TAKING CARE

In October 2019 , the Weltmuseum Wien inaugurated the new EU project “TAKING CARE. Ethnographic and World Cultures Museums as Spaces of Care”. In the course of the last few years,collaborating with representatives of indigenous groups and diaspora communities has becomeestablished practice at ethnographic and world cultures museums. Museums today realise thatthey are not only responsible for their collections but also for the people connected to them. Today, the museum’s core aims comprise more than collecting, preservation, research andeducation. We also focus on sharing cultural heritage, communicating knowledge, creating newapproaches and healing colonial trauma, which may at times include returning artefacts. Comprising all these aims, the expression “taking care” functions as the title of a new EU project, which started on October 1, 2019 at the Weltmuseum Wien. TAKING CARE is a cooperationproject led by the Weltmuseum Wien; scheduled to run for four years, it brings together fourteenpartner organisations and is co-financed by the Creative Europe programme of the EuropeanUnion, which has contributed two million euro.

The project’s topics will be discussed and examined at workshops, creative residencies and exhibitions, through artistic research, small lab meetings and in joint publications. We will develop a number of participatory practices, from hands-on sessions in small groups to large public events. We will creatively study the unused potential of our museums to look critically at the global past and at possibilities to shape a sustainable future. World cultures museums no longer regard themselves primarily as depositories but as places of encounters, discussion and experience, of social innovation and experiments. Here, different forms of knowledge and of being in a rich and varied world can be (re-)discovered, developed and publicly shared. Today, more than ever, we need such discursive spaces in Europe.