How can the museum be reimagined from the perspectives of Guarani and Kaiowá indigenous communities in Brazil? The Guarani and Kaiowá Virtual Museum project aims to support Guarani and Kaiowá communities preserve their cultural and ecological knowledge and heritage, in a context where ecological decimation, humanitarian crisis, and escalating land conflicts have led to violent attacks against traditional communities and shamans. By inviting Guarani and Kaiowá shamans to take an active role in the creative direction, curation, and narration of the Guarani and Kaiowá Virtual Museum space, this project seeks to facilitate the collaborative development of new methods of participative heritageand work with communities to rethink the ways heritage can be presented. In doing so, we aim to question museum models which exclude community members from the curatorial narratives through which their heritage is preserved and displayed, challenging heritage frameworks which deny participation in the imagination of our collective futures.

 

This global collaboration draws together members of Guarani and Kaiowá communities - both shamans/elders and local youth - with the interdisciplinary team of postgraduate students that make up the UCL Multimedia Anthropology Lab (UCL MAL), including anthropologists, artists, computer scientists, geographers, historians, translators, among others. The project builds on an 18 month period of research and development which took place through a series of pilot projects in 2021, supported by the British Museum’s Endangered Material Knowledge Programme, UCL Grand Challenges, and UCL Global Engagement. 

 

The project adopted a radically collaborative approach to documentation where all video, sound recordings and photogrammetry scans were recorded by community members themselves, ensuring that recordings were framed by their local knowledge while also providing Guarani and Kaiowá youth with the technical skills to document their elders on their own, and continue recording their cultural heritage beyond the duration of the project. The initial Guarani and Kaiowá Virtual Museum project, supported by UCL Grand Challenges, sought to further the collaborative and participatory methodology of the project by inviting Guarani and Kaiowá shamans and elders to assume the curatorial direction of a Virtual Reality exhibit of their culture and heritage, questioning the historical exclusion of communities in the process of curating, narrating, and contextualising museum archives and displays. An initial export of the exhibit was presented in a VR headset to Guarani and Kaiowá shamans in September 2021, and feedback was gathered. Interestingly, two shamans reported seeing metaphysical entities within the VR Museum experience, which had not been placed there by the technical team. 

 

This year, thanks to support from the UCL Centre for Critical Heritage Studies, we worked closely with Guarani and Kaiowá community members to analyse community feedback and incorporate it into the VR space, and we have made these initial pilot VR spaces publicly available to both the Guarani and Kaiowá community and international audiences. We are now making preparations to enter the next phase of the project, where we will be working with computer science students in Brazil to develop a wide range of 3D models and photogrammetry scans to be been increasing the scope of the Guarani and Kaiowá VR Museum.