For Rome and the Catholic world, 2025 will go down in history as the year of the Jubilee. One hundred years earlier, Pope Pius XI called for another Jubilee and inaugurated the first Vatican Missionary Exhibition in 1925. Following the success of international exhibitions and fairs held in European and American metropolises, the Catholic Church had decided to “put on display” its evangelising work in missions scattered all over the world – from Alaska to Ethiopia, from China to the Amazon, from India to Peru. A hundred thousand artefacts collected by the missionaries were exhibited to testify to the diversity of cultures and indigenous knowledge that had produced them. The Vatican Missionary Exhibition of 1925 was such a success that, after its conclusion, part of the collections on display became the original nucleus of the Missionary Ethnological Museum that was opened in the Lateran Palace. This museum remained open for decades until its closure between 1963 and 1973, when the collections were transferred to the Vatican Museums, where they remain today. Since then, the Ethnological Museum has undergone several renovations and will be inaugurated by Pope Francis in 2019 under the name of “Anima Mundi”.
The Vatican Missionary Exhibition of 1925 was an event of extraordinary relevance not only for the Catholic Church and the missionary orders, but also for the history of culture and science, the ideological and material legacy of which still reverberates today. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in exploring from different perspectives the complexity of the missionary ethnological collections. Due to the specific way in which the Vatican collection was assembled and the various actors operating on a global scale who were involved in the process, the Vatican Missionary Exhibition of 1925 represents an exceptional case study to explore the multiple entanglements among power dynamics, collecting, and knowledge production.
On the occasion of the centenary of the first Vatican Missionary Exhibition, this workshop aims to bring together scholars from different disciplines to reflect on what made it possible – from the anthropological visions that inspired the collections, to the museum practices implemented for the exhibition, from the richness of indigenous knowledge conveyed by the artefacts to their transmedia dissemination in order to create the “narrative” of the exhibition. In doing so, moving from its history, the workshop also aims to reflect on the legacy of the Vatican Missionary Exhibition, which is embodied in the materiality of the objects that have come down to us.
Programme
9.00-9.30 Coffee
9.30-9.45 Welcome. Maria Bonaria Urban (Director of Studies in History, KNIR)
9.45-10.15 Sabina Brevaglieri (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin), Missionary Collecting and Papal Rome: Evangelization and Heritage-making before Display
10.15-11.45 Panel I. The World on Display at the Vatican Missionary Exhibition
Respondent: Birgit Meyer (Utrecht University)
10.15-10.45 Alison Kahn (Loughborough University e Stanford University Overseas Program), Organising Creation: The Supernatural, Natural and Material Cultural Worlds of the Pontifical Missionary Exhibition of 1925
10.45-11.15 Break
11.15-11.45 Ana Rita Amaral (Utrecht University), A Vili Mask and the Making of Global Catholicism: A Century of Vatican Exhibitions (1925-2025)
11.45-12.00 Q&A
12.00-13.15 Panel II. Ethnographic, Missionary & Colonial Collections Today
Respondent: Birgit Meyer (Utrecht University)
12.00-12.30 Rosa Anna di Lella (Museo delle Civiltà, Rome), tbc
12.30-13.00 Wonu Veys (Leiden University & Wereldmuseum Leiden), ‘This is my grandfather, the father of my mother’: The Presence of Tiwi islands (Australia) Collections at the Anima Mundi Museum
13.00-13.15 Q&A
13.15-14.15 Lunch
14.15-15.30 Panel III. Collecting and Narrating the Other through the Vatican Missionary Exhibition
Respondent: Birgit Meyer (Utrecht University)
14.15-14.45 Mariana Françozo (Leiden University), Between Mission and Museum: Tracing South American Indigenous Artifacts in Vatican Displays
14.45-15.15 Maria Bonaria Urban (KNIR), The Sodality of Saint Peter Claver on Display: Faith and Alterity at the Vatican Missionary Exhibition
15.15-15.30 Q&A
15.30-16.00 Break
16.00-17.30 Respondent: Birgit Meyer (Utrecht University). Discussion and conclusion
