"Taking care that the same pain is not inflicted again". A conversation between Nanette Snoep, Carla de Andrade Hurst and Aurora Rodonò, respectively Director and Diversity Managers at the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne, facilitated by Marian Nur Goni

This discussion took place on January 19, 2021. Since then, much has happened in the museum landscape and at the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum itself (RJM), especially regarding the restitution debate and the transfer of property of the Benin bronzes held in German collections to Nigeria, which also involves the RJM1. Just to name but a few projects, the museum has recently inaugurated a space within its permanent exhibition entitled ‘I Miss You’ conceived as a space to mourn and to heal, and launched the project ‘Leaky Archives’ around its collection database, questioning its voids, its racial classifications, the specificity of ethnological knowledge that it encapsulates, and how it could embrace, rather than accumulate, other kinds of knowledge in order “to build an intersectional community”. Both projects, their gestures and the vocabulary employed to express what they mean to do clearly state a stance which is by no means neutral, and significantly contribute to transforming how we think about a (ethnographic) museum and, most importantly, what it can do today.