Traces of colonial provenance

Funded by the Federal Office of Culture (FOC), the project, which ran from 2021 to 2022, examined the ethnographic provenance of objects in the collection of the Bernisches Historisches Museum using the comprehensive archive compiled by Rudolf Zeller, the first conservator to have been permanently employed to curate the Ethnographic Collections of Bern. During his tenure, which lasted from 1904 to 1940, Zeller built up an international network of collectors, dealers and curators from other museums, and significantly extended the collections. He systematically set up the ethnographic collections of the Bernisches Historisches Museum during the heyday of European colonial expansion, and the exploration of his extensive archive holdings involved searching for clues with regard to the provenance of objects, which might have been acquired in contexts of injustice.