Europeana Research collaborations: National Museum of World Culture, Sweden
About the institution
The National museums of world culture responsible for non-European collections in Sweden. Within the administration there are four museums: the Museum of the Far East, the Museum of Antiquities and the Museum of Ethnography, all three in Stockholm, as well as the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg.
About the project
After a fire at Brazil’s National Museum in 2018, which destroyed almost 20 million objects in its collections, Sweden’s National Museums of World Culture and the University of Gothenburg started a pilot project around the digital repatriation of ethnographic collections to Brazil: “Digital Repatriation of Cultural Heritage in the Global South”, which is funded by of The Swedish Research Council.
Through this project, the museums intend to strengthen the indigenous population of the Brazilian Amazon by investigating the possibility of decolonizing the Swedish database for museum collections – “Charlotte” – which also shows collections that are currently in Sweden and belong to these communities.
To this end, the project team has begun experimenting with Tainacan, an open source tool that allows users to create digital collections on the Internet, opening up new possibilities for dialogue about the power of data in decolonizing collections. A pilot project focused on a specific indigenous community, the Wai Wai, and the objects attributable to them currently at the World Culture Museum in Gothenburg.
About the report
The World Culture Museum commissioned a report within the Europeana Research Grants program, under the 2021 call “Crowdsourcing and Research”. Based on the specific objectives of “Digital Repatriation of Cultural Heritage in the Global South”, the report explores the topic of deconstructing an inherently colonial database by working in collaboration with indigenous peoples and developing different models of information management and cataloging that are more attuned to their perspectives and self-representation. More specifically, the report focuses on the pilot project that was conducted at the museum.
From a research perspective, the pilot project can be seen as a case study. In addition, professionals, students and stakeholders can build on it to interact, use and curate the information in Carlotta.