September 8, 2026

Human Rights in Contemporary Societies

Ruth Ivonne Herrera Pineda e Tiago Castela

This thesis investigates the transformation of Casa Pumarejo, an old colonial palace in Seville, into a decolonial museum space. The study analyses the relationship of this process with urban social movements and the struggle against gentrification and touristification. The central objective is to understand how occupied and self-managed spaces can redefine traditional museological practices by questioning colonial structures of power, memory, and space. The research adopts a critical ethnographic methodology, utilizing semi-structured interviews with movement members, consultations of the movement's archives and secondary sources, and an interdisciplinary literature review spanning museology, urban studies, and decolonial theory. The results reveal that Casa Pumarejo, through its daily practices of political organization such as horizontal assemblies, popular legal support, self-managed cultural workshops, and the maintenance of a community archive displaces and contests conventional definitions and functions of the museum. This contestation, however, is not an internal museological project of the movement. Departing from a research hypothesis that viewed the space as a potential decolonial museum, the ethnographic analysis demonstrated that activists do not seek to reformulate the museum institution but rather to counter-colonize the space. They achieve this through militant praxis that reconfigures the colonial mansion into a space of community power and living memory, where the community itself, acting as the curator of its history, materially opposes the logics of gentrification, touristification, and institutional abandonment. The analysis identifies three forms of memory materialized in the space: museal memory, of a documentary and archival character; social-collective memory, expressed in objects and iconography of a political nature that members use to inscribe their narrative onto the space; and affective memory, constituted by personal objects that anchor individual biographies to the collective. This typology demonstrates how the processes of horizontality and direct participation, fundamental to Pumarejo's self-management, not only democratize but also radically redefine the modes of cultural production and curation, displacing them from institutional authority to the community body. Furthermore, it shows how the okupa (squatter) movement, by occupying historic buildings, subverts the colonial logic of museums, transforming them into laboratories for social and political experimentation. The conclusion indicates that the Pumarejo experience offers an alternative museum model centered on community and resistance, contributing to debates on decolonization, the right to the city, and cultural heritage preservation. The implications include the need for institutional recognition of these spaces as museums and the valorization of their practices as tools for social transformation. The thesis highlights the tension between institutionalization and the maintenance of the movement's autonomy, proposing that the humanization of concepts such as the museum, power, and the urban is fundamental for a decolonial and prefigurative museology.

Keywords: Right to the city, social movements, collective memory, decolonial museum, Seville