An international cooperation between the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich and museums in Uganda.
For around three decades, museum experts, curators and researchers have increasingly started to develop innovative strategies to challenge the violent historical burden and ideologies of colonial legacies inherent in collections. Against this background, numerous initiatives worldwide review their collection, research, communication and exhibition strategies.
Beside these goals of museums’ work as defined by the International Council of Museums (ICOM), a sixth core activity of museums emerged: cooperation – with the collection’s ‘source communities’ and museums in countries of provenance. Such cooperation, however, turns out to be a sensitive field of activities, and the scientific community draws attention to a possible risk of neo-colonial relations – it appears to be difficult to consider the right social groups for collaboration and guarantee mutual benefits, to find means of appropriate actions in a post-colonial, unequal setting and to enhance substantially the public understanding of (neo-) colonial trajectories.
Who to cooperate with to attain which objectives? Drawing on the expert knowledge and collections of the three museums, this project aims at jointly working on an exhibition on milk in Kampala, Mbarara (West Uganda) and Zurich. Hence, the cooperating institutions believe that there is great potential for the contemporary museum in bundling expertise in research and curating. As a guideline to the procedure of a reciprocal scientific and practical exchange, the partnership is reflected along Clifford’s (1997) concept of the ‘contact zone’ and its critical consideration by Robin Boast (2011). The process and collaboration will be documented and shall nourish the debate of the future of the ethnographic museum.
Activities
June 2014 – September 2015
Exhibition ‘Milk in Africa – from Calabash to Tetra-Pak’ (Drinking Skills) at the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich curated by Luciano Gagliardi, Thomas Laely, and Raphael Schwere.
Exhibition: http://www.musethno.uzh.ch/ausstellungen/trinkkultur.htm
Short film: http://www.musethno.uzh.ch/ausstellungen/tlrinkkultur/filme.html
February – May 2015
Seminar ‘National and regional museums in Subsahara Africa – new cooperation between Africa and Europe?’ at the University of Zurich
Dr. Thomas Laely / M.A. Birthe Pater
Friday 12-4pm, February 27th - May 29th, 2015
September 2015
Laboratory ‘Museological Exchange Uganda – Switzerland’
// Date: September 14th -19th 2015 // Venue: Ethnographic Museum at the UZH, Pelikanstr. 40, 8001 Zurich
January 2016
Workshop ‘Drinking deeply from museum work’
// Date: January 2016 // Venue: Uganda Museum Kampala & Igongo Cultural Centre, Mbarara
September – Dezember 2016
Seminar ‘Alpine Milchwirtschaft aus translokaler Perspektive: eine Annäherung an eine multi-sited ethnography für Uganda und die Schweiz’ an der Universität Zürich
M.A. Birthe Pater
December 2016
International Conference „International museum cooperation between Africa and Europe”
// Date: December 1 – 3, 2016 // Venue: Ethnographic Museum at the UZH, Pelikanstr. 40, 8001 Zurich