Interaction with A Museum – A Quick Mental Guide to Surviving Institutional Gaslighting & Reclaiming Your Reality (Digital Version)
Healing is an inalienable right: healing is a sacred right.
This is my living record.
Here you will find the three blog posts I shared in real time in May 2025, tracing my precise engagement with Amsterdam’s Huis Marseille Museum. This archive documents the unfolding work of institutional gaslighting I overcame—my multi-layered critique, the Dutch museum’s performative concern, and the compassionate mental health guidance I forged from enduring the encounter.
I offer this archive openly so the unedited truth remains free and accessible. It lives as a permanent counter-narrative to institutional silence.
From these essays, I forged a physical vessel of reclamation: my book, Interaction with A Museum – A Quick Mental Guide to Surviving Institutional Gaslighting & Reclaiming Your Reality. This is not a conventional book. It’s a human exploration of what healing means beyond modern Western science—where many cultures talk with each other, and weave a unique medicine at the forgotten intersection of art, spirituality, philosophy and psychology.
Guided by my diverse multicultural heritage, I crafted this intersectional medicine—a present-day Nlongo/Bilongo—that diagnoses, transforms, and heals knowledge to inhabit a contemporary Kongo Nkisi Ndonki—a protective figure hunting for justice. It carries the ancestral energy of my Kongo roots, and the mindful Dharmic mantras of my Sikh upbringing. It is also shaped by my professional mastery of what is commonly known as modern Western science—Europe’s own traditional knowledge system, self-proclaimed as universal—which I wield with forensic precision.
This multicultural artistic healing knowledge—Nlongo— lives at the globally well-known intersection of subjectivity and objectivity, materiality and immateriality. It breathes in an unbearable paradox only experienced in Western culture’s European binary logic of right or wrong, conform or non-conform, black or white, existence or non-existence, rational or emotional, analytical or metaphorical, all or nothing—and so forth or back. Its undying heart pounds beyond the invisible binary matrix that colonization made out of humanity’s entire reality, the scarred, empty womb we all live in.
This liberating, decrypted key is lent only to spaces that have begun the true labor of decolonization and progess steadily in their healing journey. They are courageous museums that have returned stolen sacred objects from cultures historically deemed invalid. They are the bold ones who re-humanize the lens with which they teach history, and challenge the museological apartheid* aftermath. They do not do it because they want to please the majority of humans that colonization has marginalized, nor is it another “white savior” endeavor. They do it because they know when we dehumanize others, we dehumanize ourselves first. And when others hold to their humanity, we are the only one left without one.
As those African ancestral guardians depart to their longed-for missing home, they leave a consecrated void—a silent vessel waiting to become a Nkisi. Into that space, this hybrid vessel is placed. There, it exists as a presence to be encountered… holding the potential to guide, witness, and protect.
Its full power—as a Nkisi Ndonki hunting for justice—emerges only when activated by an ancestrally chosen healer… an enlightened hybrid Nganga. Only through this intentional activation does the book perform its role as justice-seeker and ancestral guardian for the community that honors its protective presence.
This is not merely my story. It is a collective healing strategy.
Healing is a sacred right.
I am Dr. Linda Bonga Bouna, and this is my reappearance.
*Museological apartheid is the re-humanized word for what academics call epistemic segregation. It is the systematic separation of knowledge in museums. European art is elevated as universal culture; African, Asian, and Indigenous works are confined to “ethnography.”
This is not a neutral arrangement of collections. It is an active hierarchy of knowledge. It assigns different ontological values to objects depending on origin, reproducing colonial logics of superiority and inferiority.
In re-humanized words: European objects are displayed as “art” and universal heritage. Global Majority objects are reduced to “craft,” “culture,” or “ethnography.” This segregation divides not only collections but also knowledge systems, audiences, and funding priorities, maintaining the colonial order inside the museum.
Thus, committed museums borrowing this Bilongo have reached one of the highest developments in the never-ending decolonization journey. As the powerful medicine still awaits an institution to reach this stage, it can be lent to decolonized transcultural psychology clinics (decolonized therapy practices).
May 9, 2025: The Trigger
May 16, 2025: The Insight
May 25, 2025: The Healing
Reappearance 