Between November 2021 and February 2022, a Papua New Guinean artist and three German historians began a dialogue to explore the concept – How would you explain Germany to the Pacific? What followed were difficult and illuminating conversations, that opened a space of empathy, which led to questions of curiosity and understanding.

So why would Pacific people, especially from former German colonies want to know about Germany?
That’s up to Pacific people to decide.

One intended aim of Tok Stori | Geschichten-Austausch (as a prototype) is to give Pacific people the choice of what they would like to know about Germany by appealing to Pacific people’s cultural values and ways of understanding. The other aim is to get as many German citizens as possible to share stories publicly about their unique and shared German identity, culture, and history, so that both German and Pacific people can learn about each other.

Tok Stori is a Melanesian concept that means spending time and connecting with someone through a conversation, a dialogue or storytelling and actively listening and relating. It implies a mutual or reciprocal relationship in sharing. We want to encourage Geschichten-Austausch among German people.

As part of the NEO Collections project, Tok Stori | Geschichten-Austausch is the result of a collaborative digital residency that engaged artists from the Pacific Islands region to develop a prototype for an online exhibition on the Pacific hosted by the Übersee Museum.

Prototype collaborators for Tok Stori | Geschichten-Austausch are Lisa Hilli, Etta Grotian, Lisa Korge, Tobias Goebel and shi Blank.

Lisa Hilli creates and curates kick arse exhibitions that shift narratives and art histories with a Melanesian feminine lens. She has specialist knowledge of lens-based practices, interpretation of museum collections, and the language of textiles. Her creativity is sparked by digging through archives, listening to human stories, and lucid dream states. She is driven to empower individuals and communities whose stories and knowledges are overlooked and to arm them with skills to share their stories their way. She is thoughtful, curious, and led by the important Pacific cultural value of reciprocity. Lisa is obsessed by the wondrous worlds of animated films and the joy and wisdom of growing plants. shi Blank searches to make meaning of identities from concepts of belonging, home and the great deluge of everydayness in being. They are curious about how tools and systems work, preferring to invent and do things themselves from scratch rather than leaving it to chance. Their work spans over many mediums, both tactile and virtual with a focus on vivid infrastructures and feminist subjects. They are highly inquisitive and love delving into uncharted territories. NEO Collections is a 4 year project about finding new ways of working with museum collections — online and onsite. NEO is based on the principles of openness and participation. It aims to provide reliable and reusable information and great digital resources to the public and wants to explore how to make the collections more human-centered and accessible. It is funded by the Digital Culture Programme of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation). Our project partners are: Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (Germany), Übersee-Museum Bremen (Germany) and National Museum (Sweden). Our partner is Digital Identities.