ScienceUncut

In her talk “From Curiosa to World Culture: what comes next” at the Herrenhausen Symposium "Positioning Ethnological Museums in the 21st Century", Adriana Muñoz describes how the Swedish Värlskulturmuseet in Göteborg defines its new role in the Swedish society. She points out that “museums with wholly or partially ethnographical direction must, even more than now, have an important mission in promoting contacts between Swedish and non-Swedish cultures”. Muñoz looks as a curator at the history of the collection from a post-colonial perspective.

Adriana Muñoz is curator for the Collections at the National Museums of World Culture. She studied history in Argentina and archaeology in Sweden. Since 1998 she has been working as curator and in charge of a number of exhibitions at the Etnografiska Museet i Gothenburg as well as at the Museum of World Culture. She has been exploring how categories have been constructed in Ethnographic museums in relationship to the Colonial period. She has been working with possibilities of de-colonial practices in museums. Adriana has been working for ICOM with problems around the illegal import/export of archaeological plundered objects from Latin America.

Photo: Philip Bartz for Volkswagen Foundation

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Barbara Plankensteiner talks at the Herrenhausen Symposium "Positioning Ethnological Museums in the 21st Century" about her experience regarding the restitution of human remains from the Weltmuseum Wien to the Maori community through the official representatives. She contrasts this experience to an initiative called “the Benin Dialogue” that deals with the art work.

Barbara Plankensteiner is Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Weltmuseum Wien where she also is in charge of the Subsaharan Africa collections. She is lecturer at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Vienna University. Research and publications on African material culture and arts, history of anthropology and collections, museum anthropology. Her most well-known international exhibitions are Benin—Kings and Rituals: Court Arts from Nigeria where she was lead curator and editor of the accompanying handbook, and African Lace. A History of Trade, Creativity and Fashion in Nigeria that she co-curated and for which she co-edited the accompanying catalogue. Currently, she is project leader of SWICH Sharing a World of Inclusion, Creativity and Heritage. Ethnography, Museums of World Culture and New Citizenship in Europe, a large cooperation project of ten European museums funded by the Creative Europe programme of the EC.

Foto: Philip Bartz for Volkswagen Foundation

ScienceUncut - Science Podcast by Volkswagen Foundation