These museum workers had gathered ... to oversee and document artist and musician Satch Hoyt “un-mute” the African instrument collection, as he calls it. A masterful player of wind and percussion alike, Hoyt has been working to gain access to African instrument collections in colonial and ethnographic museums so that they may be played again. Within certain African diasporic traditions, some of these instruments are understood as tools to communicate with the creator and ancestors. Thus, this un-muting is not a mere symbolic act protesting the enforced dormancy of museum storage, but an affirmation of fluid continuity between the living and ancestral realms.
Un-muting points to the urgent need for rematriation, not only in terms of repairing frayed ancestral ties, but crucially, in maintaining the instruments’ integrity: “Instruments need to be played. If they’re not, they literally dry up. Every first violinist in a philharmonic or symphonic orchestra is playing a Stradivarius which is on loan. Why aren’t any of these instruments that are in these ethnographic museums on loan? Why aren’t they being played?” When Hoyt was finally granted access to the British Museum’s African instrument collection in 2023, after three toilsome years of negotiations, he was asked to sign a waiver itemizing a litany of poisons (arsenic, lead, mercury, methyl bromide, ethylene oxide, DDT, etc.) that were pumped into the instruments, agreeing that if he were to fall ill or drop dead upon playing them, the British Museum would not be liable.
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