The Swiss Alpine Museum (alps) is firmly established in the present and its topics are close to our visitors: identity, mobility, tourism, tradition and innovation, culture and nature. The Swiss Alpine Museum conveys complex concepts and ideas. It presents, asks questions, contradicts, moves, irritates and provokes – looking beyond the events of the day, visualizing even slow change, using relations as a tool for reasoning, and turning the attention to the future. The active human being is at the very center. The Swiss Alpine Museum is a platform for dialogue and guidance, and its historic collection (mountain photography, cartography, and mountaineering) is part of this purpose.
The Swiss Alpine Museum knows its visitors. It involves experts, artists and museum visitors in its work and combines cultural and natural scientific disciplines to create a holistic view. It conceives the Alpine region across borders, from Slovenia to France, and assumes a global perspective when looking at the relationship that people all over the world have to mountains. The Swiss Alpine Museum encourages its visitors to act and provides a venue for both communication and reflection. A network of several local museums throughout the Alpine region also benefits from our knowhow.
The Swiss Alpine Museum is the "Embassy of the Alps" in the capital city of Switzerland. Its location in the capital emphasizes the museum’s Switzerland-wide responsibility to be a platform of topics for everyone: for city dwellers, people from the suburbs and those living in the mountains, German- and French-speaking Swiss, for tourists from Switzerland and abroad, for conservationists and people for whom the mountains are primarily a place to spend their free time, for school classes and groups of adults. The museum is located where stakeholders from politics, professional associations, NGOs and the economy meet to discuss and dispute their causes. And at the same time, Berne is the gateway to the touristic top destinations of the Bernese Oberland and the Valais.
The Swiss Alpine Museum’s potential has not been exhausted yet – it can be further utilized and developed thanks to the commitment of both public and private partners.
