Amazonian Activism for European Museum Audiences: Critical Reflections on the Development of an “Amazonia” Exhibition at the National Museum of World Cultures, the Netherlands

Abstract

AbstractThis paper describes and expands on the discussions held at a symposium at the Research Center for Material Culture in the Netherlands in February 2020, which was held as part of the planning of an upcoming “Amazonia” exhibition to be curated at that institution by some of the authors. The symposium invited curators and museum directors who had recently carried out projects with Amazonian communities to share their experiences with co‐production and co‐curation. The discussion and this paper aim to be a reflexive critical first step before reaching out to potential partners in South America. This paper supplements discussions on participative museology by examining the underlying frameworks of an exhibition project at its outset, in addition to contributing, as happens more commonly, post‐rationalizations in a final written evaluation. The discussion furthermore contributes to exhibition co‐curation by focusing on Amazonian‐European collaborations, which are under‐represented in Anglophone museological literature.