This present paper aims to discuss and make a comparative analysis between the visual content shared on Instagram of two ethnographic and imperial museums: the Humboldt Forum, in Berlin, and the Rio de Janeiro's National Museum. While the National Museum exists nowadays as an archive of remains, since the most part of its 20 million items were lost in a fire in 2018, the German institution recreates in its building the historical Prussian city palace, reassembling the broken bits of its past and the remembrance of the Prussian imperialism. This visual material of a museum that no longer exists, or exists only as images, will be compared with the new Humboldt Forum, and how the reminiscences of its previous charged history are represented on the collective imaginary on social media.
Both institutions have a similar root in a colonial past. Founded in 1818 by King João VI of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarves, the National Museum was the oldest and most important scientific and historical museum in Brazil. The unclear provenance of many of its items indicates that some of them may have come to the museum from looting. Since 46% of the collections were lost, the debate about how its reconstruction should take into account the fact that it's not possible to recreate a 21st century museum with 19th century parameters. Even if the reconstruction plans, which include the creation of new collections through donations from other countries, are achieved, this will certainly not be the same museum as it was for 200 years.
The Humboldt Forum also has a controversial history of cultural appropriation. The new institution, to be opened later this year in Berlin, incorporates non-Western art such as the collections of Berlin's Asian Art Museum, the Ethnological Museum and the Humboldt University Scientific Collection. Since it started to be planned, it has been accused of being rooted on conservative ideas that go against modern Germany. How to overcome the haunted colonial past in the debate about decolonizing institutions, incorporating multiperspectivity as one of its principles (Bose, 2013), is one of the main challenges of the new museum. In the introductory posts in its Instagram account, it is defined as "a social experiment" and "Berlin's newest landmark," indicating that the museum perceives itself as an ambitious project and aims to use this social network as a relevant space for its institutional discourse extended to a global sphere.
Having in mind the social media vocation for spreading multiple narratives and capturing a collective imaginary about controversial subjects, Instagram was chosen as an object due the range it reached as an image-sharing platform. The method of analysis includes mapping relevant hashtags related to both institutions, organizing these images in a separate Instagram account as a way to develop new narratives, and trying to create a "contact zone" (Clifford; Pratt) between both institutions. Following Clifford's notion of 'museums as contact zones' (1996), I apply this idea to images and the model of communication that the Internet and social media made possible.
