Island 84
(Re-)Connecting with Felix Speiser’s Vanuatu collection (1910—1912)
«Island 84» is a digital platform on which the objects, photographs, and research materials are assembled that the Swiss ethnologist Felix Speiser brought back to Basel from his 1910-1912 trip to Vanuatu. The project aims to make the collection held in the «Museum der Kulturen Basel» and its documentation easily accessible and to encourage participation beyond the holding institution. By creating an interactive space, we hope to establish a foundation for lasting connections and future collaborations.
disclaimer
Visitors should be aware that this website holds historical data created in colonial circumstances, which may include vocabulary and views that today might be considered obsolete, inappropriate, and/or racist.
The collaboration envisaged in this project makes an English translation of the research materials and the collection documentation—originally written in German and held in the Museum der Kulturen Basel—indispensable. The English translation available on the platform has been entirely machine-generated using DeepL's neural translation technology: it has not been manually reviewed or corrected by human translators.
The purpose of such a translation is solely to provide an accessibility tool assisting you in exploring and understanding information originally written in German; they are not authoritative translations. For any scholarly research, publication, or official purposes, please always refer to the original German text as the definitive source. Think of these English translations as a helpful starting point for discovery.