Digital publication
A burning museum in Brazil initiated the two-year project Das Museum Sem Nenhum Caráter—Resisting the Universal, in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut Rio de Janeiro. The accompanying free digital publication addresses questions surrounding decolonial curatorial practices.
With around 20 million objects, the Museu Nacional de Rio de Janeiro’s ethnological and natural history collection is one of the most important worldwide. A fire in 2021 almost entirely destroyed the building and collection. Amongst much more perhaps the last testimonies—in the form of artefacts or language records—of numerous indigenous communities in Brazil were lost. The tragic fire served as impulse for the workshop series and this accompanying publication, with the focus lying on questions surrounding decolonial curatorial practices in relation to the care and development of museum concepts.
The collaborative project Das Museum Sem Nenhum Caráter is inspired by the Brazilian novel Macunaíma: O herói sem nenhum caráter by Mario de Andrade, one of the major works of Brazilian literature. Published in 1928 (English title: Macunaíma—A hero without any character), the novel is a “rhapsody” on Brazilian nation-state identity. In turn, de Andrade drew inspiration for his narrative from the diaries and travel notes of the German ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg, which are preserved in the ethnological collections in Berlin.
Over the course of several digital workshop sessions, the project invited participants to share their thoughts and responses on the subjects of postcolonial curating, translation and fiction and subsequently resulted in the publication of a rich and multilingual compilation of essays, photographs, a poem and a recipe. The contributions are primarily in Portuguese, English and Spanish. The contributors were free to choose which language they wished to write in and none of the contribution were translated. By including different languages, we want to offer multiple access points for contributors and readers, rather than limit our audience. We want to understand a museum as a place for plurality, whether through multilinguality, different forms of expression, or diverse ways of looking at the world. This plurality resists the notion of understanding everything and resists the idea of the universal museum.
With workshop and publication contributions by Denilson Baniwa, Mabe Bethônico, Nego Bispo, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Michael Dieminger, Chandra Frank, Andrei Fernández, Sara Garzón, Paulo Knauss, Noé Martínez, Thaís Mayumi Pinheiro, Ivan Muñiz-Reed, Julia Richard, María Sosa and Rolando Vázquez
A workshop by Michael Dieminger und Thaís Mayumi Pinheiro. A cooperation between the Museu Nacional/UFRJ, the Goethe-Institut Rio de Janeiro and the Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss. Sponsored by the Federal Foreign Office.
The Museum Sem Nenhum Caráter—Resisting the Universal
Digital publication
Spanish, Portuguese, English
135 pages
ISBN 978-65-00-53162-6
Download the free publication here.
