Towards Mutuality in International Museum Cooperation: Reflections on a Swiss-Ugandan Cooperative Museum Project

Thinking about a “museum of mutuality” affords the question of who the actors are and, accordingly, between whom mutuality is a characteristic of their relationship, ideally or practically. The call for papers for this special issue invited contributors to examine how museums and audiences are intertwined in mutuality. Over the last few decades, expectations directed to this relationship have tended to point towards its “democratization”[1] and inclusiveness, towards opening the institution as a forum for sociocultural exchange and debate, towards plurivocality concerning representation, and towards greater accessibility to and renegotiation of the ownership of its collections.[2] It is anticipated, and according to the current trends in museology rightly so, that museums are transforming from being inward-looking institutions that communicate unilaterally from an authoritarian and custodian position, to becoming outward-looking organizations that insert themselves permeably into society. Mutuality is commonly understood as a moral value or a principle of seeking reciprocally referential “mutually positive relations.”[3] The present article focuses on the analysis of mutuality in the relations between museums themselves, not between museums and other external stakeholders, such as representatives of communities of the provenance of collections or museum audiences. Specifically, we examine if and how this quality manifests itself in a trilateral cooperative research and curatorial arrangement between one Swiss and two Ugandan museums. Thereby we depart from the assumption that, firstly, the abovementioned transformation of museums has also formed the manner of interaction of African with European museums and, secondly, we are convinced that it is high time for an empiric analysis of transnational museum cooperation practices.