14 December 2017
Throughout the year, the RCMC with Imagine IC organized depot/collections visits at Tropenmuseum for people of African descent, especially those who feel connected to our Ghanaian collections. In this series, Diasporic Connections: Ghana 60 Years After, we asked a few Ghanaian-Dutch people to look at the Ghanaian objects in the Tropenmuseum collection to see which objects spoke to them. After several months, talks, meetings and depot visits, one person became intrigued by a certain Fanti-canoe. This canoe is not visible in the current exhibition but stored in our depot. In order to acknowledge the interest in the object, we started to think about how the object might be made accessible by a larger group of people, who consider the canoe to be important.
Interest in this particular Fanti canoe, provoked important questions and conversations about about exhibiting, belonging, working together with communities, and sharing authority. Together with Imagine IC, we have therefore organized a discussion about this object and the possibility for it to be exhibited at the Imagine IC ‘huis’ in their Bijlmerplein location in South-East Amsterdam. There is a huge Ghanaian community in South-East Amsterdam which makes the Imagine IC location an interesting place to showcase the object and thereby give it new purpose. How can the museum share the collection and bring this ‘back’ to a community that shares interest and heritage with it? Could we revisit and rethink the ways in which we collect and store objects?
The program will be in Dutch.
