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This paper illustrates a process of recovering the past concerning one of the earliest ethnographic collections from New Guinea. Made in the 1870s and donated to the municipality of Genova in the 1930s this collection of artefacts from Luigi Maria D’Albertis’ expeditions in New Guinea has finally become available to the public in 2004, with the opening of the Museo Castello D’Albertis. The first process of recovery is that of bringing it to public attention. The question – raised more than one hundred years after the collection was made- was how to stage this exhibition, with what representational aims. Its location within the reconstructed museum/home of Luigi Maria’s cousin Enrico (also a navigator and explorer) suggested contextualising it within a discourse on 19th Century collectors, rather than displaying the artefacts as material instantiations of New Guinea cultures. The solution was to juxtapose the objects with passages from D’Albertis’ memoirs, and with oral history accounts of those ‘first encounters’ recorded among descendants of some of the ‘natives’ from whom the objects were taken. In this way we hoped to emphasise to the public that there are more sides to the activity of collection and of the historical, not absolute, meaning of the objects.

From New Guinea 1872-78 to Genova 2004: recovering Luigi Maria D’Albertis’ private collection