Activate

Connecting Arts Series

Activate is a series of loosely tied together projects intended to uncover the contemporary meanings of our collections for different local and global stakeholders. Questions are often asked about the relevance of ethnographic collections. We believe that they are important for a better understanding of how we make meaning in our lives both in the past and in the present.

Activate

In Activate we foreground the potential of objects to inspire creativity and feelings of belonging, to trigger memory, and to connect people to recent or distant pasts. Activate is focused specifically on working with artists, poets, writers and performers to interpret our collections in new ways and to create new works inspired by them. The project is based on the idea that objects play an important role in how we negotiate our everyday lifeworlds: their meanings for us are based on what aspects of ourselves we bring to them.

KUNCI: Researchers in Residence at the RCMC

The Research Center for Material Culture in collaboration with the research platform Heterotropics, invited KUNCI Cultural Studies Center (Yogyakarta, Indonesia) to be Researchers in Residence at the Tropenmuseum for the period May – June 2017. Their residency resulted in the event Tropical Dissonance. Read more about KUNCI´s residency at the RCMC.

Unlocking Sounds

To bring attention to Tropenmuseum’s diverse sound collections and the knowledge and histories that are embedded in these collections, Research Center for Material Culture and RE:VIVE invited three leading contemporary artists to create new EPs for the Unlocking Sounds project.