Decontextualise to Decolonise: 2025 Interior Architecture Students Re-Presenting Artefacts at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery

Decontextualise to Decolonise is a co-produced publication emerging from a pedagogic collaboration between Interior Architecture students and staff at the University of Brighton and Brighton & Hove Museums. Through critical spatial design and storytelling, this project repositions artefacts held within museum collections, challenging colonial narratives and reimagining cultural heritage from the perspective of student designers.

The book presents the outcomes of a live project in which students developed speculative spatial interventions in response to selected artefacts from Brighton Museum & Art Gallery. These interventions formed part of a public QR code trail installed in the museum, linking physical objects to digital reinterpretations. The publication weaves together project reflections, theoretical framing, and visual documentation of student work.

Foregrounding decolonial design practices, this work interrogates institutional authority over cultural knowledge and proposes alternative modes of engagement that honour diasporic memory, material agency, and plural authorship. As an evolving archive of critical spatial practice, Decontextualise to Decolonise is a call to reimagine how we learn, curate, and design in pursuit of social justice.