Amazonia as a Laboratory for the Future - Networking-Understanding-Mediation

The objects stored in the cabinets of ethnological museums and the stacks of libraries and archives are more than just silent witnesses to processes of appropriation, circulation and reinterpretation. They materialise relationships between humans, plants, ancestors and other beings as well as territories. Even in their current status as objects of collecting institutions, they have the potential to connect different lifeworlds, forms of knowledge and knowledge practices and thus find their way back into life - a life that transcends the walls of collecting institutions. This requires the development of suitable formats and instruments. "Amazonia as a Future Laboratory" is a pilot project based on collection objects to overcome disciplinary, institutional and spatial boundaries and to create digital and analogue spaces for networking, mutual understanding and mediation.

In close cooperation between Brazilian and German partners, digital tools are being developed as part of the project to bundle and network information on collection objects from different perspectives. A central challenge is to convey the diverse approaches in all their complexity. The aim is to overcome historically grown differentiations between collection institutions. Disciplinary and institutional organisational logics of things are taken into account as well as indigenous knowledge systems and knowledge practices. Historical-ethnographic and botanical collections from the Brazilian Amazon region and cultural-historical multimedia collections serve as case studies for their contextualisation (including field diaries, photographs, maps, sound recordings, films, secondary literature). They have been collected over the last 200 years and stored, classified, conserved, restored and researched in the Ethnological Museum, the Botanical Museum/Botanical Garden and the Ibero-American Institute. Only some of these extensive multimedia collections and holdings have been catalogued in depth and are available digitally. They have also not yet been networked across institutions and countries.

The general aims of the project are to utilise the possibilities of digital formats and tools in order to communicate with each other from different perspectives, knowledge practices and social contexts, to exchange ideas, to network and to jointly create new knowledge. The knowledge networked as part of the project will be made publicly accessible in its processual nature via interactive formats of reception and participation. The resulting tools will then be made freely accessible and can thus be utilised or further developed through further work such as digital and participatory collection and cultural mediation.