As you said, when the Rijksmuseum moved here, this area was the countryside. 200 years down the line, everything changed. How did the museum evolve over the centuries?

Yes, everything changed but the collection has remained merely the same, besides numerous acquisitions. What changed is the way we look at the objects. If you move an artwork only 30 degrees, it tells a completely different story…

In general, during the 20th century, the Rijksmuseum played an important role in shaping our national identity. People were visiting it as part of their civic education.

Differently from other important museums, the Rijksmuseum is “national” also in the sense that almost all the objects are made in the Netherlands. And in this sense, it’s pretty unique.

But I think it took a while for Dutch people to fully realize how national this museum is. I myself only understood it when I started working here, in 2009.

At the time, the museum was in refurbishment. Dutch society was coming from a decade of turmoil, also because of the murders of politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and of director Theo Van Gogh in 2004.

There was a big debate going on around the issue of Dutch identity.

At the same time, it became evident that what was at display here represented mainly the governing elite, just a thin layer of Dutch society throughout the ages. The objects about the everyday life of normal people went to other Dutch museums.

In particular, the colonies were my main concern. They form a big part of our history and, of course, only if you understand colonial history you can understand how the Netherlands became the Netherlands.

We do have beautiful and powerful colonial objects in our collection but, at the time, they weren’t very well explained and there were small texts to describe them. Better than nothing, but not enough.

So we came up with the idea of publishing a series of books about the relationship between the Netherlands and its colonies. The purpose was to recollect awareness about history and our self of the past. And maybe just to explain why we do have those objects in the first place.

I think the books were helpful to understand our colonial history and an important step at trying to make every single Dutch person with roots in one of those countries feel welcomed in the museum.

So, to go back to your question, I’d say that one of our roles in this time is to make everybody feel at home, to be here for all Dutch people (and, of course, for the many, many tourists, that goes without saying).

And, in doing so, to look beyond our contemporary national borders and realize that there’s also a mutual, transnational heritage that is important to display.

For example, you can also make an exhibition together with another country’s museum, and that’s what we’re doing with the Indonesian National Museum in Jakarta at the moment.

Slavery, an exhibition