Despite the challenges posed by the COVID crisis, the project has made scholarly process through a threefold strategy: First, prior related research on Indigenous and museological topics have been further developed towards outputs, such as academic publications, and their dissemination, as through online events. Second, the overall project has moved from pursuing a multi-sited ethnography to establishing a multi-sited research infrastructure through which teams based in several localities - Munich, Cambridge, Aotearoa New Zealand, Hawai’i and Rapa Nui - work collaboratively on initiatives under the umbrella of the ERC group. This methodological innovation has enabled the project to be productive on a global scale despite not being able to travel. Third, the team in Munich has pursued historical research, as planned, but from within Germany and Europe. While doing so, the intellectual orientation has evolved towards the investigation and deployment of a set of knowledge practices - collecting, filming, exhibiting - through which Indigenous multiplicities become constituted. A film project on NIU, known as the coconut, has been set up by the PI with a team at the University of Hawai’i, involving the affiliated researchers Vilsoni Hereniko and Ida Yoshinaga. The trilogy takes the pandemic as a springboard to tackle issues such as human-environment relationships, food security and Indigenous sovereignty. The exhibition ‘Indigenous Futures’ at the MAA Cambridge is developed through the curatorial leadership and input by four Indigenous residencies: Noelle Kahanu (University of Hawai'i), Taloi Havini (Independent artist, Brisbane), Leah Lui-Chivizhe (University of Technology, Sydney) and Jordan Wilson (New York University), who have all gathered in Munich and Cambridge. The project has led to major results: The exhibition 'Faultlines: Imagining Indigenous futures for colonial collections' has featured for a year (December 2024-December 2025) at MAA Cambridge, which also hosted the summative symposium of the project in May 2025. The exhibition's catalogue will be published with open access in the first half of 2026. Three films have been produced ('Sina ma Tinirau', 'Woven' and 'Ta'oa? (Objects?)'), all by Indigenous actors in collaboration with the PI. Those films have toured the festical circuit, won awards, and are or will become availabe with open access. Several articles, chapters, journal issues and books have been published. Key forthcoming books are: 'German-Rapanui Entanglements: Collecting, Knowing and Remembering Easter Island' (Leuven University Press), 'Experiencing Islandness: Oceans and Beyond' (University of Hawai'i Press), and the summative volume 'New Discoveries: Indigenous Collecting, Exhibiting and Filming' (Te Papa Press), all coming out with open access in 2026. Our project website has contributed to the dissemination of our work beyond common academic audiences and on a global scale, and was chosen by the ERC to feature on the CORDIS website.
