About the Project

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. The presented project aims at meeting this challenge through international scientific and professional exchange and  collaboration.

Besides acquiring, conserving, researching, communicating and exhibiting “tangible and intangible evidence of people and their environment”, 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.

Drawing on the expert knowledge and collections of three museums, this project aims at jointly working on exhibitions on Ugandan and Swiss milk culture
and museum cooperation in Kampala, Mbarara (Western Uganda) and Zurich (Switzerland). Hence, the cooperating institutions believe that there is great potential
for the contemporary museum in bundling expertise in research and curating. This process of reciprocal scientific and practical exchange and collaboration will be
documented, reflected upon and shall nourish the debate of the future of the ethnographic museum.