In January 2014 the team went to Cologne to attend the Made in Oceania Symposium hosted by the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum. The symposium was run in association with their temporary exhibition of the same name, which features barkcloth from a number of museums including MAA.

Tapa from MAA in the exhibition. Photo Julie Adams.

The symposium, which was held over two days, explored the cultural meanings of tapa and its material quality, the conservation concerns of tapa for museum professionals, and the use of contemporary tapa. Speakers were museum curators, researchers and conservators from across the world. The variety of papers highlighted the breadth of bark cloth production not just within Oceania but across the world, as demonstrated by Mark Nesbitt’s paper which discussed ‘the tapa belt’. The large and visually stunning exhibition entitled ‘Made in Oceania; Tapa, Art and Social Landscapes’ gives a historical introduction to the collection of tapa, discusses its use as a backdrop within colonial portrait photography, looks at the differences in its production and decoration in Melanesia and Polynesia, and culminated with its use in contemporary art.

The old museum site. Photo Julie Adams.

The museum as a whole opened in 1906 and houses the collection of Wilhelm Joest, a gentleman explorer who collected around 3,500 objects from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. After his death in 1897 in Melanesia, his collection was left to his sister Adele Rautenstrauch. Rautenstrauch used Joest’s collection to form the basis for the new museum, which today comprises over 60,000 objects from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. In 2010 the museum moved to its current location on the Cäcilienstraße in the centre of Cologne. The new space displays its collections thematically within the construct ‘People and their Worlds’. It explores common themes experienced by people all over the world and concentrates on how they address them within that specific region. This comparative approach aims to present all cultures as equal. This new space draws on a multitude of advancements in museum technology to display its collections and these advancements are exemplified through the displays on the first floor in the section entitled ‘a matter of perception and opinion: art’. The space exhibits ‘masterpiece’ objects in glass cases with low lighting in the gallery space. When the visitor approaches the case they can touch a pad and the case will light up revealing photography and text to contextualize the object on view. The display is referencing how objects are often exhibited as either art or anthropology.

A matter of perception and opinion: art, before the light. Photo Julie Adams.

A matter of perception and opinion: art, with the light. Photo Julie Adams.

In addition the gallery before this takes all of the objects in the Museum’s Massim collection and displays them. Spears and clubs are displayed typographically, with their museum numbers across the walls from floor to ceiling whilst a deconstructed house hangs from the ceiling amongst these objects. The cases in the centre of this gallery offer the visitor photographs, text, smaller objects and even reproductions of the museum catalogue cards. All in all, a very engaging, innovative and exciting museum.

The Massim displays. Photo Julie Adams.

After the symposium Julie and Ali remained in Cologne to visit the museum’s Micronesian collections. The majority of collections not on display are still housed at the Museum’s old site at Ubeirring, a short tram ride from the city centre. We were hosted by curator Burkhard Fenner and had asked to view objects specifically from Palau and Nauru. We photographed approximately 70 objects in one day and of particular interest during the visit were the knives labelled as ‘women’s weapons’ perhaps due to their size, the banana fibre skirts and the woven child’s hats which will be exploring further in a visit to the British Museum’s Micronesian collections.

‘women’s weapons’. Photo Julie Adams.

Skirt. Photo Julie Adams.

The visit to Cologne really demonstrated the work of the project over the past year, as we are now able to draw comparisons between collections and show the curators we visit comparable objects and collections in other museums, giving us and them a sense of the networks these objects were and are a part of.

Ali Clark