and serve to integrate this history of touch into visitor education.

Historically, the curiosity cabinet has been both a “‘political’” and ‘violent’ space.[12] In 2023, Dutch law professor Carsten Stahn developed a historiography of collecting, tracing the history of European collecting from the sixteenth century to present day. In sixteenth-century Europe, curiosity transformed from a ‘danger’ to a “‘virtue,’” and colonial exploitation, in the European mind, became a “quest for knowledge.”[13] Europeans amassed Indigenous artwork, objects, and materials as they colonized, encountering widespread resistance from Indigenous peoples.[14] These objects entered the cabinets of wealthy Europeans where they became part of a constructed “microcosm” of the world, divorced from the realities of colonialism.[15] These cabinets are part of what Smith terms “the cultural archive,” a collection of knowledge taken by colonizers from Indigenous cultures through imperialism and claimed as their own “‘new discoveries.’”[16] This knowledge, and the objects used to represent it, was then used in a colonial “re-arrangement, re-presentation and re-distribution.”[17] In early cabinets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, collectors re-arranged objects within three categories: naturalia, artificialia, and exotica.[18] These re-arrangements enabled Europeans to explore the cabinet’s content in a “wandering” manner, without ‘discipline.’[19] Visitors would use multiple senses in this exploration, including touch.[20] By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cabinets grew more “systematized” and the objects became “part of a system of directed vision” governed by the curator through text.[21] Cabinets lost their multi-sensory quality.[22] The Western state became responsible for the protection of its own heritage, or rather the accumulation of other cultural knowledge compiled in the ‘cultural archive.’[23] This responsibility manifested in the creation of public museums.[24] These museums functioned as “’educational engines’” that would both teach and ‘civilize’ the wider public.[25]

This is the context in which the MMFA and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art were founded in 1860 and 1842, respectively. Today, in replicating the seventeenth-century curiosity cabinet in their modern exhibits, the MMFA Cabinet of Curiosities and the Wadsworth Cabinet of Art and Curiosity bring this evolutionary history of collecting into the modern museum setting. As such, these exhibits must contend not only with the history of curiosity collecting as it stood in the seventeenth-century, but also with how that history has changed and shaped the museum as it stands today. Very little information was recorded by colonizers on the Indigenous origins and makers of collected objects; Stahn argues that this has “resulted in knowledge gaps” that are “reproduced in archives, provenance research, or display practices.”[26] Given the historical origins of the curiosity cabinet as a site of “erasure,” to use Stahn’s word, and appropriation of Indigenous knowledge, artwork, and objects, these modern cabinets walk a delicate line between serving as a tool to educate visitors about colonial history and being an antiquated colonial relic replicating those same historical erasures. Curators of both collections are actively working to counteract these erasures. In my December 3, 2024 interview with Associate Curator for Collections Research at the Wadsworth, Vanessa Sigalas, she explained that “for us it’s really important to make sure that we are… on top of thinking and research and not considering this as a static display that never evolves.”[27] Major updates were made to the Wadsworth’s interpretive text in 2015 and more are underway.[28] Multiple different curators work on updating this language to ensure diverse perspectives are considered.[29] Speaking with Curator of European Art at the MMFA, Chloé Pelletier, on October 8, 2024, she expressed a similar sentiment, explaining that she hopes to add additional information on the colonial history of collecting within the Cabinet space itself.[30]

However, due to ‘gaps’ in archive, both displays continue to generalize colonized and non-Western geographic and cultural groups who either directly produced or contributed to the production of objects in the collection. In so doing, these displays inadvertently perpetuate the imperialist Western historical erasure and “fragmentation” of Indigenous knowledge, culture, and art.[31] As briefly referenced by Stahn, Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot speaks of this process of “erasure,” or ‘silencing,’ in his 1995 book, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History.[32] Trouillot argues:

“Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).”[33]

Trouillot explains that each historical narrative is composed of a “bundle of silences,” with certain silences being greater than others.[34] Several historians have applied Trouillot’s theory to museum contexts.[35] I follow in their footsteps here in considering how these modern cabinets create and reproduce certain silences. Many historians and art historians have considered how the archive obscures, biases, and erases the lives and presence of colonized and enslaved individuals from colonial and present history.[36] This erasure fits within Trouillot’s first two instances of silencing. The erasure in the modern MMFA and Wadsworth cabinets fits within Trouillot’s third instance of silencing, as curators participate in the ‘making of narratives.’ This third instance of silencing ultimately relates to, and, in some sense produces, the fourth instance, as the narrative told to museum visitors becomes the history they understand and perceive. The narratives told in these modern cabinet exhibits are thus vital to how museum visitors learn decolonial histories.

Having provided this contextual framing, I turn now to analyse the development of the MMFA and Wadsworth curiosity cabinets and their objects’ histories. First, I would like to situate my historiographical approach. I largely base my analysis on the collecting periods established in Stahn’s historiography, but I attempt to depart from Stahn in my construction of this historical narrative. I draw on the work of Linda Tuhiwai Smith to acknowledge the inherently biased, imperial, and imperialising nature of Western history and my role within it as a settler historian.[37] Smith explains that Western history is composed of “a set of interrelated ideas” which shape how history is told and perceived.[38] Focusing on four of these nine ideas, Western history is posited by the settler colonist as a “totalizing,” “universal,” ‘chronological,’ and “innocent” narrative.[39] Further, Smith explains that “[s]pace is often viewed in Western thinking as being static or divorced from time” and that this enables a ‘static’ view of the world that excludes “politics.”[40] Recognizing these failings of Western history, in my analysis, I present a historical narrative which seeks to examine time across space and through individuals. This analysis of time across space builds upon the theorizing of German historian Karl Schlögel in his 2003 book, translated in 2016, In Space We Read Time: On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics. Acknowledging the restrictive chronological nature of Western history, Schlögel proposes a “topographically centered historiography,” considering history as “set not only in time but also in space.”[41] He considers time as separable into “layers,” allowing the cartographer/historian to examine slices of the past, “present” and even “future.”[42] Whereas Schlögel focuses on singular “layers,” moments or periods in time, as they occur over space, I propose combining these layers of time, applying this model to the study of global history over the past five hundred years to tell a longer-term spatio-temporal historical narrative centered on the curiosity cabinet.[43]

I construct this historical narrative through touch. In the first chapter of the 2021 book, Concophilia: Shells, Art and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe, Swan traces the tactile history of shell collecting. By focusing her analysis on touch and shell handling, Swan moves beyond the biased European colonial visual archive, capturing the shells’ tactile relationship with not just European collectors, but enslaved people who gathered, cleaned and polished the raw specimens.[44] These enslaved people have been consciously written out of European history, often lacking substantial, or any, presence in the textual and visual archive of the colonizer.[45] It is through touch and materiality that the individual enslaved person’s “labour” is indexed.[46] By looking at the history of touch, Swan uncovers this otherwise invisible labour and returns it to the historical narrative.[47] One can apply this touch-centered history to the study of curiosity cabinets on the whole.

Extending the scope and timeline of Swan’s research, I consider the handling of objects from their inception through to their display in the MMFA and Wadsworth’s curiosity cabinets. Like Swan, I situate this analysis within the surrounding sociopolitical context of the period. Arjun Appadurai argues that objects have their own “social lives.”[48] As an object moves around the globe across space and time, people handle it, from extraction of the raw material, to polishing, carving, collecting, and curating. The existence and “labour” of these individuals is indexed in the material of the object itself.[49] These instances of handling in the object’s life can be considered as data points, or, more aptly, touch points. Bringing all the objects in a curiosity collection together, I propose that these individual touch points can combine to form not a point cloud of a singular object, but rather a metaphorical ‘point cloud of history.’ This ‘point cloud of history’ functions as a three-dimensional map, where elevation in the vertical dimension is replaced by time. This three-dimensional map shows every object’s path across geographic space over time, all based on the history of that object’s handling. Importantly, this map considers not only Western individuals’ role in producing these objects, but also non-Western people’s individual contributions which, as explained above, are often uncredited in the archive.

Using this ‘point cloud of history’ visualization, I will now trace the role and history of touch in the MMFA and Wadsworth Cabinets by working backwards through time and outwards through space. I begin with the current context of the cabinets, then explore the historic context of the cabinets and the wider museum, and, finally, end with the context of the objects before they entered the museum. The analysis presented in the following paragraphs is not intended to compile all known information from all periods of these collections’ history. Rather, my goal is to suggest a conceptual framework for further research and to begin to analyse how these histories might fit within that framework. Following this initial analysis, I will consider how this history of touch could be introduced to museum visitors using tangible photogrammetric models.

I begin within an overview of touch in the cabinet spaces as they stand today and how it fits withing the textual and visual experience of the exhibit. The MMFA Cabinet of Curiosities is composed of seven tall black walls arranged in an encapsulating octagon of seventeenth-century Dutch still life and history paintings alongside inset glass display cases. The Wadsworth Cabinet is similar, composed of one large green room containing eighteen glass cases and object displays alongside a mix of still life, history, and landscape paintings. Both cabinets seek to reproduce the physical and emotional space of a seventeenth-century European curiosity collection. Upon entering both spaces, visitors are first confronted by artworks, rather than wall text. In the MMFA, visitors move in a circle around the space to view cases of porcelain and silverware, navigation instruments, stone carvings, taxidermy animals, shells, medical equipment, and firearms. At no point is the visitor invited to touch these objects.

In the Wadsworth Cabinet, visitors walk between free-standing cabinets holding objects from antiquity, several Indigenous-produced artworks, European decorative objects made from globally sourced materials, and natural specimens. While visitors cannot directly touch the objects themselves, they are invited to pull open drawers to reveal additional objects behind glass.[50] Additionally, the Wadsworth offers four digital touchscreens embedded into the central display case that enable the visitor to interact with two-dimensional images of the objects.[51] A revised digital activity will soon allow visitors to look through objects and read their labels, as well as design their own virtual curiosity cabinet by dragging and dropping objects from the collection onto a cabinet backdrop.[52] The touchscreens are slanted to replicate the viewing experience of a book propped open on a stand.[53] Speaking with Wadsworth Curator of European Decorative Arts, Linda Roth, in a December 3, 2024 interview, she explained her goal was “to give some sense of… [sitting] at a long table in a period Kunstkammer and… you’d be able to handle your object… I wanted that sort of really eye level experience.”[54] Thus, for the visitor, the Wadsworth offers a tactile experience at some level.

While visitors cannot touch objects directly, every object is handled and placed by the museum curators. MMFA Curator of Asian Art, Laura Vigo, and research assistant, Lindsay Corbett, describe this phenomenon of the “‘white-gloved’ museum professionals [who] maintain privileged access to handling artifacts,” noting that this ‘privileged access’ is part of “the institutional hierarchies of the museum.”[55] Paralleling the experience of a collector in a seventeenth-century curiosity cabinet, touch, as a central ‘privilege’ of curation, becomes a medium through which objects are ‘re-arranged’ by the curator and the historical narrative is presented to the visitor. [56]

The curators further construct this historical narrative through their presentation of textual information within the cabinet spaces. In the MMFA cabinet, visitors can read two sets of laminated cards on either side of the gallery for more background information on the history of collecting. The colonial context of curiosity collecting is discussed twice briefly on one of the laminated cards in the MMFA Cabinet of Curiosities exhibit space: first in reference to “Dutch, English, Portuguese, Spanish and French trading companies” whose initial commercial endeavors resulted in “the formation of colonial empires,” and, second, in reference to the “globalization of trade” and the subsequent “development of the triangular commerce in slaves.” In both descriptions, not only is the violence of colonization and imperialism obscured, but the personhood and cultural identity of colonized and enslaved people is entirely erased.

In the Wadsworth, the bulk of textual information is provided through a mobile tour and digital object labels accessible through the digital touch screens at the center of the exhibit. The object labels include information on provenance, date, key known artists, object use, explanation of iconography, and often general geographic information on where materials were sourced. These labels often make brief connections to colonialism without explaining the violence of these objects production or adequately representing the individual work of Indigenous and enslaved people in that production.

Provided this background on the contents of the cabinets themselves and how touch and text intersect in these spaces, one can now move outward to consider the surrounding context of the wider museums. While the Wadsworth cabinet occupies a room of its own, the MMFA cabinet sits within the Golden Age in Holland and Flanders Gallery. This gallery is largely geared toward visual observation. Upon entering the gallery, the introductory wall text orients visitors the space, filled with landscape, genre, history, and still life paintings from the seventeenth century. Curator of European Art, Chloé Pelletier, has recently updated this text to include a discussion of the colonial realities of the Dutch ‘Golden Age.’[57]

The Wadsworth Cabinet is situated within a floor of entirely European art, moving from Baroque to Late Nineteenth Century. The MMFA Cabinet is similarly found within a predominantly European pavilion of the Museum. Visitors move back in time as they ascend floors, walking through the nineteenth and twentieth century galleries to reach an elevator to the third floor. This context situates both cabinets within a highly ocularcentric, eurocentric space. This is the mindset with which visitors then encounter the cabinets.

Now, having explained the context of the cabinets as they exist today, one can move back in time several years to consider the origins of the cabinets. The cabinets were unveiled within a year of each other. The MMFA Cabinet opened in 2016 with the creation of the Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavillion for peace, while the Wadsworth Cabinet opened in 2015 with the reinstallation of the Wadsworth’s European wing. Former MMFA Director and Chief Curator Nathalie Bondil’s “Manifesto for a Humanist Fine Arts Museum” features in the opening exhibition catalogue of the Pavilion. In this ‘Manifesto,’ Bondil argues: “[the MMFA’s] works are like the words of a global dictionary.”[58] She describes the Museum as a place “at the service of society,” providing a “neutral, positive, inclusive, and above all, relevant space.”[59] This Manifesto situates the Cabinet of Curiosities and its intended role within the Pavillion space. The motivation for instituting the Wadsworth Cabinet echoes much of this sentiment. In a 2018 interview, curator Linda Roth of the Wadsworth spoke directly about the inspiration for the Wadsworth Cabinet: she wanted to “encourage in people… the sense of discovery and exploration, and curiosity” in an unconventional exhibit space.[60] Beyond this she wanted to convey the notion of “interconnectedness” and something “global.”[61] This echoes Bondil’s concept of the museum as a ‘global dictionary’ that is ‘positive’ and ‘relevant’ to modern visitors.

Many of the objects on display in these cabinets entered the collections of the museums long before the cabinet exhibits existed. Before entering the museum collections, these objects were handled by private collectors. The MMFA’s Cabinet contains objects amassed from a much wider range of private and public collections than the Wadsworth Cabinet. The MMFA owes much of its initial decorative arts collection to Cleveland Morgan.[62] Morgan grew up in Montreal, visiting the Gallery frequently.[63] His family business, Henry Morgan & Co., traded in imported objects; Morgan expanded this trade to antiquities and “exotic objets d’art,” which he often personally collected.[64] He sold and gifted many of these objects to the Art Association for display in the Gallery.[65] Two items from his collection appear in the 2016 Cabinet: a late nineteenth century frit water bottle (surahi) from India, possibly Dehli, gifted in 1943, and a Chumash Whale Effigy made of steatite and shell inlay sometime between 1200-1600 in present-day California, purchased in 1950. Before reaching the MMFA, these objects passed not only through Morgan’s hands, but likely the hands of dealers and traders working directly and indirectly for and with Morgan and his company.

Many of the other objects in the MMFA Cabinet are on loan from other museum institutions in Montreal, namely the Redpath Museum of Natural History and the Montreal McCord Stewart Museum. Both institutions are foundationally linked to McGill University.[66] These museums contain large collections of Indigenous artwork and objects, as well as natural specimens and human remains in the case of the Redpath. While a complete history of these institutions is beyond the scope of this essay, I would like to highlight two key sources for additional research. Brian Young’s 2000 book, The Making and Unmaking of a University Museum: The McCord, 1921-1996, recounts the history of the McCord from 1760 to 1996. Concerning the colonial history of McGill as an institution more widely, art historian Charmaine Nelson’s 2020 joint research project conducted with McGill students, “Slavery and McGill University: Bicentenary Recommendations,” analyses the history of slavery at McGill and Canada, including how founder James McGill directly profited off slavery, engaged directly in colonial trade, and owned enslaved people.[67] Given the large number of loaned objects from both museums on display, this history is fundamentally tied to the history of the MMFA cabinet as it stands today.

The Wadsworth cabinet collection is indebted to the work of another, unrelated Morgan: American financier J.P. Morgan. The bulk of decorative objects and antiquities on display come from the private collection of J.P. Morgan.[68] Morgan was a major financial investor in United States (US) industrialization at the start of the late nineteenth century.[69] Morgan’s collecting practices were inspired by a personal desire to recreate the early collections of nobility.[70] He also desired to bring European art to America and, through it, culturally elevate the American public.[71] Sociologist Tony Bennett argues early museums were arranged to teach the public “what was to be seen”; Morgan’s ambitions clearly align with this early ideology of aesthetic ‘education.’[72] Morgan mainly collected older European artwork and antiquities, avoiding anything contemporary.[73] He worked with dealers, but also often bought entire collections from private collectors.[74] His own collecting practices occurred at a time when collecting had shifted to emphasize “systematized” collecting practices.[75] After his death, Morgan’s son donated half his collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and half to the Wadsworth Atheneum.[76] These objects thus passed through not only Morgan’s son’s hands, but Morgan’s hands, the hands of dealers and auctioneers he worked with, and previous private collectors.

These objects were placed into institutions with similar foundational histories. The Wadsworth and MMFA were founded within twenty years of each other, the Wadsworth opening in 1842 and the MMFA in 1860. This period was marked by a wide-spread rise in cultural nationalism, with newly formed states defining their “national identity through culture.”[77] Founded by Daniel Wadsworth, the Wadsworth was the first permanent public gallery of fine arts in the United States of America.[78] A.J. Davis, architect of the museum, “called it ‘foremost… upon this Continent, to provide for the arts of civilization a… home.’”[79] The first Montreal art society formed in 1826 and was succeeded by the Montreal Society of Artists in 1846.[80] It was not until 1860 that the Art Association of Montreal formed, opening the Art Gallery of Montreal in 1879 which would later become the MMFA.[81] Like the Wadsworth in the US, this was the first art gallery in Canada.[82] The Gallery was funded by Benaiah Gibb, a wealthy businessman who had taken over his father’s tailoring company, B. Gibb and Company, Tailors, which frequently served British officers at the garrison in Montreal.[83] The creation of the association coincided with the inauguration of Victoria Bridge, representing a physical and ideological connection to American city centers, as well as a further tie to Britain.[84] Both institutions were thus founded as nationalist symbols in colonial countries built on stolen Indigenous land.

Finally, zooming out to the global scale, these cabinet objects had ‘social lives’ before and outside of the cabinet, the museum and private collections. From archival research, it is possible to discern much about an object’s early life. For example, in the case of ‘European’ decorative objects at the Wadsworth, most objects have known provenance and curators often note the names of European gold or silversmiths who produced the final accoutrements to transform a raw material into a final ‘art’ product. However, these objects owe their lives to much more than the work of European artists. Looking at history through touch, one can acknowledge the work of the Indigenous, colonized, and enslaved individuals who handled these objects through extraction of raw materials, processing, and artistic production in European colonies across the globe. The ‘point cloud of history’ is much denser with touch points than the archive is with names, drawings, or descriptions of these individuals.

This concludes my comparative analysis of the MMFA and Wadsworth Atheneum curiosity cabinets. I have traced the history of touch in these cabinets through the ‘point cloud of history’ over time and geographic space, situating it within the local historical and contemporary context of both museums. Archival work should continue to unearth more details about the past lives of these objects. However, while and where textual and visual archives cannot fill the ‘gaps’ in the cabinets’ historical narratives, this analysis has demonstrated touch as an alternative means to trace the movement of objects over space and time, and thereby acknowledge and record the lives of those Indigenous and enslaved individuals who have been erased or obscured. 

Touch as a means to unlock the past is not a fundamentally Western idea. Several projects in the past decade have sought to provide tactile access for Indigenous groups to Indigenous artworks and objects taken under colonialism and retained in the collections of museums.[85] One of these studies, conducted by Marie Pierre Gadoua at the McCord Stewart Museum in Montreal, sought to enable the “recalling, narrating, and re-enacting [of] memories associated with objects” by connecting a group of Inuit elders with Inuit objects taken and kept in the McCord Stewart collection.[86] This Indigenous knowledge has been, to return to Smith’s explanation, ‘re-arranged’ and ‘re-presented’ by Western scholars. John Harries’ 2017 study combined archaeological and memory theory to explore the ability to “’touch the past.’”[87] A decade prior, cultural historian Constance Classen and anthropologist David Howes wrote of a similar phenomenon in a chapter in the 2006 book, Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture. They explain that object handling in early European collections served as a “medium of intimacy” between visitor and object, arguing that “[b]y touching a collected object the hand of the visitor also encounters the traces of the hand of the object’s creator and former owners.”[88] Gadoua makes similar observations.[89] In their work on archive digitization, researchers at Lund University specifically considered touch and “the unnoticed materiality” of the archive as a tool to uncover “some of the stories unregistered in the archive.”[90] Object handling, as it was historically exercised in the cabinet space, and as a historiographical index, could thus function as an educational tool to enable and provoke visitor understanding and exploration of the gaps in the historical narrative presented in the MMFA and Wadsworth cabinets.

The point cloud functions not only as a useful conceptual framework to visualize objects’ history, but as an actual basis for replicating the experience of touch through the creation of interactive, three-dimensional, photogrammetric models. Touch is already being incorporated into both the MMFA and Wadsworth using digital technologies. The Wadsworth’s interactive digital touchscreens approximate the experience of digital object handling, particularly through the design-your-own-cabinet activity explained previously.[91] This activity engages the user in thinking about the process of cabinet design and enables an interrogation of the curation process. However, this activity is not fundamentally designed to replicate touch.

The MMFA has an existing photogrammetric modelling exhibit on display elsewhere in the museum. In 2022 in the MMFA Stephan Crétier and Stéphany Maillery Wing for the Arts of One World, curators launched a digital, three-dimensional model tool: 根付 Netsuke Hands On. Netsuke are small ivory carvings worn on traditional Japanese men’s clothing; in the mid-nineteenth century, Europeans collected netsuke as part of the Japonisme trend.[92] Given the small size and intricate detail of netsuke, curator Laura Vigo and research assistant Lindsay Corbett turned to digital modelling as a means to make “the invisible visible.” [93] Additionally, they explain that “small ‘exotica’” like netsuke were historically tactile objects, and yet within the museum this “sensorial experience” is often lost.[94] Through digital models, they sought not only to “mimic the ‘handling’” experience, but to disrupt the “asymmetrical organization of power in ‘encyclopedic’ museums” that privileges large, visual “‘fine arts’ works.”[95]

Research and practical applications of digital touch are widespread beyond these two museums. The 2008 book, Touch in Museums: Policy and Practice in Object Handling, considers the potential of multiple digital modelling techniques in museums and university settings. In his chapter, anthropologist Graeme Were argues that, although the digital does not provide direct contact with the original object itself, the mouse or hand-based interaction with the digital object shifts the students’ interaction with a digital object “from a direct [ocular] observation into a direct relationship.”[96] Were describes this as “a new kind of touch.”[97] His study suggests digital models can effectively mimic the experience of touch.

Referenced in Touch in Museums, Māori scholar, Deidre Brown, considers the applications of digital modelling technology as a Māori tool for cultural heritage preservation in her 2008 article “’Ko to ringa ki nga rakau a te Pakeha’ – Virtual Taonga Māori and Museums.” Brown raises important considerations about the use of digital models in Indigenous object collections. Brown notes that digital models, while beneficial tools, must be produced and integrated into museums by Māori and on Māori terms and “must be located within Māori custom.”[98] This is an important consideration more widely for Indigenous-produced artwork and objects in the MMFA and Wadsworth Cabinets. There are several artworks in each cabinet produced exclusively by Indigenous and colonized peoples. For these objects, if repatriation is not possible, their digitization should be conducted in partnership with the communities of origin. Many of the objects in these cabinets, however, have less clear production histories, created by multiple laborers and artisans working across colonizing and colonized countries over time. These objects often do not have clear pathways for repatriation or return. Digital models can expand global access to both Indigenous and cross-cultural objects; Indigenous studies scholar Ruth Phillips argues in chapter fifteen of her 2011 book, Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums, that digitization not only offers a new means for Indigenous communities to access Indigenous artwork and objects, but this digital access helps “begin to level the playing field by displacing the museum as the unique site of study” of these objects.[99] Graeme Were makes a parallel argument, suggesting that through digitization “objects become extracted from the controlling environment of the museum institution.”[100] Therefore, in creating digital models of the MMFA and Wadsworth cabinet collections, both museums not only offer visitors new modes for connecting to and understanding history, but also open a new platform for decolonial practice to occur outside of the exhibits themselves.

In both the Wadsworth and MMFA cabinets, photogrammetric three-dimensional digital models could be integrated via either touch screen or mobile apps, as already used in the Wadsworth Cabinet. These digital models would replicate object handling, shifting the ocular-centrism of the fine arts museum toward a more historically accurate multi-sensorial space. In the Wadsworth, these digital models would further the decolonial work already underway; in the MMFA, these models would begin the conversation and work in tandem with any text introduced to the space. In both, the model would enable the visitor to interrogate Western history, connecting to individuals who have gone thus far unrecognized on an individual scale.

This essay has considered the point cloud as both conceptual framework and practical decolonial tool in modern recreations of seventeenth-century curiosity cabinets in fine arts museums. I have outlined and used a ‘point cloud of history’ framework to trace the history of touch within the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Cabinet of Curiosities and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art Cabinet of Art and Curiosity from the time of the objects’ creation to their present display in the cabinets. With this history of touch in mind, I have proposed introducing three-dimensional digital photogrammetric models of the cabinets’ objects directly into the cabinet spaces. In this proposal, I draw on the work of Indigenous studies scholars, sociologists, historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and geographers. I echo existing digital touch projects across North American and European museums, offering a uniquely effective context for their application.

Appendix

Figure 1. In progress point cloud model of a tea pot. Accessed December 8, 2024. https://www.mathworks.com/help/vision/ref/pctransform.html.

Figure 2. Cursory ‘point cloud of history’ conceptual framework model. Graphic created by Sophie Cooke using an image of a 3D scatter plot by Jinhang Jiang made for “Tutorial Network-Analysis R Visualization” on jinhangjiang.com overlaid on Political Map of the World, January 2015 shown in a Robinson projection, December 10, 2024.

Figure 3. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Cabinet of Curiosities. Photograph taken by Olivier Blouin, January 30, 2018. Olivier Blouin Photo. Accessed December 13, 2024. http://www.olivierblouin.com/blog/quartzco-t6syp.

Figure 4. Central display cases in the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art Cabinet of Art and Curiosity, with two digital touch screens visible at base. Photograph by Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Accessed December 13, 2024. https://www.thewadsworth.org/event/art-curiosity-cabinets-historical-contemporary-perspectives/.

Footnotes

[1] Leanne R. Simpson, “Anticolonial Strategies for the Recovery and Maintenance of Indigenous Knowledge,” American Indian Quarterly 28, no. 3/4 (2004): 373, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4138923.

[2] Simpson, “Anticolonial Strategies,” 374.

[3] Simpson, “Anticolonial Strategies,” 374.

[4] Carsten Stahn, Confronting Colonial Objects: Histories, Legalities, and Access to Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 45, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/

9780192868121.001.0001.

[5] Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, third edition (London: Zed Books, 2021), 51, https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350225282.

[6] Laura Vigo and Lindsay Corbett, “根付 Netsuke Hands On: Subverting Untouchability through the Digital,” in Beyond Digital Representation: Digital Innovations in Architecture, Engineering and Construction, ed. Andrea Giordano, Michele Russo and Roberta Spallone (Cham: Springer, 2023), 6, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36155-5_1; Graeme Were, “Out of Touch? Digital Technologies, Ethnographic Objects and Sensory Orders,” in Touch in Museums: Policy and Practice in Object Handling, ed. Helen Chatterjee (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 128, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003135616.

[7] Vigo and Corbett, “根付 Netsuke Hands On,” 6; Were, “Out of Touch? Digital Technologies,” 122; Deidre Brown, “‘Ko to Ringa Ki Nga Rakau a Te Pakeha’—Virtual Taonga Māori and Museums,” Visual Resources 24, no. 1 (2008): 59, doi:10.1080/01973760801892266.

[8] Vigo and Corbett, “根付 Netsuke Hands On,” 7.

[9] John Harries, “A stone that feels right in the hand: Tactile memory, the abduction of agency and presence of the past,” Journal of Material Culture 22, no. 1 (2017): 113, https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183516679187.

[10] Stephen Bann, “The Return to Curiosity: Shifting Paradigms in Contemporary Museum

Display,” in Art and its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium, ed. A. McClellan (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2003), 118, https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470775936.ch5.

[11] Bann, “The Return to Curiosity,” 118.

[12] Stahn, Confronting Colonial Objects, 64-65.

[13] Stahn, Confronting Colonial Objects, 61.

[14] Stahn, Confronting Colonial Objects, 10.

[15] Stahn, Confronting Colonial Objects, 64; Constance Classen, “Tactile Arts,” in The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 143, https://doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252034930.003.0006.

[16] Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 69-70.

[17] Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 71.

[18] Stahn, Confronting Colonial Objects, 87.

[19] Tony Bennett, "Pedagogic Objects, Clean Eyes, and Popular Instruction: On Sensory Regimes and Museum Didactics," Configurations 6, no. 3 (1998): 348,

https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/con.1998.0020.

[20] Constance Classen and David Howes, “The Museum as Sensescape: Western Sensibilities and Indigenous Artifacts,” in Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture, ed. Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth Phillips (London: Routledge, 2006), 201-202, https://doi-org.proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/10.4324/9781003086611.

[21] Stahn, Confronting Colonial Objects, 88; Bennett, “Pedagogic Objects,” 350.

[22] Classen and Howes, “The Museum as Sensescape,” 208; Bennett, “Pedagogic Objects,” 350-351.

[23] Stahn, Confronting Colonial Objects, 88.

[24] Stahn, Confronting Colonial Objects, 88.

[25]Bennett, “Pedagogic Objects,” 355; Stahn, Confronting Colonial Objects, 88.

[26] Stahn, Confronting Colonial Objects, 45.

[27] Vanessa Sigalas (Associate Curator for Collections Research at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art), interview by the author, December 3, 2024.

[28] Sigalas, interview.

[29] Sigalas, interview.

[30] Chloé Pelletier (Curator of European Art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts), in discussion with the author, October 8, 2024.

[31] Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 31.

[32]  Stahn, Confronting Colonial Objects, 45.

[33] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The Power in the Story,” in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 26, https://hdl-handle-net.proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/2027/heb04595.0001.001.

[34] Trouillot, “The Power in the Story,” 27.

[35] Rhiannon Mason and Joanne Sayner, “Bringing museal silence into focus: eight ways of thinking about silence in museums,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 25, no.1 (2019): 6-7, https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2017.1413678.

[36] The following works serve as several examples of scholars interrogating gaps and limitations of the archive: Sadiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008), https://muse.jhu.edu/article/241115; Cara Krmpotich, “The senses in museums: Knowledge production, democratization and Indigenization,” in The Routledge Handbook of Sensory Archaeology, ed. Robin Skeates and Jo Day (Milton: Routledge, 2019), https://doi-org.proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/10.4324/9781315560175; Daniela Agostinho, Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, and Karen Louise Grova Søilen, “Archives That Matter Infrastructures for Sharing Unshared Histories. An Introduction,” Nordisk Tidsskrift for Informationsvidenskab Og Kulturformidling 8, no. 2 (2019), https://doi.org/10.7146/ntik.v7i2.118472.

[37] Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 33.

[38] Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 33.

[39] Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 33-35.

[40] Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 60.

[41] Karl Schlögel, In Space We Read Time: On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics, trans. Gerrit Jackson (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2016), xvii-xix, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv12fw89w.5.

[42] Schlögel, In Space We Read Time, 63. Schlögel proposes a reading of maps as both products of and influenced by sociopolitical processes. In this he echoes the earlier work of geographer Jeremy Crampton in his article, “Maps as social constructions: power, communication and Visualization,” Progress in Human Geography 25, no. 2 (2001): 235-252, https://doi.org/10.1191/030913201678580494. Crampton’s work has been hugely influential on my thinking as a geographer over my academic career.

[43] Several art historians have read two-dimensional artworks, namely paintings and prints, as maps. In her 1983 book, The Art of Describing, University of Chicago Press, art historian Svetlana Alpers argues that seventeenth-century Dutch painting was parallel to and itself a kind of mapmaking. Over three decades later, in her 2016 book, Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica, Routledge, Charmaine Nelson draws on the analyses of critical geographers, namely Irit Rogoff and J.B. Harley, to interrogate nineteenth-century marine landscapes as themselves colonial maps. I follow loosely in the traditions of Alpers and Nelson in my reading of art across geographic space.

[44] Claudia Swan, “The Nature of Exotic Shells,” in Conchophilia: Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 45-46, https://doi-org.proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/10.1515/9780691220246-002.

[45] Swan, “The Nature of Exotic Shells,” 26, 47.

[46] Swan, “The Nature of Exotic Shells,” 47.

[47] Swan, “The Nature of Exotic Shells,” 47.

[48] Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3, https://doi-org.proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/10.1017/CBO9780511819582.

[49] Swan, “The Nature of Exotic Shells,” 47.

[50] Linda Roth (Curator of European Decorative Arts at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art), interview by the author, December 3, 2024.

[51] Roth, interview.

[52] Jama Holchin (Evaluation and Digital Interpretation Specialist at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art), interview by the author, December 3, 2024.

[53] Roth, interview.

[54] Roth, interview.

[55] Vigo and Corbett, “根付 Netsuke Hands On,” 7.

[56] Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 71.

[57] Pelletier, discussion.

[58] Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion for Peace:

International Art and Education: Michel de la Chenelière International Atelier for Education and Art Therapy, ed. Nathalie Bondil (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2016), 26.

[59] Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion for Peace, 20-24.

[60] Linda Roth, interview by Francois Coulon, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, March 2018, https://www.thewadsworth.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Inteview-with-Linda-Roth-by-François-Coulon_reviewed-linda-roth_lhr-JH-6-4-1.pdf.

[61] Roth, interview by Francois Coulon, March 2018.

[62] Georges-Hébert Germain, A City’s Museum: A History of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2007), 63.

[63] Germain, A City’s Museum, 63.

[64] Germain, A City’s Museum, 63.

[65] Germain, A City’s Museum, 63.

[66] Brian J. Young, The Making and Unmaking of a University Museum: The McCord 1921-1996

(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 51, https://coilink.org/20.500.12592/rk29df.

[67] Charmaine A. Nelson and Student Authors, “Slavery and McGill University: Bicentenary Recommendations,” Black Maple Magazine, 2020, 55-60, https://blackmaplemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/bicentenary-recommendations.pdf.

[68] “Cabinet of Art & Curiosity,” On View Now, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, updated 2024, https://www.thewadsworth.org/explore/on-view/cabinet-of-art-and-curiosity/.

[69] Linda Horvitz Roth, ed. J. Pierpont Morgan, Collector: European Decorative Arts from the Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1986), 26.

[70] Roth, J. Pierpont Morgan, Collector, 38.

[71] Roth, J. Pierpont Morgan, Collector, 26.

[72] Bennett, “Pedagogic Objects,” 351, 355.

[73] Roth, J. Pierpont Morgan, Collector, 26.

[74] Roth, J. Pierpont Morgan, Collector, 28, 30.

[75] Stahn, Confronting Colonial Objects, 88.

[76] Roth, J. Pierpont Morgan, Collector, 39-40.

[77] Stahn, Confronting Colonial Objects, 26.

[78] Eugene R. Gaddis, Patrick McCaughey, Jean K. Cadogan, and Linda Ayres, The Spirit of Genius: Art at the Wadsworth Atheneum (New York, Hartford: Hudson Hills Press in association with the Wadsworth Atheneum, 1992), 11.

[79] Gaddis, McCaughey, Cadogan and Ayres, The Spirit of Genius, 11.

[80] Germain, A City’s Museum, 17.

[81] Germain, A City’s Museum, 18.

[82] Germain, A City’s Museum, 26.

[83] Germain, A City’s Museum, 30.

[84] Germain, A City’s Museum, 18.

[85] Two of these studies include: Cara Krmpotich, Laura Peers and the Haida Repatriation Committee and staff of the Pitt Rivers Museum and British Museum, This Is Our Life: Haida Material Heritage and Changing Museum Practice (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013), https://doi-org.proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/10.59962/9780774825429, and Marie-Pierre Gadoua, “Making Sense through Touch: Handling Collections with Inuit Elders at the McCord Museum,” The Senses and Society 9, no. 3 (2014): 323–41, https://doi.org/10.2752/174589314X14023847039719.

[86] Gadoua, “Making Sense through Touch,” 325.

[87] Harries, “A stone that feels right in the hand,” 113.

[88] Classen and Howes, “The Museum as Sensescape,” 202.

[89] Gadoua, “Making Sense through Touch,” 325.

[90] Agostinho, Dirckinck-Holmfed, and Søilen, “Archives that Matter,” 6.

[91] Holchin, interview.

[92] Vigo and Corbett, “根付 Netsuke Hands On,” 4-5.

[93] Vigo and Corbett, “根付 Netsuke Hands On,” 3-4, 6.

[94] Vigo and Corbett, “根付 Netsuke Hands On,” 6-7.

[95] Vigo and Corbett, “根付 Netsuke Hands On,” 4.

[96] Were, “Out of Touch? Digital Technologies,” 132.

[97] Were, “Out of Touch? Digital Technologies,” 128.

[98] Brown, “‘Ko to Ringa Ki Nga Rakau a Te Pakeha,’” 62.

[99] Ruth B. Phillips, “The Digital (R)Evolution of Museum-Based Research,” in Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 278, https://doi-org.proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/10.1515/9780773587465-023.

[100] Were, “Out of Touch? Digital Technologies,” 122.