The House of the People was founded in 1995 as an initiative of Tyrolean Africa expert and photographer Gert Chesi. As a journalist and photographer, he discovered his passion for the different cultures of this world at an early age. In forty years he has collected more than 1,000 exhibits on his travels to Asia and Africa, which form the inventory of his museum. The House of the People is a place of encounters which captures the cultures of this world in a comparative way, and in doing so attempts to portray the immeasurable wealth that the work of humanity has created.

Commodities and cult objects
The main points of the Africa collection include cult objects of animist religions through to the modern voodoo movements. From the oldest excavated findings of the Nok and Katsina cultures to the ritual objects of the Ogboni federation, the House of the People shows a representative cross-section of African art. The second part of the museum shows the art of Buddhism from South-East Asia. The Asian collection is dominated by the findings from Myanmar (Burma), Thailand and China, which stand in attractive contrast to the figures and masks of Africa. Important Buddha presentations as well as Chinese excavations from the Han and Tang periods form the core of the Asian collection. The supplemental special exhibitions convey an overall understanding of culture and form a bridge between yesterday and today, as well as between the cultures and people of this world.