Maria Camilla De Palma ​

Museum anthropologist, founding director of Castello D’Albertis Museum of World Cultures in Genoa (1991), MCDP has organized nearly 100 exhibitions, related workshops and events with indigenous peoples of Africa, the Americas, and Oceania, through dialogues with them and citizens with migrant background. 

She did field research among the Wayuú (Venezuela) and the Bororo (Mato Grosso, Brazil) creating a Cultural Center in Meruri (MT) and a dialogic exhibition in Genoa (2004).

Collaborating with the Peabody Museum of Ethnology and Anthropology (Harvard University), she conducted a sui generis repatriation of two Mayan fragments of the museum collections originating from the site of Copán, Honduras (1998).

Thanks to a Getty Grant (2002), she collaborated with the Hopi of Arizona and the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian Institution, Washington) to engage the Hopi in the representation of their culture in the museum.

In 2014, she returned 5,000 pre-Hispanic Ecuadorian artifacts to Ecuador, after exhibiting them involving Genoese citizens of Ecuadorian descent. 

In the last ten years she has explored participatory design with deaf and blind communities, involving them for creating audio and video guides for their visit, ensuring accessibility for all cultures, and promoting the museum as a place of well-being.

As part of various practices for decolonizing the museum as an institution, she is digitally sharing the museum archival photographs with Aboriginal Australians to create spaces for reciprocal collaboration (Aboriginalarchivesitaly.com). 

Her research focuses on the representation of cultures in museums and the intercultural use of museum heritage, with the aim of initiating processes around the themes of belonging, appropriation, and the construction of identity.

She was a member of the Executive Committee of the Ethnography Section (ICME) of ICOM, a founding member of Simbdea – the Italian Society for Museography and Demo-Ethno-Anthropological Heritage – of ICOM Provenance-Italy and of MIPAM (Network of Italian Museums with World Heritage).

Social Media

https://www.facebook.com/CastelloDAlbertisGenova

www.facebook.com/mariacamilla.depalma

Links

https://www.museidigenova.it/it/castello-dalbertis-museo-delle-culture-del-mondo