This exhibition project proposes a series of workshops leading to an exhibition on the theme of traps. Following on the idea of the exhibition as research that is promoted in the Red Zone at the Kulturhistorisk museum, the topic of traps is chosen given its potential to reflect on issues related to particular kinds of predatory human-animal, and human-human, relations.
In anthropology, and the social sciences more generally, there has been a recent call to pay attention to non-human agencies, and human-animal relations; traps are artefacts that can be used to think about these themes. Traps also happen to be found in abundance in ethnographic museums collections, early collectors presumably mainly motivated by traps as technology. Traps thus link the museum with the hunting ground, collecting and hunting practices, and can be used as conceptual tool to think about museums and exhibitions as kinds of traps.
The workshops leading to the exhibition will revolve around artefacts in the collections from the Pacific, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. We will be asking ourselves: what can traps tell us about the way we humans relate to other beings, including other humans? What do they tell us about the human mind, or perhaps human nature?
The project includes a collaboration with Professor Gunnar H. Gundersen at the Høgskolen i Oslo og Akershus.
