About the exhibition

The Other is an exhibition based on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous 1952 work, Race and History. It addresses the questions of cultural diversity and racism, placing them in the context of contemporary social conflicts.

The basic premise of the exhibition is that we are all fundamentally ethnocentric. In other words, we tend to think that we are always right and that only we can behave in a civilised way, while we consider the stranger’s behaviour somewhat incomprehensible and even outrageous. However, ethnocentrism and discrimination are not fateful.

Our attitude towards the rest of humankind may change depending on history, our level of knowledge or our contact with other peoples. Ethnography and anthropology have greatly contributed to this view, as well as to understanding the Other. One lesson of history is that we are able to learn how to live together just as much as we are able to forget this knowledge. We are living at a time when we need to learn in order to survive.

The exhibition encourages the visitor to recognize the complexity of human relations by using scenic effects. Its material is made up of vast and colourful ethnographic collections, historical documents as well as contemporary pieces of art to show how we, Europeans have constructed the concept of the Other, and how we are seen by the Others.

Throughout the rooms the exhibition shows us how to learn to look at ourselves from the outside in order to accept the Other and difference.