What does it mean to bring the term ‘design’ into the Wereldmuseum?
Working with the museum’s curators and historians, this project explores how storytelling is produced around material culture. How does the lens of ‘design’ generate a specific kind of telling? How do objects move in and out of the category of design, reflecting shifting values? What new narratives of material culture emerged at the turn of the twentieth century amidst changing colonial politics, and how did crafts education play a role within these political agendas?
This collection of essays sets off to create a shared space between separated disciplines of design and material culture, with the purpose of re-examining colonial and ethnographic histories, tracing how the modernist gaze shaped categories, and how objects were translated, reframed, or erased through colonial and dominant knowledge practices.
