NEW DIRECTOR

At the beginning of the year, Prof Dr Larissa Förster took up her position as Director of the Weltkulturen Museum. The accomplished cultural anthropologist has a wealth of expertise and valuable experience in the fields of post-colonial provenance research, cultural and social anthropology and, last but not least, museum work in Germany and abroad.

"I am delighted to be able to help shape the future of such an important museum in Frankfurt, with its vibrant and diverse urban society and highly interesting museum landscape," says Larissa Förster. "The museum can raise important questions about the possibilities and challenges of living together - locally and globally - not only from the perspective of cultural and social anthropology, but ideally in dialogue with other museums and disciplines. The debate on the decolonisation of cultural and academic institutions, on provenance and restitution will have a place here. The planned new venue of the Weltkulturen Museum will create even closer links with urban space and urban society, which I see as a great opportunity".

Most recently, Larissa Förster contributed to the establishment of the department "Cultural Goods and Collections from Colonial Contexts" at the German Lost Art Foundation, which she has headed since 2019. She teaches as an honorary professor at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University in Berlin and is co-initiator and scientific advisor of the project "Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envisioning Creative Futures", as part of which a restitution from the Ethnologisches Museum in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin to the National Museum of Namibia in Windhoek took place in 2024.

The Weltkulturen Museum team and Larissa Förster are looking forward to exciting projects with lots of new impulses!