The white-gloved conservator moved around a storage area of the Übersee-Museum Bremen, carefully presenting a selection of objects from Samoa to the iPad camera, turning them this way and that. On the other end of the Zoom call, halfway around the world in the Pacific Island nation, academics and craftspeople were taking in as much detail as they could from a distance: Can you zoom in? Can you show us the fibre? Can you smell it and tell us what you smell?
“That was the closest I have ever gotten to objects in a museum’s collection, and I’ve been working in a museum for 20 years,” says Etta Grotrian, the Übersee-Museum’s digital strategist who was in the storage room. The focus of museums has always been on preserving the artifacts it holds, and that means handling them as little as possible: Just taking them off a shelf and then replacing them on the shelf is considered a risk. And now to smell them! And to get a sense from the people so far away in Samoa of the stories and questions behind the artifacts, how they were made and used, their roles in ceremonies or in daily life.
“There is a different kind of user online, of course, and a lot of this project has been conversations, inviting people, having people reflect on what we do.”
That day in 2021 was an early key moment for Etta, a growing sense of how different a global audience would be from a local German one, and how much the museum might start questioning its mission as it digitizes items from its collections and makes them available online so anyone around the world can see them.
“There is a different kind of user online, of course, and a lot of this project has been conversations, inviting people, having people reflect on what we do,” she says.
“When the objects go back in the storage, they lay in the storage and hardly anyone looks at them, and nobody relates to them. And of course we can’t help it, we can’t show everything in the exhibition that we have in our storage, but that’s where I realized that to rethink the role of the museum like ours … means to question your routines and your standards that you work for.”
The Zoom presentation was an opening step in a partnership between the Übersee-Museum and the National University of Samoa as the museum re-examines its artifacts from the Oceania region, including those from Samoa. It’s a collection dating to colonial times, and a re-examination in the 2020s inevitably puts a spotlight on colonialism, ownership, and the limited European-focused information or metadata that the museum has on each object.
”But it was also clear at the beginning “that we don’t do this for a German audience, we do it also for a Pacific audience.”
It has pushed Übersee-Museum into grappling with the knowledge and emotions from people who understand the history and meaning of the artifacts; the conversations and reactions that arise.
When this digital project and its partnership began, Etta says, “I think a lot of my colleagues who were exhibition curators, they were expecting we would prepare a lot of multimedia content and then put that online, and they would be the same stories as in the physical exhibition.” But it was also clear at the beginning “that we don’t do this for a German audience, we do it also for a Pacific audience.” And the museum lacked the kind of explanatory metadata – the storytelling – needed for those in the Pacific.
An online community was being built, and it was adding to the museum’s knowledge of the objects themselves.
One of the ways the Übersee-Museum began listening was through a Facebook site where a visiting co-curator of Samoan descent, Mitiana Arbon, posted photos of items in the collection. People responded.
“It was this connection of getting involved in discussions, seeing what part of our collection is interesting for people, what are connections to everyday life today,” Etta says.
An online community was being built, and it was adding to the museum’s knowledge of the objects themselves, contributing stories tied to historic photos, for example, about places and memories and traditions. This was another shift for the museum.
“Museums often think we bring out knowledge online and others contribute to that, and then the knowledge is complete,” Etta says. “It’s very museum-like, this wish to get answers to all our own questions.”
But, she says, “we are not the knowledge holder.”
“We also think this is part of the biography of an object: the conversation and the stories that were woven around it.”
What the Samoan community was offering was perspectives and stories, conversations and emotions. And as Etta says, “it is very difficult to add this to a museum’s system. But of course we want to. We also think this is part of the biography of an object: the conversation and the stories that were woven around it.”
That goal was why the Übersee-Museum hosted an online workshop called Weaving a Narrative, featuring storytellers, poets and artists, as well as people with archival or curatorial backgrounds.
Sometimes Etta wonders if the museum knew what it was getting into with the digital partnership. “I think they were really thinking in the exhibition-making terms when you choose the topic, you choose objects, you describe them, you make a nice room,” except you also post it all online. “And on the other hand, having all these experiences of inviting artists, just listening, getting new perspectives, getting inspired, that’s all grown” to the point that the possibilities seem endless, and ideas vastly outweigh the museum’s resources.
One reality of a physical exhibition is that eventually you take it down, and you move on to the next one. You have control of the timing and of the space. But if you’ve started a conversation online, can you end it? If you develop a global audience, can you take down the collection that draws them? And if you don’t, where will you find the resources to sustain the website and commentary when you’ve also moved on to the next thing? Can you even be sure the technology or host you’re using for your site will last? These are all new questions for the museum.
Having a global audience also raises questions of restitution of objects taken during colonialism. Etta goes back to the 2021 Zoom session.
“I think it was in one of the last sessions, it was really interesting, because they said it: ‘And when are the objects getting back?’ There were a lot of very precise ideas of what they would like to show in Samoa, and we need to figure out what can travel to Samoa, how can it travel to Samoa, how can it be exhibited in Samoa, how long can it be exhibited, when will it come back, and will it come back. Will it come back.
“All these questions came up and it was also interesting because it was not just showing people our storage, it was also raising this question.”