The history of ethnological museums is ambivalent due to the colonial past it is embedded in and requires critical reflection. This spawns a responsibility I want to face. Empathy is an essential engine when dealing with collection inventory. Talking with and not about communities of origin is an important premise so that we as museum staff turn into learners and consider ourselves participants of this process, as part of a community of implication. We see the Japanisches Palais as a place where we can reinvent and rethink the museum together again and again – a platform for restoring our relationships, where we test new exhibition formats and create a free space that also largely includes the civil society.
The museum traces its origins to the Kunstkammer founded by August I, Elector of Saxony, in 1560. The nearly 100,000 objects held by the Museum für Völkerkunde Dresden come from the most diverse regions of the five continents of the world.
