ABSTRACT
Can museums become spaces for the formation of democratic knowledge? This chapter discusses this question with regard to the potentials and challenges of collaborative provenance research, curation, and restitution, taking the project “Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envisioning Creative Futures” on collections from Namibia at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin as a starting point. It looks at the ways in which the Namibian–German team attended to and translated between various forms of knowledge, such as the critical reading of colonial archives, oral histories, skills in fashion and design as well as performative and embodied knowledge. It also looks at the political and institutional context in which the collaborative research at the Ethnologisches Museum, the curating of an exhibition about the research process at the Humboldt Forum, and the return of selected “cultural belongings” to Namibia took place. Finally, it argues that developing new modes of plurifying and translating knowledge with historical collections is key to transforming museums into more inclusive, sustainable, and just spaces.
