Making Differences:
Transforming Museums and Heritage in the 21st Century (2016–2022)
Making Differences focuses especially upon the changing role and potentials of museums and heritage in the production of difference and diversity. Informed by global developments and theorizing, it takes Berlin as its research lab for examining the dynamics and potentials of contemporary museum and heritage transformations. Funded by the €3.5 Million Alexander von Humboldt prize, with further support from the Humboldt-Universität, the Berlin Museum of Natural History and the SPK, it will run until the end of September 2020.
Rationale
Cultural diversity and difference raise some of the most pressing dilemmas in our contemporary – and future – world. Globalization – a label for a variety of processes – is used to describe the disappearance of cultural and linguistic diversity on the one hand, and the co-presence of greater diversity in the form of migrants and tourists on the other. Identity politics and post-colonialism promote recognition of difference and colonial legacies; and many States struggle over – and come to different temporary settlements on – how far cultural diversity should be acknowledged, ignored, integrated and/or celebrated. Similarly, there are questions and struggles over how pasts are publicly represented and even, insofar as this is possible, redressed.
Museums and heritage not only deal with social and cultural diversity in this sense, however, but also with so-called ‘natural’ diversity (e.g. ‘bio-diversity’). Furthermore, they engage in differentiating activities, especially classification, that act to make identities and differences of multiple kinds. Of particular interest for Making Differences is how these may become interrelated through actual practice. For example, how might museological classifications into kinds of museums and collections influence how certain people or histories are represented? How might specific notions of bio-diversity inform those of cultural diversity, or vice-versa? By looking at a range of kinds of museums – including natural science as well as art and ethnography – the project aims to get critical traction on differences among differences as well as any traffic between them.
Museums offer exciting reflexive potential for examining and collaboratively exploring concepts and practices about difference. Because the museum and heritage transformations in Berlin are informed by many contemporary and cutting-edge ideas, it is a highly productive site for reflexive theorizing. Analyzing how difference and diversity are being constituted in Berlin’s ongoing museum and heritage transformations is of historical significance in itself and also offers a window through which to understand what is at stake in a range of forms of differentiation, and to examine the implications of strategies and conceptualizations involved. This not only concerns new spaces, styles and technologies of display but also the possibility to understand and use heritage in new ways – as part of forging new knowledge relationships, publics and futures.
Berlin as Lab
Making Differences is a multi-researcher ethnography of Berlin’s contemporary transforming museum and heritage-scape. It examines ongoing developments in international, comparative perspective. Key current transformations in Berlin include major planned developments of the museums of the project partners, the Museum für Naturkunde (MfN) and the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz (SPK). The latter includes a new Museum of Islamic Art (MIK) and the Humboldt-Forum (HF), which will display objects from the Ethnological Museum, the Museum of Asian Art and from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin within a controversial ‘new old’ space, generally referred to as the Schloss and currently under construction, in the centre of Berlin, and due to open in 2019.
One ambition of the research project is to go ‘behind the scenes’ of the high-profile developments and to examine and analyze what goes on in practice and process. How are outcomes shaped, not only by plans and visions, and the mobilization of particular examples or histories, but also by unacknowledged assumptions, imaginaries, contingencies or politics?
The research is not limited to the high-profile sites but also explores more low-key, hidden or neglected forms of heritage-making. This includes perspectives of visitors and potential visitors and of different groups or communities.
Making Differences is commited to direct engagement with practice, process and players ‘on the ground’. As well as study and analysis, this also includes ongoing reflexive participation in the developments – such as conceptual development, exhibition design or visitor research.
Research Areas
Transforming the Ethnographic
This research theme begins from the challenges facing ethnographic and ethnological museums today. It includes attention to difficult and contested heritage, with a particular focus on the enduring, problematic, and multiple legacies of colonialism. What curatorial strategies are being and could be developed to address issues of difference and otherness, including boundaries between ‘European’ and ‘non-European’, transnational and cosmopolitan theories, as well as postcolonial critique?
Looking not only at ethnographic museums, we are working on and with a selected number of different kinds of museum, exhibition and contemporary art institutions, which tackle these questions in various ways, speaking to different audiences and operating on different scales.
These include but are not limited to the Humboldt Forum and the Staatliche Museen Berlin (SPK), as well as the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa) gallery in Berlin-Mitte, the municipal gallery Galerie Wedding and the artistic project space SAVVY Contemporary. We consider how institutions develop their own theoretical and political agendas, how they position themselves in line with or against other institutions or discourses. Such a comparative approach necessarily involves paying close attention to the ways in which debates echo and reverberate differently – at times in contrasting ways – in institutional constellations in Berlin and elsewhere.
While this research area focuses primarily on the global entanglements of Berlin’s and Germany’s transforming museum, exhibition, and contemporary a landscape, it also draws comparatively on specific case studies in France, South Africa, Namibia, and Australia, including an in-depth study of the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale in Tervuren, Belgium. The project also cross-references, for instance, restitution debates in the former colonial metropolis of Berlin to museum debates in the ‘Global South’ and other international trends and perspectives.
Transforming the Ethnographic research speaks directly to existing and emerging anthropological debates on critical heritage studies, museums, postcolonial thought and decolonizing practices, contemporary art, curatorial studies, and provenance.
Representing Islam
This research theme begins from the challenges for museums and heritage institutions of how to represent Islam. We approach Islam as a phenomenon, acknowledging the historical and regional diversity, the complexity of ideologies, traditions, practices and dis-courses, as well as the multitude of meanings a ached to Islam. Our primary aim is to under- stand how and in what situations Islam is produced, performed and used by different actors and institutions. What are the consequences, for example, if Islam is represented as art, or if it is primarily addressed as religion or as a way of life?
We seek to examine how explicit and implicit imaginings and perceptions about people and cultures, as well as practices and processes related to Islam, transform and are transformed through museum and heritage initiatives in Berlin. This includes examining the production of collections, exhibitions and other museum-like displays and practices, as well as co-operations with Muslim and non-Muslim communities, initiatives, and individuals.
To do this, we employ postcolonial reflections and the lens of intersectionality (e.g. ethnicity, gender, social class), and address the affective qualities of objects and places. We actively engage in museum-related work to explore if and how alternative ways of ‘doing’ the museum can transform knowledge production and meaning-making, and contribute to their futurability.
Looking behind the scenes of institutions, such as the Museum of Islamic Art, or temporary initiatives, like the exhibition daHEIM at the Museum Europäischer Kulturen, or the guides at the Multaqa project, allows us to understand how themes and objects are interpreted, and how these interpretations are received by people coming to museums. Getting involved in the making of exhibitions or initiatives associated with them also allows us to engage directly with the people involved, thus gaining insights into their perspectives and practices, and the potentials and limits for transformation.
The last decades have witnessed rapidly growing anti-Muslim prejudices that are expressed in Islamophobic public rhetoric. By looking closely at processes of heritage-making and the poetics and politics of representation within museums and heritage developments in Berlin, our research can help to contribute to an understanding of how these attitudes are nurtured or can be challenged. In this way, we hope to contribute to helping museums and heritage institutions to address Islamophobic attitudes, for example by questioning problematic binaries in relation to what Islam ‘ is’.
Science and Citizenship
The core research remit here is on how scientific – especially, though not only, natural scientific – knowledge about diversity is constructed and its implications for citizenship. Museums are an important source of informal education, conveying knowledge and educating in certain ways of seeing. They shape citizen formation through the inclusions and exclusions that they perform, through what they depict, and through the kinds of knowledge they display and modes of transmission that they deploy. Techniques to find better modes of engaging the public in science, including in understanding the nature of scientific research, has been high on the agenda of many museums, especially museums of natural science; and there have, therefore, been innovative techniques deployed, including those that go under the label ‘citizen science’, the use of art in science exhibition, collaborative and co-production of research and exhibition, and innovative forms of visitor research.
Diversity and difference are particularly interesting to examine in a museum of natural history due to the fact that such museums have played important roles historically in naturalizing and disseminating ideas about ‘diversity’ through notions such as ‘species’. New biological research not only works with notions of ‘bio-diversity’ but is also transforming various earlier understandings. This offers the potential to experiment with and track how this is publicly disseminated and received. The Museum for Natural History (MfN), with its lively programme of exhibitions and visitor engagement, is central to this research area but the questions concerning science and citizenship, and also of scientific knowledge and research in displaying diversity and difference, are also relevant to all museums and heritage organizations.
Media and Mediation
This research area is dedicated to theorizing and investigating processes of mediation in museums and heritage, with particular emphasis on the implications for questions of diversity and difference. The term media covers both the traditional media of museum and heritage collecting and display as well as more recent uses of digital and social media. This research area addresses questions such as the following. How far are new media changing the nature and capacities of museums and heritage? What do everyday uses of new media by diverse groups tell us about the ways in which memory, knowledge and subjectivity are being shaped today? And what is the potential of new media for involving more people and groups – including those at a distance who identify with collections and sites? As well as considering the implications and effectiveness of various media for organizing and transmitting knowledge, our research also investigates the sensory and affective dimensions of media, and how this articulates with creating senses of sameness and difference.
Who is ID 8470?
A spread from the catalogue of the exhibition: Theatrum naturae et artis / Theater der Natur und Kunst – Wunderkammern des Wissens, by the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Gropius Bau, 2000
Who is ID 8470? is a collaboration between CARMAH and the Humboldt Laboratory at the Humboldt Forum, artistically directed by Tal Adler. An art installation in the exhibition of the Humboldt Laboratory asks visitors and professional communities to consider the ethical and political implications of exhibiting human remains in public settings like museums and university collections.
Who is ID 8470? is developed throughout the year leading to the opening of the Humboldt Laboratory’s exhibition. It is based on the understanding that artistic-research can generate processes of new knowledge through the entire spectrum of the artistic production. The research-based artwork in this sense is not only seen as an end-product on display. It consists of research and artistic production processes, and relationships with a network of institutions and individuals that participate and contribute to these processes.
Who is ID 8470? revolves around four main elements: A multiple-narrative video sculpture, collaborative workshops, visitor engagement programme, and a commissioned provenance research.
Realizations and reception in the Humboldt Forum, Berlin
This is an exciting opportunity to conduct original research, leading to publication, as part of a lively international team in a leading Centre for museum and heritage research. It will focus on the (hopefully) newly opened Humboldt Forum in Berlin – a nationally and internationally significant and contested cultural development that has been the subject of considerable academic and public debate, especially with respect to its approach to colonialism and ethnographic collections, and to German Democratic Republic heritage.
Realizations and Reception is a sub-project of Making Differences. Transforming Museums and Heritage in the Twenty-first Century. Funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in an extension to the Making Differences project, Realizations and Reception will build on and expand research that has been conducted thus far to research aspects of the completed exhibitions in the Humboldt Forum and their reception. The overall project is concerned with how questions of difference and diversity are approached in museums and heritage, with a particular focus on how these are being transformed in light of postcolonial and decolonial critique, global and diasporic interrelationships, and new media possibilities. The research so far has been primarily ethnographic and has looked at a wide range of sites within Berlin in order to examine how such questions are addressed in different settings, including the extent to which there are shared or differing concepts and practices involved. Aspects of the Humboldt Forum have been explored in this work, including questions of which particular histories, collections and constituencies have been foreseen in the making-processes. There is also ongoing engagement in exhibition-making within the Humboldt Forum, especially the Humboldt Lab (Who is ID 8470?).
The completed opening exhibitions of the Humboldt Forum in 2020 and 2021 will allow investigation of, among other things, whether certain approaches work as anticipated, what happens as exhibits from the various participating organizations (including the Ethnological Museum, Museum of Asian Art, Humboldt-Universität and Berlin Exhibition among others) come together, and what visitors and communities of implication make of it. As with other research within Making Differences, the results should contribute to wider debates about the roles and workings of museums and heritage in the contemporary world, particularly with respect to how they tackle difference and diversity, and thus what might be done in the future.
The work on the subproject will be as part of a team, involving some researchers who were part of the previous phase of Making Differences. Collectively, we will refine the specific questions to be tackled and methods and work-plan to do so. Key areas of research will include how Germany’s histories (especially those of the contested space that the Humboldt Forum occupies), including colonial and GDR, are figured through the completed space, which particular groups within the nation and beyond it are implicated in the resulting presentation, and who interrelates with it in which ways. Analysis of the exhibitions and visitor research are the two main anticipated components of work to be conducted by the new researchers in Realizations and Reception. If COVID-19 or other restrictions make physical access impossible, the research will be carried out in modified form using plans, texts, and interviews, together with online formats. In terms of methodology, it is anticipated that the work will be primarily qualitative, though some quantitative visitor research may also be undertaken. Although using the shorthand ‘reception’, we understand visitors and others interacting with the exhibitions as active meaning-makers whose engagement is not only in response to what is presented. Concurrently, classes for MA students related to the subproject will run, encouraging them to conduct relevant empirical research, supervised in part by project researchers.
In addition to jointly designing, conducting and analyzing the research, researchers will be expected to contribute to writing up the results in both report format and for publication. It is anticipated that a collective book will be produced.