National University of Samoa to open Research Museum

Apia, Samoa – 20 August, 2024 – The National University of Samoa (NUS), will host a special event to officially open the National University of Samoa Research Museum and launch the inaugural exhibition, Atalilo: Motifs in Samoan Material Culture.

The event is held in partnership with the Übersee-Museum Bremen (UMB), with funding from the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The NUS-UMB collaboration began in 2020, facilitated through the Centre for Samoan Studies (CSS) and the Faculty of Science (FOS), with teams in both faculties addressing project needs based on their expertise and academic training.

The multi-year project has several components, ranging from recruiting and hiring two Samoans to join the curatorial staff in Bremen, to the delivering of six (6) online workshops with UMB staff and Samoa-based artisans and material culture practitioners.

These Measina Show & Tell Workshops were a great success and were instrumental in breaking the geographical boundaries of accessibility to museum collections traditionally faced by community members.

Since July 2023, the CSS and UMB teams have focused exclusively on planning and executing the inaugural exhibition, Atalilo: Motifs in Samoan Material Culture. This required renovating an existing exhibition space on the NUS campus, co-curating the exhibition with the help of the Director of the Übersee-Museum Bremen, facilitating a loan of artifacts from Bremen, and installing the entire exhibition on the ground in Apia.

With the support of our partners, NUS now has a viable Research Museum where objects can be displayed to the public and academics can use the objects to pursue further research interests.

Atalilo: Motifs in Samoan Material Culture, explores motifs as they are and were used across seven (7) genres of Samoan material culture. The genres were selected and researched by the team at CSS, supplemented with artifacts from as early as the 19th century, replicas created from ethnographic and archaeological records, archival documentation and artistic contributions. Wherever possible, the researchers collaborated with local artisans and experts to supplement and enhance the academic research, setting a precedent for the future goals and outputs of the NUS Research Museum.

“It has been a great pleasure to work together with NUS. The collaboration with the co-curators and the local scientists and artists has been very enriching for our museum work, as we were able to learn a lot of new things about the collection,” said Dr. Wiebke Ahrndt, Director of Übersee-Museum Bremen.

“Moreover, it is a great honour for us to be able to support NUS in setting up a research museum and we are also very pleased that some objects from our collection can now be presented in the inaugural exhibition for a duration of three years. We celebrate a very successful cooperation.”

The Opening of the National University of Samoa Research Museum and launch of its inaugural exhibition, Atalilo: Motifs in Samoan Material Culture, will take place on Friday, 30 August 2024 at 3pm, at the Niule’a Building on the NUS Campus.