News & Activities

On November 7, 2025 the Global Cultural Embassy (GCE) hosted a special edition of the Humboldt Forum’s SPÄTI, introducing Berlin audiences to kené, the intricate artistic tradition of the Shipibo-Konibo people of the Peruvian Amazon.

SPÄTI is a recurring Friday evening series in the Humboldt Forum’s large foyer that combines talks, music, and informal exchange in a relaxed setting with drinks and refreshments. It offers a stage for creative encounters, where artists share new ideas, musicians present fresh compositions, and designers showcase experimental projects.

In this GCE-hosted edition, contemporary artist Olinda Silvano shared her artistic journey and the work of her collective Soi Noma, performing Shipibo ícaros live. She was joined by curator, writer, and DJ Alfredo Villar (DJ Sabroso), who discussed their collaborative project Koshi Kené and played a vibrant selection of Amazonian music.

 

In early October 2025, the members of the Reference Group, nominated during the Global Cultural Assembly in June, met for their first in-person workshop at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. Together with colleagues from the Stiftung Humboldt Forum, the Ethnologisches Museum, and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst, they built on their earlier online exchanges to develop shared working structures and define concrete steps toward long-term institutional transformation.

Through a joint structuring process, the group reviewed and consolidated the Assembly’s resolutions, translating them into actionable measures. This workshop marked an important milestone in shaping future collaboration and developing actionable outcomes within the evolving framework of the Global Cultural Embassy (GCE). The focus was on developing shared working structures and formulating goals for lasting institutional transformation.

 

Over the last decade, criticism of the maps and timelines on which the colonial past and global present are based has intensified. Various international experiences and local agencies have addressed the crisis of legitimacy of museum collections and the interpretive limits of institutions. Demands for restitution, repatriation, and reparation have achieved significant political resonance, both in the global South and North. The intensity of these debates and the radical nature of certain actions have raised irreversible questions about the Western historical framework, neoliberal governance of culture, and the paradoxes of the curatorial apparatus.

In this context, the Preparatory Group – Achilles Bufure, Feride Funda G-Gençaslan, Laibor Kalanga Moko, Augustine Moukodi, Deepak Tolange, Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Diana Guzmán, Orlando Villegas, and Fabiano Kueva – took on a collective mandate between 2023 and 2025. They promoted the declaration: DIGNITY – CONTINUITY – TRANSPARENCY, signed by more than 100 international delegates in Berlin in 2022 at a meeting promoted by the Humboldt Forum as part of its Indigenous Embassy initiative.

Faced with the challenge of building forms of horizontal listening and dialogue with our German hosts, the Preparatory Group (2023 – 2025) adopted the assembly modality as a working method and vehicle of legitimacy. This led, in 2023, to the transformation of the Indigenous Embassy into the Global Cultural Assembly (GCA) as a strategy for establishing concepts and practices, derived from diverse worldviews, to modify the cosmo-political power relations that underlie the museum collections held by the German state, based on the common good as a transformative force.

Initially, WORDS/ROOTS/WORLDS was a research project by the Preparatory Group (2023-2025) to develop protocols and promote contemporary mediations based on the relationship with entities, formerly known as objects or cultural belongings, on display or held captive in museum storage facilities. Given the opportunity to integrate this project into the Humboldt Forum’s Family Matters (2025) exhibition, WORDS/ROOTS/WORLDS became a collective curatorial project presented as a multimedia installation (texts, photographs, textiles, drawings, and video) in the form of a POLYGON, as a metaphor for unity in diversity.

The relationships between time, place, language, and memory give shape to the POLYGON. Continents, communities, and knowledge connect in similarity and are woven together out of necessity, in a subtle and frank polyphony. WORDS/ROOTS/WORLDS is a conversation with German audiences to generate a zone of contact, a sensory space of collective spirit, in which concepts such as ancestors, resistance, repatriation, and decolonization are understandable and gain ground in everyday life. It provokes questions and answers in audiences based on a simple question: What are your roots?

Participatory and collaborative are terms that are increasingly present in the institutional sphere. However, the challenge for GCA lies in upholding a spirit of renewal, recognizing that cultural transformation cannot occur without social transformation, but that, at the same time, museums and cultural centers are a necessary vehicle for postcolonial reflection and democratic coexistence.

Text by Fabiano Kueva

Ethnological museums hold cultural belongings from all parts of the world. We usually learn what they mean for the local people indirectly, mediated by curators and academics. What if the people whose cultural assets we see were in control of them themselves?

GCA stands for Global Cultural Assembly. The assembly itself decides which cultural assets are exhibited and which stories are told with them. A new type of program design is emerging in which the international partners have a voice that carries weight.

This new way of working together begins with the creation of a structure that allows the concerns and interests of the international community to be represented to the Humboldt Forum, especially the perspectives of indigenous groups affected by colonialism, racism and anti-Semitism and groups that are little heard. This is our challenge for the coming years.

The first traces of the GCA are visible in an exhibition space created by members. It shows the vision of future joint work.

On 20 October 2023, the Global Cultural Assembly was the topic of the SPÄTI. The evening served to reflect on the progress made since international partners presented their declaration “Dignity – Transparency – Continuity” following the Humboldt Forum’s opening in 2022. At this one-year mark, Glocal Cultural Assembly partners came together again to discuss what had been achieved so far and the goals that lie ahead. The event was held in English with Spanish interpretation.

The evening concluded with a DJ set by Berlin-based DJ Masta Sai, known for her energetic “Berlinistan Garam Masala Sound”, blending SWANA and South Asian dance beats.