Relating to the territory:
Remapping Amazonian Collections at the British Museum
through shared museology

This pilot project is the first to systematically address the British Museum collections from this widely diverse region beyond the national borders that have sought to fragment it since colonial times. The project will do so by promoting the study and re-interpretation of Amazonian collections through a range of community-based initiatives in collaboration with local leaders, researchers, artists, educators, associations and partner institutions active in the region. It aims to develop the co-curation of displays for the existing Amazonia Case at the Wellcome Trust Gallery, which is centrered around the theme ‘Relating to animals’, as well as the participatory documentation of collections currently in storage, fostering self-representation, Native storytelling, and the recognition of ancestral knowledges and traditional material practices.  

Grounded in intercultural dialogue, the project brings ‘territory’ to the fore as a key notion for the present and future of Indigenous ways of living, challenging the common-place (mis)conception of Amazonian peoples as primitive and frozen in the past. By incorporating Indigenous ways of viewing the world, this project questions the way museums view objects as inanimate rather than living entities. The project further intends to defy the way Amazonia has often been represented in museums as an unknown and exotic region sliced by national borders in the peripheries of a number of countries in South America. Instead, this remapping ultimately allows to reposition Amazonia at the centre of a continent and at the core of the global debate on the climate emergency, where Indigenous peoples have emerged as leading voices at the forefront of this struggle.