14 al Centro Latam
The White Pube is the collaborative identity of Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad, under which they write about art, culture, video games and life. TWP has built a reputation for challenging the establishment, as well as championing accessibility to the arts through initiatives like their Successful Funding Application Library, their Working Class Writers Grant, and a regular advice column in Elephant Magazine. Marrying a critical eye on the art institutions with a love of video games, The White Pube took a trip to The British Museum to review Dentsu Webchutney and VICE’s Yellow Pencil-winning The Unfiltered History Tour, a guerrilla tour of the British Museum's stolen artefacts that taps augmented reality to reveal the truth.
I’m reading the news on my phone on the way to the British Museum. Two climate protesters wearing ‘Just Stop Oil’ t-shirts have just glued themselves to a John Constable painting not too far away in the National Gallery. Apparently, staff had to rush schoolchildren and tourists out of the way; god forbid these people might use the precious space of the gallery to think. In an amazing feat, the protestors managed to stick a print over The Hay Wain that cast an apocalyptic vision of the future on top, with planes and roads and trees with no leaves left on them. I exit the tube thinking about how easily, and also how cruelly, protests can be policed. Then, I walk into the British Museum to witness another protest that nobody seems to know is happening.
I hate this building and I hate that I am here in the middle of a heatwave, trapped under its glass ceiling like I’m a part of its collection. I march through the central hall straight past the overpriced cafe and into a darkened room. A thick crowd of tourists is gathered around a glass case. Every single one of them has their phone out, trying to take a picture of the famous Rosetta Stone. I know these images, the holiday snaps you never look at a second time, and yet I have my phone out waiting for my turn to do exactly the same thing.
“I hate this building and I hate that I am here in the middle of a heatwave, trapped under its glass ceiling like I’m a part of its collection”
In 2021 VICE Media World News collaborated with Dentsu to create The Unfiltered History Tour. The project takes 10 of the most contested artefacts in the British Museum’s collection (you know, where the objects on display aren’t British at all) and offers visitors a free guerrilla tour told directly from the voices of native experts who want the pieces repatriated. The tour spotlights the Parthenon Marbles from Greece, India’s Amaravati Marbles too, and pieces like the 15th Century Boinayel figures from Jamaica. I am standing in front of the Rosetta Stone and when the coast is finally clear, I use the tour’s Instagram filter to unfilter what I am seeing.
My screen snaps to black and then a digital Rosetta Stone hovers over the original whilst colonial-era soldiers wave a French flag, dark sunlight shining over the scene. Heba Abd el Gawad tells me the stone was a decree, written to seal an agreement between Egyptian priests and a Greek king. The voice continues by asking me to look for engravings on the stone in English. I’m curious, and there on the left I can make out the name, “George III.” The British Museum explains this away as simply a “label” made after the stone was “surrendered to British Forces as part of the Treaty of Alexandria.” The Unfiltered History Tour argues this graffiti, “is the perfect symbolism of colonialism and empire… If it was, let’s say, inscribed by Egyptian Arabic at the time, it would have been perceived as a destruction of the artefacts. When the same engraving is done by the British colonial forces, this is legal, this is fine; this is not a destruction of the artefacts.”
I’ve seen this stone on school trips and family outings but nobody ever told me what we did – especially not the museum. It makes me angry that this act of vandalism is being presented like a neutral, maybe even helpful, act of documentation; as though the king’s name isn’t proof of a violent struggle between two European powers in a country that just wanted to be left alone. With the stone where it is today, in England and not in Egypt, it feels as though nothing has changed. And so I rush to the next object on the tour braced to hear more, to continue catching up.
“It makes me angry that this act of vandalism is being presented like a neutral, maybe even helpful, act of documentation”
After I’m done with the 10 pieces, I think back to this morning: I compare the two types of protest in my mind and feel excited that as powerful as the British Museum is, they can’t stop what visitors do on their phones. I feel glad that everyone here carries theirs out in front like it’s an integral part of their visit, of their vision, but I want to tell them which way to go online so they end up here at the full story. Augmented reality is usually a means through which to coat fiction over truth but here it is doing almost the opposite. The Unfiltered History Tour undermines the museum’s overly polite curation of British colonialism; in fact, it humiliates it by speaking through the voices of the people who are owed these artefacts, rather than the middle-class museum team whose job it is to defend Britain’s unforgivable legacy.
I go back to the Rosetta Stone where a new group are now vying for their own photo opportunity. While everyone is duly looking at their screens, I open the tour’s website and share the page with a stranger who has left their airdrop on for “everyone” before I leave.