International Museum Conference Rio de Janeiro

© Felipe Varanda The National Museum in Rio de Janeiro suffered a major fire on 2nd September 2018. Since then, the German Foreign Office and the Goethe-Institut have been supporting them in their salvage work and the development of a concept for a new museum.

The National Museum was the most important museum of this kind in Latin America, with a collection of about 20 million objects – including artefacts of long extinct indigenous groups and the last surviving records of their languages.

The Goethe-Institut and the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, in collaboration with numerous museums and cultural institutions and supported by the German Foreign Office, are organising an International Museum Conference in Rio de Janeiro. In particular, it aims to develop concepts that prepare museums of Natural History and Ethnology for the future in difficult times. The central themes of the conference are: "Museums in the field of tension of society", "Collections and Archives" and "Sustainability".