SWICH Closing Conference: Multiple Voices of a Colonised World | Austria

The EU-funded project SWICH - Sharing a World of Inclusion, Creativity and Heritage will hold its final conference in Vienna on 6-7 September. The event is hosted by Weltmuseum Wien, an ASEMUS member and one of the partners in the project, which has also involved, among others, the National Museum of World Cultures in the Netherlands; the National Museums of World Culture in Sweden; Linden-Museum Stuttgart, Germany; the Luigi Pigorini National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography, Italy; the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, UK; and the Slovene Ethnographic Museum, Ljubljana.

The conference, entitled "Multiple Voices of a Colonised World", invites critical engagement with the questions of the present and future roles of ethnographic museums within a changing Europe. Coming at the end of the SWICH project, a collaborative alliance between ten ethnographic museums in Europe, the conference will explore the multiple ways that these museums have tackled and continue to tackle contemporary challenges surrounding questions of citizenship and belonging, and of (who owns) cultural heritage in the post-colonial, post-migrant Europe of today.

Invited speakers will reflect on themes such as “Non-European Perspectives on Colonialism”, “Diversity in Curatorship” and “Building Networks” which will all continue to be of importance for ethnographic museums in the years to come.

The conference will also see the presentation of the book "The Art of Being a World Culture Museum", edited by Barbara Plankensteiner, with photographs by Wolfgang Thaler and published by Kerber Verlag. Registration for the conference is now open. For additional information, please visit http://www.swich-project.eu/nocache/programme/detail/article/multiple-voices-of-a-colonised-world/