While acknowledging and addressing the long and sustained critique of ethnographic museums and the coloniality of their history and collection practices, at the Wereldmuseum, we do not reduce the collections only to the story of colonialism. Rather, we want to acknowledge that these institutions have long been committed to archiving the knowledges, skills and techniques, the ingenuity of a global majority of peoples across the world, in shaping the world around them. One of our lines of inquiry, focuses on design and histories of making. We aim to rethink design histories through the lens of the ethnographic museum and by doing that challenge categories of art or design versus craft, or dress versus fashion, to think more critically about the ways in which such categories continue to divide the world.
