Africa Museum
The Afrika Museum is an ethnological museum in the village of Berg en Dal in the Dutch municipality of the same name in the province of Gelderland . It is the only museum in the Netherlands that is exclusively dedicated to African art and sub - Saharan cultures .
history
The beginnings of the museum go back to a small but valuable private collection of Dutch missionaries of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit , who had worked in Africa for more than a hundred years and who endeavored to give people in their homeland an insight into the strange African world. Father P. Bukkems , who had worked in Tanzania for a long time , was particularly committed to the establishment of an Africa museum. In 1954, the first exhibition showed objects that the missionaries had brought back from Africa over the years and had previously only been shown at traveling missionary exhibitions.
The outdoor area was converted into an open-air museum in 1987. In the course of renovation measures in 2006, several older individual buildings were connected to one another by a modern intermediate building, the glass atrium , and the museum area was almost doubled in this way.
In 2014 one took fusion of Africa Museum with the Tropical Museum in Amsterdam and the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden instead. The three museums together now form the new "National Museum of World Cultures" (Dutch: Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen ), but they still keep their previous names and unique selling points.
Museum building
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The museum building is now a modern two-storey building complex with a flat roof. Up to 500 people can be accommodated in an approximately 500 m² light-flooded atrium. The atrium is used as an exhibition space and for events.
A hall with 150 seats, dominated by the color red - the so-called auditorium - can be used for demonstrations, lectures or symposia . This room was created by the designers Scholten and Baijings from Amsterdam ; a large tapestry and the seats were specially designed and made for the Afrika Museum.
Three additional meeting rooms are available for activities in smaller groups.
Exhibitions
The main themes are African architecture , contemporary African art , religion and society. The museum building houses an extensive collection of African art as a permanent exhibition. There are a total of 8,200 exhibits from Africa, including masks , amulets and objects from the themed areas of handicrafts and magic . The museum's photo collection comprises around 10,000 pieces.
There are also regular temporary exhibitions that are dedicated to individual African artists or concern a special Africa theme. In 2012, for example, the exhibition “Divine and uncanny - The secret of the snake” was shown, which also included items on loan from renowned international museums. The following year, the sculptor Josiah Onodome Onemu (* 1945) , who comes from Nigeria and lives in the Netherlands, was able to effectively present his work in the Africa Museum for almost a year. At the beginning of 2016, the “Rhythm & Roots” exhibition used instruments, film clips and music fragments to show how Africa has shaped music history . Another highlight was the special exhibition "The Icons of National Geographic" with over 70 works by 10 top photographers from National Geographic magazine .
open air museum
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The attached open-air museum is located on several hectares of outdoor area with numerous older deciduous trees to the west and north of the museum building. Between extensive, well-tended lawns, walking paths with a water-bound ceiling lead to faithfully recreated habitats of African tribes or population groups.
The recommended tour begins at the small agricultural settlement of Kusasi from Tempane , a village in northeast Ghana . In addition to the typical round residential buildings without doors, European influences are also shown, such as furniture, radios and bicycles.
The houses of the mountain people of the Basotho in Lesotho , some fortress similarly built houses of Dogon from the area of the rock area of Bandiagara in southern Mali and a warehouse of Baka - Pygmies from Cameroon who as hunter-gatherers in the tropical rain forest life, can be visited. A special exhibition is being shown in the museum building on this people, who have to change their traditional way of life due to the increasing deforestation of the rainforest and are increasingly losing their identity.
Two pile dwellings were also built in a water area , as are being built by the Toffinu population in Ganvié , a village on the south coast of Benin . The material for these buildings comes from Benin. One of the buildings houses an information center, the other was reproduced as authentically as possible as the apartment of a Toffinu family.
There is also an artificially created water area with flamingos and a small restaurant in the outdoor area . Oversized, brightly painted animal figures - such as a snake over 20 m long - were set up as play equipment for children; they were custom-made for the Afrika Museum from shotcrete .
Museum management
The anthropologist Irene Hübner worked for the museum for more than 30 years and has been its director since 2008. After disagreements with the director of the newly formed National Museum of World Cultures , Stijn Schoonderwoerd , she left the Africa Museum in 2014. A successor for her is not sought.
service
In addition to the normal guided tours, the Africa Museum also organizes workshops on special topics such as “African Music”, “African Cooking” or “African Stories” on request . All rooms can also be rented for private events such as birthday parties or company parties.
location
The museum is located at Postweg 6 in Berg en Dal, near the German-Dutch border near Kranenburg - Wyler and the Dutch city of Nijmegen . The museum is located southwest of the village of Berg en Dal in a landscape characterized by forests and meadows. It can be easily reached by public transport or by car.
Web links
- Literature from and about Afrika Museum in the bibliographic database WorldCat
- Africa Museum website (Dutch, German, English)
- Heike Waldor-Schäfer: Clay, wall and a gris-gris , Neue Ruhr Zeitung, August 8, 2012
- The Africa Museum on the Niederrhein-Maas website with many photos
- Africa in Gelderland , visit to the Africa Museum, report with lots of photos, travel blog Travel to Holland and emigrate , March 26, 2014
Individual evidence
- ↑ History of the museum ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Homepage of the Afrika Museum, afrikamuseum.nl, accessed on March 3, 2016 (Dutch).
- ↑ Description of the atrium , brakel.com, accessed on 3 March 2016th
- ↑ Report on the merger on the homepage of the Afrika Museum (Dutch) ( Memento of the original from January 7, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , afrikamuseum.nl, accessed on January 7, 2016.
- ↑ a b Information about the hall and service on the homepage of the Afrika Museum ( Memento of the original from January 7, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , afrikamuseum.nl, accessed on January 7, 2016.
- ↑ a b article: We got een soort Tate voor de Volkenkunde (Dutch, in German for example: “We will be a kind of Tate of Ethnology”), nrcreader.nl, accessed on January 7, 2016.
- ↑ Cornelia Ganitta: Vom Schauder zum Zauber , Neue Ruhr Zeitung , July 29, 2012, derwesten.de, accessed on January 7, 2016.
- ↑ Playing with Opposites , Neue Ruhr Zeitung, January 28, 2013, derwesten.de, accessed on January 7, 2016.
- ^ Exhibition Rhythm and Roots in the Afrika Museum ( Memento from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), afrikamuseum.nl, accessed on March 3, 2016.
- ^ Photo icons from National Geographic ( Memento from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), Afrika Museum homepage, afrikamuseum.nl, accessed on March 3, 2016.
- ↑ a b c Homepage of the Afrika Museum , afrikamuseum.nl, accessed on March 3, 2016 (Dutch).
- ↑ Description of the play equipment for the Afrika Museum ( Memento from January 14, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), BEDEKO website, bedekobetontechnieken.nl, accessed on January 14, 2016 (Dutch).
- ↑ Article: Directeur Hübner away from het Afrikamuseum ( Memento from January 7, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (Dutch, in German for example: Director Hübner leaves the Africa Museum ), newspaper “de Gelderlander”, November 4, 2014, gelderlander.nl, accessed on January 7, 2016.
Coordinates: 51 ° 48 ′ 41.5 " N , 5 ° 54 ′ 35.7" E