A for monkey, M for shell, Z for goat: In 1949, two artists were commissioned by the city of Bern to create a wall alphabet with 24 picture panels in the Wylergut school building. Included in this ABC of animal and nature motifs are three depictions of non-white people. C stands for Chinese, I for the indigenous person of America and N for the black person. The mural thus conveys a colonial, racist view of the world.

In 2019, an anti-racist collective criticized the fact that these depictions continued to be displayed without comment in a school building. The city of Bern subsequently announced a competition on how to deal with the mural. The association "The mural must go!" wins with its proposal to remove the work and transfer it to the Bern Historical Museum. The removal of the mural has been the subject of controversial debate in Bern ever since.

The museum will take over the historical mural in spring 2024 and create space for the socially demanded debate. As part of a guest curatorship, the association is designing an exhibition on the subject. This reflects the many-voiced discussion surrounding the mural and how it should be treated. It also locates persistent colonial patterns and structural racism in the present. The exhibition offers food for thought for the public discourse on how we as a society want to deal with this cultural heritage from the colonial era.


Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.