The things stored in the deposit cabinets of ethnological museums and the stacks of libraries and archives are more than silent witnesses of appropriation, circulation and reinterpretation. In each of them, relationships between people, plants, ancestors, and other beings as well as territories materialize. Even in their momentary status as objects of collecting institutions, they have the potential to connect different life-worlds, forms of knowledge, and knowledge practices, and thereby to return to life.
Departing from historical-ethnographic and botanical collections from and about the Brazilian Amazon region, the project “Connect – Comprehend – Communicate. Amazonia as a future laboratory (Vernetzen – Verstehen – Vermitteln. Amazonien als Zukunftslabor)” aims to overcome disciplinary, institutional and spatial boundaries and to create digital and analog spaces of networking, mutual understanding and mediation.
In close cooperation between Brazilian and German partners, the aim is to develop a framework that allows the contextualisation of data in a graph with meaningful relations and to render these relations navigable and narratable. This model of knowledge shifts the focus from the discrete artefact to the relational context of its manufacturing process, its usage or its significance within traditional rituals.
As an intercultural and interdisciplinary team of designers, ethnologists, curators, botanists, and indigenous researchers, we further aim to support and adequately represent multiple knowledge systems, overcoming historically grown separations between disciplines and collection institutions. Disciplinary and institutional logics of organization and classification are taken into account as well as indigenous knowledge orders and practices.
The Wanderer framework is devised as an interface for data production and linking data with film media as well as for data presentation with a strong focus on its application in exhibition settings. In the production mode, the framework allows visitors to visualise data in a network of relations by adding, connecting and arranging entities on a canvas. These flowcharts can later be animated in coordination with videos, by zooming and panning and by highlighting or blurring to focus on selected elements.
Xingu Entangled is the first case study of the project and it was implemented with the Wanderer, connecting historical ethnographic and botanical collections from the Brazilian Amazon region with cultural-historical collections for their mutual contextualisation. These objects (including plants, field diaries, photographs, maps, sound recordings, films, secondary literature) have been collected over the last 200 years and stored, classified, conserved, restored, and researched in the Ethnological Museum, the Botanical Museum and Botanical Garden, and the Ibero-American Institute. The interactive video exhibit documents material practices and knowledge from the indigenous communities of the Upper Xingu.
A flexible exhibition setup combining linear video and interactive visualisation allows to exhibit the data and invite visitors to explore the possibilities of user-guided navigation along data relations and video clips.
A general aim of the project is to use the potential of digital formats and tools to communicate, exchange, network and jointly create new knowledge from different perspectives, knowledge practices and social contexts. The Wanderer is freely available as open source software on GitHub and can thus be used or further developed for future use cases in the fields of cultural collections, science communication and beyond.
Project partners
- Project management: Dr. Andrea Scholz (Ethnological Museum/SMB of the SPK)
- SPK-internal partners: Prof. Dr. Barbara Göbel, Ibero-American Institute (SPK); Dr. Patricia Rahemipour, Institute for Museum Research (SMB of the SPK)
- Additional partners: Prof. Dr. Thomas Borsch, Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum (Freie Universität Berlin), Berlin; Dr. Thiago da Costa Oliveira (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ethnological Museum Berlin); Prof. Dr. Carlos Fausto, Museu Nacional Rio de Janeiro (Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Funding
Funded by the Digital Culture Programme of the German Federal Cultural Foundation.