Towards mutuality in international museum cooperation. Reflections on a Swiss-Ugandan cooperative museum project

Abstract

“Towards Mutuality in International Museum Cooperation: Reflections on a Swiss-Ugandan Cooperative Museum Project,” by Thomas Laely, Marc Meyer,Amon Mugume, and Rapael Schwere, presents an auto-ethnographic, self-reflexive and critical analysis of mutuality in international museum corporation. The authors focus on “Drink Deeply/Points of View,” a research and exhibition project that was organizedin a collaboration between the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich and the Uganda Museum in Kampala. Through this specific case study, the authors approach the notion of “mutuality” both as an ideal and as a modus operandi. This dual approach to mutuality provides concrete insights in the potential and fragility of working with this ideal in practice, such as how to deal with unconscious bias of historically rooted and culturally engrained prejudices and hierarchies, and addresses the broader question of whether and how museum cooperation can lead to the reinvention of museums as institutions of mutuality.