Museopiracy: Redressing the Commemoration of the Endeavour’s Voyage to the Pacific in Processions for Tupaia

Museopiracy is a way of working with/challenging the workings of museum collections as an outsider to the institution. It takes as its basis the project Cook’s New Clothes, which was a performative subversion of the commemoration of the British ‘discovery’ of the Pacific in an artistic-research program based at the National Maritime Museum as part of the Endeavour project and new Pacific Gallery (2018). In three parts, this article is a critical analysis of the limitations of collaboration between museums and marginalised communities. The case study focusses on the historical context for the commemoration and theorisation of the method of museopiracy, and an artwork based on research towards restitution, strategies for exhibiting empire, and infrastructural activism. It is a turn to transparency, movement, performance and experimentation, historical redressing, mourning, healing laughter and embarrassment about Empire.