Contemporary Curating and Museum Education [1. Aufl.] 9783839430804

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Carmen Mörsch, Angeli Sachs, Thomas Sieber (eds.) Contemporary Curating and Museum Education

Museum | Volume 14

Carmen Mörsch, Angeli Sachs, Thomas Sieber (eds.)

Contemporary Curating and Museum Education

A publication on behalf of the Master of Arts in Art Education, Curatorial Studies

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2017 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover picture: Exhibition Shape our Country. Workshop for National Planning (October 2008 - May 2009), Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) Credits: Katrien Franken Concept: Carmen Mörsch, Angeli Sachs, Thomas Sieber, Nora Landkammer Coordination & Editing: Carmen Mörsch, Angeli Sachs, Thomas Sieber, Hannah Horst, Nora Landkammer Editorial assistants: Rhea Hächler, Judith Winterhager Translations: Nora Landkammer, Katharina Maly, Veronika Peterseil, Jörg Pinnow, Anne Pritchard-Smith, Karin Schneider, Joel Scott Proofread: Joel Scott, Berlin Typesetting: Michael Rauscher, Bielefeld Printed in Germany Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3080-0 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3080-4

Content Preface Carmen Mörsch, Angeli Sachs, Thomas Sieber | 9

C urating and M useum E ducation as E xpansion of the D ispl ay Introduction Angeli Sachs | 15

Reaching Out How to Increase the Social and Cultural Value of Architecture? Linda Vlassenrood | 19

Curation & Education as an Integrated Concept The Exhibition Out to Sea? The Plastic Garbage Project in the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich Franziska Mühlbacher, Angeli Sachs | 31

In Dialogue with the Visitors The AFRITECTURE Exhibition and its Interactive Display Andres Lepik | 45

PUZZLE Education as Curatorial Practice Julia Schäfer | 53

Curatorial Work Towards a New Relationship Between People, Places and Things MUDE Museum Action to Boost the Intrinsic Relational Value of Culture Barbara Coutinho | 65

C urating and M useum E ducation as E xpansion of the M useum Introduction Thomas Sieber | 77

Identity and Ambiguity Experiences from Hohenems with the Objects of Dispersal Hanno Loewy | 81

City History Museums as Generators of Participation Paul Spies | 91

Exhibiting Migration Forms of Representation between Visibility and Invisibility Thomas Sieber | 101

How Access-iting? Museums as Cultural Educators or Shelters of Knowledge Susan Kamel | 117

The Participatory City Museum Jan Gerchow, Sonja Thiel | 131

Education at the Centre of the District Six Museum Bonita Bennett | 141

C urating and M useum E ducation as S ocial I ntervention Introduction Carmen Mörsch | 155

Contact Zone (Un)realised ‘Other’ Visitors as Inter ventions in the Exhibition Space Carmen Mörsch | 159

Inside the Post-Representative Museum Nora Sternfeld | 175

The Anatomy of an AND Janna Graham | 187

Who’s Gallery? #BlankSlates and Geniuses Living Young Syrus Marcus Ware | 203

C uration and E ducation as a D ecolonisation of the M useum Introduction Nora Landkammer | 215

Wiphala Identity and Conflict Adriana Muñoz | 219

The Decolonisation of the Mapuche Museum in Cañete Juana C. Paillalef | 231

Education in Museums, Community Mediation and the Right to the City in the Historic Centre of Quito Alejandro N. Cevallos, Valeria R. Galarza | 243

“Good for You, But I Don’t Care!” Critical Museum Pedagogy in Educational and Curatorial Practice Bernadette Lynch | 255

Visitors or Community? Collaborative Museology and the Role of Education and Outreach in Ethnographic Museums Nora Landkammer | 269

Bibliography  | 281 Authors and Editors  | 307 Illustration credits  | 313

Preface

This volume grew out of the international conference Contemporary Curating and Museum Education at the Zurich University of the Arts, which was organised by the MA in Art Education: Curating & Museum Education.1 The integrated understanding of curation and education is the leitmotif of the MA program, which is situated between the three key areas of teaching, research and the museum. At the heart of the course is the critical confrontation with the contexts of contemporary curation and the museum. The aim of the course is to promote a reflexive praxis which integrates the two fields of curation and art education. We work towards this objective in our practices of teaching, research, and in our curatorial and education work. Through this comprehensive approach, we hope to contribute to the generation of a discourse and theory which is based on the negotiation of diverse experiential contexts and traditions of knowledge. Since the beginning of the professionalisation of museum work, curation and education have stood in a hierarchical relationship to one another, whereby curation comes first, and education then does its best to smoothly communicate the content of the former to the largest possible audience. This static arrangement was never undisputed and, particularly in the last two decades, has begun to shift: the boundaries between the two fields are becoming more permeable. One factor that has contributed to this development is that museums are interrogating their role in the knowledge society in diverse ways. According to this perspective, visitors are always also potential ‘prosumers’, and the diversity of voices of networked learning communities stands in opposition to the claim to validity of specialist expertise. Apart from their strong focus on the objects, museums are oriented towards society, towards their users. They present themselves as sites of knowledge exchange, and as the stage of a participation-based linking of history with the present.

1 | From the autumn semester 2016/17 the master’s program will bear the name Master of Arts in Art Education Curatorial Studies.

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Additionally, the insights provided by critical museology have contributed to an understanding of museums as historically constructed agents which are able to make powerful interventions in the social fabric, which are never neutral, but rather always positioning themselves socially through their activities. They therefore have the responsibility to carry out this positioning in a conscious and sound fashion, and to draw practical conclusions from this process. Corresponding with this, the specific forms of knowledge and practices of museum and gallery education are becoming increasingly relevant. For its part, since the 1990s, the field of education and learning in exhibitions and museums has increasingly ceased to understand itself solely as a service, but rather is recognising and realising its potential as an autonomous practice of cultural production at the intersections of knowledge transfer, cultural education work, artistic-performative processes and sometimes also as activism. From this perspective, education and outreach work evolves into a critical practice which interrogates, expands and alters exhibitions and institutions. Currently, the marked shifts of the operational paradigms and imagined functions of museums remain restricted predominantly to the conceptual level. In the institutional reality, the associated expansions of space and activities are occurring gradually: they range from interactive exhibitions which offer the possibility of incorporating knowledge into the displays at different points, to acting on thematic suggestions for exhibition and education practice, right up to collective forms of curation. For a long time now, these developments have not been restricted to the Euro-American axis: right now, specifically in the Global South, we are seeing the emergence of ground-breaking combinations of curation, education and community liaison, as part of attempts to decolonise the traditionally Eurocentric gallery and museum context. It was against this background that, a few years ago, we began organising panels under the title Contemporary Curating and Museum Education, at which international experts have given presentations and discussed current issues in curation and education work. Right from the beginning, we planned to bring together these considerations  – which are mostly aimed at specific types of museums – in the form of a large conference. This was intended to enable a precise perspective on examples of putting interpretations of the ‘big concepts’ into practice, and focused on one question which is key for our teaching and research: how does museum work change when curation and education are understood as a single, integrated concept? The conference was opened with a panel on the so-called ‘educational turn in curating’, within which some fundamental considerations on the entanglement of curation and education work were developed, under the banner of a transformative form of praxis. On this foundation, the conference was structured around the diverse types of museums, in order to account for the fact that, to a certain extent, they have different histories, audiences, goals and practices

Preface

of collecting, curation and education. The comparison between museums of art, architecture, design, ethnography, history and culture was intended to facilitate a reflection on whether and to what extent the strategies and demands formulated for the institution of the museum in general mean different things for the different types of museums, but then also, which challenges apply to all, and can thus be tackled collectively. The presenters we invited included representatives from both the theory and praxis of curation and museum education who design and carry out their work in one way or another under the banner of this integrated thinking. The aim was to carry out the discussion on the foundation of a shared interest in connecting curation and museum education. We were hoping for the most precise possible consideration of detailed issues, which can only develop if this shared fundamental interest is present. The latter also connects the essays in this collection. Unlike at the conference however, this publication is structured according to thematic focuses which came out of our evaluation of the conference, the reading of the essays and the ensuing discussion. This structure, less thematic than programmatic, accounts for the fact that, in the essays gathered here, the potential for change in the museum as an institution which is offered by an integrated practice of curation and education can be related to diverse forms of display, operational paradigms and functions. Against this backdrop, we have assigned the essays to the four chapters Curating and Museum Education as Expansion of the Display, as Expansion of the Museum, as Social Intervention and as Decolonisation, which are each accompanied by an introduction. We would like to propose these categorisations as heuristic propositions, which are intended to support a contextualisation of contemporary practices of curation and education, both in the internal debates in the field and within social developments. In this sense, this volume is addressed on the one hand to the specialist audience; on the other hand, in the context of an internationally growing number of courses on curation and museum education, it aims to provide introductory knowledge and material for on-going discussions. This volume was conceived by the head and two members of the teaching staff of the Master of Arts in Art Education Curatorial Studies at the Zurich University of the Arts. We have invited a selection of the speakers from the panels and the conference to develop their presentations into contributions on the themes of this volume, and we would like to express our gratitude for their essays and articles. Special thanks goes to Nora Landkammer, vice head of the Institute for Art Education at the Zurich University of the Arts and a lecturer in the master’s program for the extremely productive collaboration. Nora conceived and ran the section at the conference on the ethnographic museums, and also oversaw the editorial work for the chapter in this book Curating and Museum Education as Decolonisation of the Museum. This thanks extends to the entire institute, which under the direction of Carmen Mörsch is a close partner

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at the intersection of research and teaching, and contributes substantially to the discussion and formation of the discourse in our field. A warm thank you also goes to Hannah Horst, a research assistant in the MA in Art Education, who provided significant support with her great commitment in organising and making the conference and the book happen. Lastly, we would like to thank the Zurich University of the Arts for their support of our work and this project, which aims to facilitate an analysis of the current state of the discussion, and at the same time, hopes to open up new perspectives on where the discourse at the intersection of curation and education can go from here. The Editors Carmen Mörsch, Angeli Sachs, Thomas Sieber

Curating and Museum Education as Expansion of the Display

Introduction Angeli Sachs

“The space of the museum encloses like a frame and places something on display. It divides an interior from an exterior, closes off this interior inside of itself and envelops it with value.” 1 This is the sentence with which Roswitha Muttenthaler and Regina Wonisch open their book Gesten des Zeigens (Gestures of Showing). And though their investigation is related to the “representation of gender and race in exhibitions”, the theoretical approaches which they have developed for their analyses of exhibitions are transferrable to other contexts. In the exhibition, the display of the museum is intensified, and there is never a neutral “gesture of showing”. For that is where, as Sabine Offe puts it, “the interpretive intentions of exhibition-makers, meanings of that which is exhibited and the interpretive speculations of the viewer”2 come together. Thus, a “relational network” emerges which determines the “reception” of the contents of the exhibition. It is not without reason that, referencing the work of Mieke Bal, Muttenthaler and Wonisch refer to “exhibitions as speech acts”.3 In her theoretical work, Bal goes beyond the usual definition of the museum, and is interested in the metaphorical use of the idea of the museum, which she refers to as a “particular form of discursive behaviour, the posture or gesture of exposing”. And she investigates the “ambiguities involved in gestures of exposing; in gestures that point to things and seem to say: ‘Look!’ – often implying: ‘That’s how it is.’ The ‘Look!’ aspect involves the visual availability of the exposed object. The ‘That’s how it is’ aspect involves the authority of the person who knows: epistemic authority. The gesture of exposing connects these two aspects.”4 The insights of critical museology give rise to the demand to transform the museum into an arena of political action, in which conflicts can be made 1 | R. Muttenthaler & R. Wonisch, Gesten des Zeigens, p. 9. 2 | S. Offe, Ausstellungen, Einstellungen, Entstellungen, p. 62. 3 | See R. Muttenthaler & R. Wonisch, Gesten des Zeigens, pp. 38–40. 4 | M. Bal, Double Exposures, p. 2.

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visible, articulated and worked through. In practice, the task for the museum is to become more permeable to the outside world, to no longer (solely) conceive of the public as precisely measurable in their needs for consumption and to seek to efficiently serve those needs, but rather, on the basis of dialogue, to address potential users who are motivated by the content of the museum, and to transform itself so as to enable a process of co-creation. If this chapter aims to deal with the expansion of the display, this means that the curatorial conceptions that are presented here distance themselves from these gestures of showing, and activate the exhibition as a kind of space of agency. In contrast to other expansions of the museum, this happens in the exhibition space itself, and it happens in relation to the way things are exhibited there. “The space emerges”, as Beat Hächler explains in his ‘Ansätze zu einer sozialen Szenografie im Museum’ (Toward a Social Scenography in the Museum), “only through the entanglement of the conception of content, spatial design and social practice/action by the visitors.”5 In relation to the public, this means that the visitors are not reduced exclusively to the role of recipient, but that such an integrated understanding of curation and education, dialogue, interaction, participation and reflection becomes possible. A pioneer in this field was the Netherlands Architecture Institute (Nederlands Architectuurinstituut – NAI), which transformed itself from an institute focused exclusively on research and architectural discourse into a ‘Museum of Architecture’ for everybody. In her contribution, the former chief curator at the NAI (and now program director at the New Town Institute and for Eindhoven in the Het Nieuwe Instituut) Linda Vlassenrood, who was responsible for this more strongly audience-oriented and socially-engaged program, describes the challenges of this ‘reaching out’ between specialist expertise and accessibility. The Museum für Gestaltung (Museum of Design) in Zurich has long been known for its innovative exhibition practice. This was accompanied primarily by a transfer of knowledge. This changed in 2012 with the exhibition Out to Sea? The Plastic Garbage Project, curated by the director of the museum Christian Brändle and the curator and head of the Master of Arts in Art Education Curatorial Studies, Angeli Sachs. Franziska Mühlbacher was responsible for the integrated education and learning space. In their contribution, Franziska Mühlbacher, now curator for education, and Angeli Sachs, describe how in this project, a new kind of cooperation between the practice of curation and education was able to develop, and the ways in which this has transformed the education and outreach practice of the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich. Andres Lepik (Director of the Architekturmuseum at the TU in Munich in the Pinakothek der Moderne, and previously curator of architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York) has critically engaged with a whole series 5 | B. Hächler, Gegenwartsräume, p. 139.

Curating and Museum Education as E xpansion of the Display – Introduction

of exhibitions involving socially-engaged architecture. If the display design in the first exhibitions already supported the ideas of a ‘different’ representation of architecture, the exhibition AFRITECTURE: Building with the Community in 2013/14 in Munich sought actual dialogue with the visitors. Since participation played an important role in many of the exhibited architecture projects, according to Andres Lepik, this led to the emergence “of the idea of transferring this participation into the display of the exhibition, in order to stimulate the direct engagement of the visitor with the theme of the exhibition.” In her essay ‘Education as Curatorial Praxis’, the curator and art educator at the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig (Leipzig Gallery of Contemporary Art), Julia Schäfer, presents the principle of her curatorial approach, in which education and curation are thought together right from the start. She used the idea of a puzzle as a point of departure for the development of an experimental exhibition project in the new wing of the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig. PUZZLE (2010/11) was at that point her most comprehensive attempt to rethink curating and to do it differently. For this, they invited 48 teammates to arrange the collection display. For Barbara Coutinho (Director of MUDE – Museo do Design e da Moda and Professor for Architecture at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lissabon), in order to achieve a self-reflexive, inter-subjective form of participation, it is of fundamental significance to rethink exhibitions and their themes, curatorial discourse, exhibition design and aesthetics. In her conception of the “exhibition as an open discourse”, exhibitions must contribute to a new, holistic sensitivity and diverse forms of reading, instead of presenting a closed message. This curatorial approach demands an active role from every visitor, and encourages the public to create their own meaning, which affords them increased autonomy.

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Reaching Out How to Increase the Social and Cultural Value of Architecture? Linda Vlassenrood

“I don’t just want the kids building a model and then going home with the idea that architecture is easy. The professionals here have been exiled to the attic.” – The scene is the re-opening of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) in June 2011, and it is clearly not only words of praise that are being uttered. Many colleagues have expressed decidedly critical views of the new program. The transformation of the NAI into a “Museum of Architecture” with a renovated foyer and readjusted exhibition program has above all been the consequence of a desire to strengthen the social significance of architecture. That made it necessary to solicit the interest of the public. And thus the professional architect was displaced from the centre of attention. Architects now shared the new NAI with children and with members of the public who might rarely give a thought to architecture, or who may have been giving it their conscious attention for the first time. Considering the original profile of the Institute and the drastic budget cuts that are imminent in Dutch cultural policy, the shift in emphasis was carried out with mixed feelings and triggered divergent reactions. And while the vexed tone was sincere, it also exhibited the perspective of an inward-looking professional community. Although every square centimetre in the Netherlands has been designed by architects, urban planners and landscape architects over the centuries, the better part of the population is unaware of this; architecture and urban planning are felt to be abstract matters and are dismissed as difficult. Even if our everyday surroundings are defined on every scale by architecture and urban design, their social impact remains something on which the public either cannot or would rather not reflect. Particularly in times of economic recession, Dutch society’s faith in the value that architecture adds is deplorably low. Architects find themselves at a great remove from the rest of society. They hardly communicate, or communicate only with insiders; moreover, the architectural icons of the past decades hardly express an intention to serve the public good. Architecture is not even a topic of discussion in the media, unless the point is a search for the ugliest

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building in the country. In short, if architecture wishes to gain in cultural, political and economic influence, architecture has to be “unlocked”  – in the broadest sense of the word – for a non-professional public and in an intelligent and appealing way. Hence the NAI ceased to attempt to provide everything for everyone, instead making a selection based on different needs and expectations. The following article deals with the thematic underpinnings of the re-orientation of the NAI.

A “ rich ” architectur al climate It is natural to ask what can be so new about an institute that was founded in 1988 and opened in a new building in Rotterdam in 1993. An institute that once again became a subject of discussion in mid-2011, given that from January 1, 2013 it was to be absorbed into The New Institute (Het Nieuwe Instituut) for Architecture, Design and E-Culture. The fusion of NAI (architecture), Premsela (fashion and design) and the Virtueel Platform (e-culture) was above all a result of deep budget cuts made by the Dutch government. However it also has to do with efforts to market architecture and design as parts of the creative industries. The present mood fades in comparison with the ambitious ’80s and ’90s, in which the foundations were laid for a world-famous architectural climate. In 1991 the Dutch Ministry for Education, Culture and Science, together with the Ministry for Building, Planning and the Environment, published the first position paper for architecture, ‘Space for Architecture’ (Ruimte voor architectuur) with the aim of stimulating the architectural climate between 1991 and 1996. The paper smoothed the way for the establishment of infrastructure for a whole series of architectural institutions. The Netherlands Architecture Fund was founded, as was the postgraduate program in architecture at the Berlage Institute. Although the NAI had already been around since 1988, the opening of its own dedicated building represented the public face of architectural policy. Meanwhile, in the wake of the NAI, numerous architecture centres arose to strengthen the architectural discourse at the local level. All of these measures cleared the way for a new generation of architects, urban planners, landscape architects and historians. Through designs, exhibitions and publications they engaged in an intensive period of self-reflection, research and theoretical production. The economic prosperity of the 1990s gave architects the freedom to push the boundaries both of their field and of each brief. Moreover, numerous attention-grabbing projects were actually brought to construction. In the mid-nineties offices such as West 8, MVRDV, OMA and NL Architects gained international recognition for their challenging and provocative design ideas, which they proposed in response to extremely complex processes and assignments.

Reaching Out

It is this period which is now looked back upon as the heyday of Dutch architecture, particularly by policy-makers. Characteristic of this perspective is that emphasis is chiefly laid on the architect’s market position. In view of the economic difficulty of the era, it sees in iconic architectural works – which are rarely critical and seldom site-specific – an internationally marketable product. The social and cultural embeddedness of architecture barely plays a role in the discussion on the subject – resulting in a diminishing system of funding support.

M useum for architecture Its activities, but above all the comprehensiveness of its collection, made the NAI into one of the largest architectural institutions in the world. Actually, the collection was much older than the institute itself; older even than the three cultural institutes that in 1988 amalgamated to form the NAI: the Netherlands Architecture Documentation Centre (Nederlands Documentatiecentrum voor de Bouwkunst – NDB), the Architecture Museum Foundation (Stichting Architectuurmuseum – SAM) and the Foundation for Housing (Stichting Wonen). Architectural drawings by significant architects had been collected as early as the end of the nineteenth century. The collection comprises around 500 archives documenting the work of Dutch architects, urban planners, professional organisations and degree courses. Highly regarded figures such as H. P. Berlage, P. J. H. Cuypers, W. M. Dudok, J. J. P. Oud, G. T. Rietveld and T. van Doesburg are represented – and not merely by competition entries: entire firm archives have been left to the NAI, including models, sketches, diaries and correspondence. This enables investigation of individual projects or thorough research into the total output of individuals and firms. Among the new acquisitions of the collection are the archives of T. Bosch and M. van Schijndel, as well as the early work of OMA and MVRDV. These archives can still be consulted and investigated in the public library of The New Institute. The library also holds more than 35,000 books on architecture and related subjects, plus a broad range of (inter)national architectural journals. Beyond the reorganisation of administrative functions and the accessibility of the collections, the 1998 amalgamation gave rise to a further challenge: the organisation of exhibitions, readings, debates and increasingly, under the influence of several very different institute directors, a wide-ranging international and pedagogical program. In the period between 1993 and 2013 the NAI made the transition from an outfit known mainly to the international circle of specialists to a well-regarded institute with exhibitions on architecture in the broadest sense of the word.

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The art museum as emancipator Within the world of museums, architectural museums do not possess a long history. For decades, beginning in the early twentieth century, it was art museums that formed the physical environment and context in which architecture was exhibited. It is not surprising, therefore, that the very same conventions were called upon in attempting to introduce the public to the history of architecture. This took place on the one hand by means of the systematic presentation of significant architects in solo exhibitions, on the other by the modes of display, namely by exhibiting visually impressive artefacts, such as models (placed on pedestals), sketches, competition designs and photos.1 However, these two perspectives are rather circuitous ways to exhibit the built environment. The larger part of what surrounds us internationally is informal and thus built without the help of star architects. And the exhibition materials are only derivatives of that which is found outside museum walls. Drawings and models simply lack the physical vitality of space, scale and time. Nonetheless, this mode of display still predominates.

The stree t Although the NAI has never repudiated this “classical” form of display and selection, since around 2007 it has looked for more direct ways to enter into dialogue with its audiences. In this way the hope was to get closer to the physical environment of people’s lives and to activate the engagement of the viewer in a pleasurable way. How can an architecture museum, and in particular an architecture exhibition, position itself in the field of social, political and economic forces so that with its questions or theses it resonates with the public? With a public, namely, that is co-responsible for the shaping of our built environment. With a public that is extremely diverse, and comprises designers, project developers, public servants, property developers and builders, but also inhabitants and users. Although the last several decades have actually shown a number of experiments with the architecture exhibition qua medium – both in relation to the content and to the spatial design – this has not automatically resulted in a closer relationship to the public or with a larger target audience. Particular attempts 1 | The 1932 exhibition Modern Architecture: An International Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York is considered to be one of the first architecture exhibitions in the West; the curators Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock presented selected buildings above all by means of models on pedestals and large, representative photographs.

Reaching Out

in this direction have included the progressive architecture exhibitions in the Van Abbe Museum in the period from 1964 to 1973. Director and architect Jean Leering used the exhibition as a means of raising awareness about processes of social change. In only a few years, he shifted the emphasis from monographic exhibitions taking a rather static approach to the original, to exhibitions that mobilised installations in order to enable a larger spatial experience, that demanded the audience to play a more active role, and that selected their designs on the basis of thematic considerations. One series of exhibitions still placed the work of architects Adolf Loos (1965), Hans Scharoun (1968) and Antoni Gaudí (1971) on centre stage in a classical fashion. Exhibitions on Vladimir Tatlin (1969), El Lissitzky (1965/66) and Theo van Doesburg (1968/69) began experimenting with the reconstruction of installations and the erection of scale models in order to provide visitors with a spatial experience. The exhibition on the Cityplan Eindhoven (1969) by the firm Van den Broek en Bakema was also important. It not only involved the presentation of an enormous model (1:20 scale) of the project at eye level, visitors were also asked to submit alternative ideas, which were later discussed at a public event. As such, the audience was given the chance to break free of its passive role. Experimentation reached a climax in the exhibition The Street: Forms of Community (De Straat. Vorm van samenleven, 1972) of which the themes and conception of which perfectly matched the atmosphere of the time. In contrast to other countries in which post-modernism was beginning to coalesce as a new architectural tendency, the discussion in the Netherlands remained focused on democratisation-processes, social engagement, participation and on human-centred design. The exhibition explicitly focused on the use and the design of the street in an ever more complex society. An interdisciplinary working group designed the exhibition. Observing that the social use of the street is diminishing, the group sought to put the street back into a political and cultural arena. Everyday experiences were invoked in an attempt to encourage an active response from visitors, the aim being to break with the style of art exhibitions that were only intelligible to experts. In the end, the exhibition consisted of hundreds of photos mounted on building-site fences, street furniture in the form of benches, cordons and traffic signs, with pot plants standing in for nature. Slides with synchronised sound and films and videos were shown. The reaction from both press and public was largely negative. The exhibition’s concept was felt to be unclear and the amount of information presented overwhelming. One visitor expressed the following reaction: “Maybe the museum world feels that this is a great advance, an exhibition like this with

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a social theme. It might be fashionable but it has hardly anything to do with social engagement.”2

C ross - pollination : cur ation  – education Maybe we should have taken this criticism more to heart. But starting from the belief that engagement is possible and necessary, the curation department of the NAI proceeded down its own path of experimentation and learning on the way to bridging the gap between museum and audience. Several public events and exhibitions between 2008 and 2010 distanced themselves from pure consumption and in different ways invited visitors to play an active role and to make contributions of their own. Audience members were viewed as producers, not consumers. The aim was to encourage an inquisitive attitude. Visitors were to be encouraged to look at their environment with different eyes, in the hope that in that case they would also value it more. For years the education department applied this consciousness-raising approach, introducing children, adolescents and adults to architecture, and subsequently a similar attitude was introduced in other programs. Beyond this, the event series has sought to achieve integration wherever a particular subject matter has been distributed across different programs such as exhibitions, readings and education. Thus the education program and readings and discussions no longer took place as secondary offerings within the content of the relevant exhibition, but were promoted to public offerings in their own right.

A more be autiful R ot terdam! Organising a pedagogical design competition in 2007–08 was decisive for my own personal attempts to locate the limits of the public events program. For five months, around 60 pupils from five secondary schools in Rotterdam’s “problem neighbourhoods” put their heads together over the question of how architecture could improve their neighbourhood. In the media there was constant talk about problem districts – but did the pupils feel the same way about the places they inhabited? Should their neighbourhoods be different  – and if so, how? With this initiative, the NAI hoped to encourage young people to reflect on the role of 2 | Presentation by Diana Franssen, The Street: Forms of Community, April 19, 2006, Van Abbemuseum. See the report “¿Museum in Motion? Conference Proceedings: Boekpresentatie” (http://libraryblog.vanabbe.nl/category/livingarchive/museum-in-¿motion-​ conference-proceedings).

Reaching Out

architecture. During the competition, pupils were able to discuss their district with one another, but also with architects and neighbourhood managers. What did they particularly like about their environment, what did they dislike? What role did architecture play in that? The pupils were invited to develop a vision of their built environment and to present a trailblazing design for changes. The pupils were given a crash course on the architecture in their neighbourhood and investigated the immediate surroundings of their school in the company of an architect and a neighbourhood manager. A week later they received a visit from an architect at their school; he informed them about how he worked and they were able to ask him questions. Then at a workshop they learnt how best to present their plans, and produced their first models. With this preparation behind them, the participants had three months to develop their design. Since the project took place exclusively in the neighbourhoods in question, the pupils only encountered the NAI building at the official presentation. The creativity and inventiveness of the pupils was astounding; one could easily see how excited and rightly proud they were to present their designs.

E xperimentation phase In an effort to establish a more contemporary, critical and dynamic program around architecture in the broadest sense of the word, and for a broader public, consciousness-raising of the kind that had been deployed for A more beautiful Rotterdam! (Rotterdam Mooier Dan!) was developed further. The event Shape Our Country (Maak ons land, 2008/09) was the most daring of these experiments.3 For six months, not just professionals but above all a general public took part in a discussion about the design of their environment, reflecting on the question: what should the Netherlands look like in the future? Can the spatial design of the Netherlands once again become an ambitious task that 3 | In 2008, the exhibitions Happening, My Public Space, and Archiphoenix – the Dutch contribution at the 11th International Achitecture Biennale in Venice – were shown. Happening was an architectonic object by the architect Wiel Arets, which functioned in the evenings as a set and podium for concerts, theatre performances, discussions, dinners and performances. The eight kiosks of My Public Space were stationed around the city of Rotterdam. In relation to eight selected cities they provided answers to the question: how public is our public space? The conceptual impulse for Archiphoenix came from the fire of May 13, 2008, that destroyed the faculty for architecture at the Delft University of Technology. Archiphoenix functioned as an international discussion platform. During the opening week the NAI invited the entire international architecture community to reflect on architecture’s burning questions by means of a series of readings, podium discussions, interviews, a workshop, and speed dates.

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is pursued with passion? And besides all the conflicts, can we also discern a range of opportunities? The spatial requirements of transport, living, working, leisure, green spaces and water needs are in fact larger than the Netherlands itself; and besides these, we are also influenced by changes in the climate and the world economy. Not just the government but also market actors, designers and the population were called on to propose innovative solutions and supply compelling ideas. The event rested on the conviction that innovation and change are a matter not just for specialists but for all those with good ideas. Potential partners, moreover, were engaged in an exploration of the degree to which the most innovative plans might actually be realised. An important theme during the conception of this event was personal contact, treated as a means to generate dialogue between the general audience and professionals, and in order to show visitors both the causes of the problem as well as solutions. The exhibition thus functioned as a workspace in which visitors (whether individuals or groups, laypersons or professionals) could initiate conversations and present their visions of the spatial design of the Netherlands. The debating game The Making Of was one of the most important elements of this process. Professionals, non-professionals, and pupils were given five hours to come up with a proposal for realising a particular spatial design goal. After presenting the plan, each team was responsible for responding to the objections and arguments of other players. Monthly networking dinners with experts from various disciplines, a monthly call for collaborators published in the well-known daily De Telegraaf, and weekly visits by civil society groups invited either to play the game or organise meetings, all guaranteed an overwhelming flow of ideas and suggestions for improving the spatial design of the Netherlands.

L essons In the above examples the attempt to get the public actively involved was often taken to extremes. But the result tended to be the opposite of what was intended. The majority of visitors felt little need to develop ideas of their own while visiting the institute. Rather they wished to see what they were used to seeing: a beautifully designed exhibition with extraordinary models or drawings. The professionals often felt the same way. Participation scared people off. The experiment ran too quickly for its audience. The desire to serve all target audiences simultaneously meant that public relations communications led to confusion and repelled the general public and professionals equally. In terms of the content, it became clear that it was a mistake to try to translate local engagement, whether at street or neighbourhood level, as in A more beautiful

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Rotterdam!, to an abstract national level: the concrete cases, the well-calibrated channels, and thus also the general public were all missing. So what worked well? Never before had so many ministers from different ministries participated in NAI events or so many organisations collaborated with the NAI in bringing to light the need for better spatial design in the Netherlands. The desire to communicate in a substantial way with a broader public was energetically supported by all of these organisations. Thus they anticipated what has since come to be called the participatory society: a government that increasingly shares its responsibilities with business, research institutions and citizens. The networking dinners, the debating game, the podium discussions, the happenings too: all these events were successful and brought a mixed public together in unusual combinations. Included were many experts from different fields who had never visited the NAI before and who were impressed by tailor-made solutions such as these.

N e w NAI N ow After years of experimentation and a drop in visitor numbers, the NAI was facing a dilemma: how could a scholarly institution demonstrate its expertise nationally and internationally while remaining accessible as a museum? One of the most important lessons was that it is simply not possible to please everybody. Each activity needs to be aimed at a very definite target audience and the topic, atmosphere, tone and selection of images as well as the spatial and graphical design need to be oriented accordingly. No more everything for everybody and all at once. This means recognising, too, that although architecture certainly can interest a broader public, the limits of this niche are quickly reached. Therefore target audiences were redefined: professionals, cultural consumers, teachers and tourists. In May 2010 the NAI was closed for a long-planned renovation of the foyer area. The renovation had already been on the agenda for ten years. Initially it had been intended to provide the educational program with a more prominent location in the building and to enable the welcoming of more groups. On account of the lessons I have just described, 2011 saw an intense period of reorientation, a new marketing and communications policy, and the transformation of the building. The aim was to enlarge the NAI in several ways. In a literal sense, by means of an easily accessible lobby area, which with its improved and more spacious café, terrace and bookshop, as well as the new outreach area, means that a larger public space is accessible free of charge. And also in a metaphorical sense, by adding new exhibitions such as the Hands-on Deck (DoeDek) and Dutchville (Stad van Nederland) to the already substantial offerings, in order to enable a wide audience to encounter architecture.

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H ands - on D eck With the aim of getting newcomers to the field of architecture  – above all families and also teachers – excited about the topic, a new area was set up in a prominent position in the centre of the building. The Hands-on Deck, accessible free of charge, was designed as an informal landscape in which anybody who wants to can engage in a hands-on experience. Visitors were able to build and design things both physically and digitally, on smaller and larger scales. Building blocks were available with which large edifices could be quickly created. Four interactive tables provided Lego and space to work on a virtual building foundation.

D utchville The permanent exhibition Dutchville was focused on the universal love-hate relationship to cities. Set off by atmospheric lights and recorded sound, the exhibition consisted of nothing but models and spatial installations, the aim being to let architecture be experienced through architecture. Models from the NAI collection functioned as actors in a play representing the positive, but also the negative sides of a city. Through a headset, the visitor was able to follow the discussions of six characters talking about the projects on display. The conversations made it clear that multiple truths regarding our built environment exist side-by-side, and that the subjects of controversy are not exhausted by the familiar question: beautiful or ugly?

P opul ar As much as Hands-on Deck and Dutchville answered to the tastes of architectural “beginners”, it became clear that the possibilities for reaching a larger target audience by means of an exhibition about architecture are extremely limited. And thus it is not surprising that one of the most successful experiments seems to be an architecture app. In 2010 the NAI published the app UAR (Urban Augmented Reality) in Rotterdam. While walking through the city, the user is provided by UAR with texts, images, 3D models, archive materials and films that provide information about what cannot be seen. The city as it once was: buildings that used to stand here, on display. The city as it might have been: models and plans for buildings that were never built. And the city as it will one day be: impressions of buildings that are under construction. With the help of modern technology the app connects, in an extremely logical fashion, materials from the collection with physical reality. Of course, as much

Reaching Out

as we might experiment with forms of display, this is something that is hardly possible inside the walls of a museum. For years the museum world has witnessed a robust debate as a consequence of the far-reaching popularisation of offerings through the introduction of interactive exhibitions, blockbusters or complete experiences. Is an art museum a place for marketing, or should a gallery visit be above all a voyage of discovery that calls for effort? This discussion often overlooks the fact that a distinction has to be drawn between leisure-time spent in an amusement park and the accessible stimulation of an active dialogue that may be offered to an audience. Every attempt to bring fine art or architecture closer to the visitor is quickly dismissed as a genuflection at the altar of commerce or mediocrity. Is the belief in architecture as a discipline undermined by an accessible exhibition, by apps or chances to build and play with physical models? Surely not. Architecture could benefit from a naive journalism that picks its way through conventions and clichés and serves up crude narratives precisely in attempting to present the intricacies of the subject. As such, architecture deserves a wideranging discussion involving more than just experts. The task of a public institution is to bring people of all ages and with different interests into this process, while ensuring that its programs are tailor-made and executed with intelligence and integrity.

Figure 1: Exhibition Shape our Country. Workshop for National Planning (October 2008 – May 2009). Every month focused on a specific theme – mobility, housing, work, leisure, greenery, water – along with the corresponding ambitions.

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Figure 2: Hands-on Deck at the heart of the museum, specially designed for adults, young people and children wanting to try their hand at architecture with oversize building blocks or simply with Lego.

Figure 3: Inside the permanent exhibition Dutchville. Feel the City (July 2011 – July 2013).

Figure 4: Five secondary schools from Rotterdam participated in the design competition Rotterdam Mooier Dan! to redesign their neighborhood (August 2007 – March 2008).

Curation & Education as an Integrated Concept The Exhibition Out to Sea? The Plastic Garbage Project in the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich Franziska Mühlbacher, Angeli Sachs Design museums are confronted with the particular challenge of repeatedly having to engage with phenomena and objects from daily social life in their exhibitions. In this context, the underlying question is who is speaking to whom, how, and about what? Why should the visitors be interested in issues with which they are often confronted on a daily basis in the museum as well? Or are they interested precisely because of this? And how can museums and the public enter into a dialogue that does not imply a one-way transfer of knowledge, but rather facilitates an exchange in which the visitors’ reactions, experiences, knowledge and experiments can become part of a common project?

F orum , archive and l abor atory The Museum für Gestaltung Zürich (Museum of Design Zurich) (1875/1933) belongs to that group of European applied arts museums founded in the wake of the South Kensington, now Victoria and Albert museum (1852/1857)1, such as the MAK – Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst/Gegenwarts­ kunst (Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art) in Vienna (1863/1871) and the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (Museum for Design and Industry) (1866/1877). Following the first World Fair in London in 1851, the Victoria and Albert Museum was established “in order to show exemplary ‘use of art in craft.’”2 Accordingly, it was the founding mission of subsequent museums to create exemplary collections that would raise the quality of the (national) arts and crafts to their highest possible level and elevate 1 | The first number refers to the founding date and the second to the relocation to the new museum building. 2 | O. Hartung, Kleine deutsche Museumsgeschichte: p. 38.

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their market competitiveness. Consequently, they would often be coupled with vocational educational institutions for these occupations. Currently, many of the former applied arts museums are putting a renewed focus on their foundational concepts, and on the archetypal character of their collections as living archives for contemporary and future design issues. The Museum für Gestaltung Zürich grew out of the Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Arts and Crafts) founded in 1875. In 1878, the Kunstgewerbe­ schule (School of Arts and Crafts) was established. The programmatic decision made in the 1920s to give the museum and the school of arts and crafts (today the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste [Zurich University of the Arts] – ZHdK) a joint home has not lost its validity. In its aesthetic and functional quality, the historically listed Steger & Egender building from 1933 located in the Aus­stellungsstrasse in Zurich, which accommodated both school and museum up until 2014, is amongst the most striking examples of the modernist Neues Bauen style in Switzerland. In 2014, the museum’s collections and the school were transferred to the school’s new home in the Toni Campus in Zurich West, where they possess a Schaudepot (an open storage space)  – something for which both school and museum advocated for decades and which complies with the foundational concept of an exchange between museum, research and education. After the renovation of the building in the Ausstellungsstrasse, the museum will exhibit at both locations. The Museum für Gestaltung Zürich is the premier institution for design and visual communication in Switzerland, spanning a broad range of subjects from design, arts and crafts, fashion, textiles and jewellery, through to graphic and poster design, photography, film and architecture. “With its exhibitions, collections and publications, the museum is simultaneously a forum, archive and laboratory.”3 The project at the centre of these formats is a prime example for this approach. Endstation Meer? Das Plastikmüll-Projekt (Out to Sea? The Plastic Garbage Project)4 was and still remains of special importance to the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich. It brought about many changes regarding the museum’s self-conception and its understanding of how the exhibitions should be executed and related to audiences. This is also why this article is written from two perspectives: a curatorial one and an educational one. But first we would like to address the motivations for this exhibition project. According to the generally accepted definition, the central tasks of the museum are collecting, conserving, researching, exhibiting and educating. This 3 | Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Ausstellen Sammeln Forschen Publizieren Vermitteln. For further information on the history and architecture of the institution, see C. Lichtenstein, Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Zürich. 4 | The exhibition was shown in 2012 in the hall of the aforementioned location at Aus­ stellungsstrasse 60 in Zurich.

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also includes the museums’ social responsibilities. In its code of ethics, ICOM, the international council of museums, describes it as follows: Museums create the prerequisites for the appreciation, understanding and management of natural and cultural heritage. […] The interaction between the community with the museum and promotion of their heritage is an integral part of the educational role of a museum. 5

In accordance with the foundational concept outlined above, design exhibitions tend to exhibit design processes and examples of especially successful design. However, the material and immaterial testimonies which become exhibits in a museum context don’t always need to be ideal case studies and thus conform to an affirmative conception, in the sense of forming a canon of good design. The mission statement of the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich therefore states: Design-related phenomena are seen as expressions of their respective cultures and values; connections are revealed and debates stimulated. By critically engaging with the past and the present, with theory and praxis, the aim is to depict, discuss and enhance the significance and potential impact of design amongst the broader public. 6

A project at the end of design Out to Sea? The Plastic Garbage Project (2012) was created by Christian Brändle, the director of the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, and curated together with Angeli Sachs. Franziska Mühlbacher was responsible for the education segment, and Françoise Krattinger worked as a research assistant. The exhibition presents a drastic shift in focus onto the end stage of design, the end of the histories of use of objects. Since the beginning of the 20th century, plastic has changed our ‘designed world’ like no other material. However, mass production and overconsumption lead to vast amounts of waste. The oceans’ creeping transmutation into a gigantic plastic soup has fatal consequences for the environment, the scope of which cannot yet be fully grasped. This project, the world’s first comprehensive exhibition7 dealing with this ecological problem is composed of four parts: the core of the exhibition and a symbol for ecological 5 | ICOM – International Council of Museums, Code of Ethics for Museums, p. 8. 6 | Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Ausstellen Sammeln Forschen Publizieren Vermitteln, p. 2. 7 | We mostly refer to the exhibition in the present tense, as it is going to go on an international tour for several years. Further information about the exhibition and its different stops can be obtained on the website at: http://www.plasticgarbageproject.org/

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disaster is a large-scale Plastic Flotsam Installation. The section Plastic Garbage in the Sea sketches out the background to the problem and its fatal impact on oceans, animals and humans. The section Plastic in Everyday Life presents the most frequently encountered kinds of plastic and takes a closer look at topics such as consumption, health risks, microplastics, material cycles and bioplastics. Different approaches to solving the problem, in terms of reduction, conversion or re-usage serve to inspire visitors to take action. The fourth section is Education, which is an integral component of the entire exhibition. When it comes to knowledge transfer, the acquisition of exhibits and edu­cation, one of the key principles for this project was cooperating with international initiatives and stakeholders who work on this issue. The flotsam displayed in the exhibition was gathered during beach clean-ups in Hawaii, on the island of Sylt in the North Sea and on Fehmarn in the Baltic Sea. Part of the curatorial team itself was involved in the beach clean-ups in the North and Baltic Seas. Planned in the initial stages, the big, island-like installation forms the core of the exhibition, and illustrates a phenomenon which for many people remains abstract. Upon entering the exhibition space in Zurich, most visitors were impressed and emotionally shocked when confronted with the volume of piled-up garbage. The mirror at the end of the installation drew them in and made them part of the setting. Although the exhibition layout was kept open in Zurich, most visitors started with the Plastic Garbage in the Sea section, which conveys basic information about plastic garbage gyres in the oceans, what happens to plastic objects once they end up in the water, and what repercussions this has for the animal world, and on the increasingly pressing issue of microplastics. Alain Rappaport, the exhibition architect, designed different sized boxes out of euro-pallets for the exhibition design. For the individual themes, they can be assembled to form groups resembling islands or rafts, and serve as transport cases for the travelling exhibition when is transported in a container. During the exhibition, drawings, photographs, and information graphics on wooden poster stands are stuck into these boxes. This information is either illustrated by objects taken from the central installation, or by artistic contributions like Chris Jordan’s impressive photographs of albatrosses which have been killed by plastic garbage, Richard and Judith Lang’s installation The Mermaid’s Tears, in which visitors can experience how hard it is to distinguish grains of sand from bits of plastic, or Gaia Codoni’s stop-motion film, which portrays the complex issue of plastic in the food chain in an understandable fashion. By including these works, the curators hoped to open up the unusually (for the Museum für Gestaltung) didactic and informative character of the exhibition, and to address the visitor directly. In addition, Plastic Garbage in the Sea is accompanied by works made by students in the advanced courses in Scientific Visualisation in the design program at the ZHdK. The students have produced object studies of plastic artefacts which, in a few hundred years, will tell stories about our culture.

Curation & Education as an Integrated Concept

W hat to e xhibit and how to communicate ? Typically, an exhibition about plastic garbage and its impact on the environment would end at this point. However, as a design museum, it is important to us to depict the aspects that are central to the creation of plastic garbage as well. This is why the following section of the exhibition is entitled Plastic in Everyday Life. It aims at raising awareness of the issue in the daily actions of the visitors, who are also time consumers of plastic. We spent a lot of time thinking about which issues we would depict, and how we should communicate with our visitors – how we should write and speak. On the one hand we wanted to create a balanced representation, and on the other hand, the exhibition itself and our educational tours and discussions were explicitly aimed at raising awareness and inspiring people to act. The first step consisted in understanding that we as curators were as much a part of the problem as everybody else. So rather than taking the position of omniscient narrators, we questioned our role as “authorised speakers”8 and furthermore relied on our own learning (as we were not experts in the field at the outset), conversations and discussions. The curatorial process began with a self-experiment in which the exhibition team endeavoured to collect the plastic waste they created for a period of time, and incorporate it in an installation. The ‘Garbage Aquarium’ that came out of this activity was a good place to start a conversation with the visitors from a personal perspective, and to realise the astonishing extent to which plastic permeates our day-to-day life. To this end we developed a Science of Plastics, which was accompanied by a hand-out to take home. Another important issue is that of rapid consumption, which we depict by means of plastic bags, food packaging and take-away containers. The key point here is the contrast between the short lifespan of the product and the long lifespan of its packaging, which lasts up to several hundred years. Further issues are questionable additives (like plasticisers or Bisphenol A) as well as the problematic role of microplastic particles (as for instance in fleece textiles or exfoliant products). This is followed by the presentation of a number of holistic approaches: plastic as a new raw material, recycling strategies and thinking in terms of cycles for designers, producers and consumers. And at the end, the advantages and disadvantages of bioplastics are put up for discussion. Plastic Garbage in the Sea follows a rather scientifically founded, objectivising form of representation, which is enriched by elements that are emotionally evocative and invite interaction. Meanwhile, in Plastic in Everyday Life, 8 | Here we refer to Eva Sturm’s ideas regarding the linguistic sphere of the art museum, in particular to her notion of “befugte und unbefugte Sprecher” (authorised and unauthorised speakers). These notions can be applied to a design museum and its discursive realm. See E. Sturm, Im Engpass der Worte, pp. 37–44.

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there is a greater intersection of the perspectives, experiences and expertise of curators and visitors, both in terms of the common participation of visitors and curators in causing the problem of plastic garbage, and in the development of ideas for a responsible way of dealing with this material.

I ntegr ated activit y space for education Through this exhibition, the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich had the opportunity to develop a new form of collaboration between curation and education practices.9 The museum’s desire to reach the widest possible audience with an environmental issue was the aspect which allowed the museum to explore new terrain in education.10 The education strategy paper defines the audience as not being restricted by “age, gender or socio-economic background.” The fact that a large portion of the exhibits had no economical, artistic, or design-historical value and did not form part of the museum’s collection (nor were they intended to do so) was also advantageous for the conceptualisation of the educational program. The aspect which presented more of a challenge for the curation of the exhibition – namely the question of which objects to present if the focus did not lie on the design aspect – widened the range of activities for our education work: it was mostly everyday objects which were exhibited, which were then thrown away at the end of their life cycle. These factors were prerequisites for a balanced coexistence of the exhibits, artistic positions,11 and the findings and leads that arose from the educational activities. The aim of the educational work was to generate a space for exhibition visitors to become active, and to house an experimental educational practice. The Action Space here refers to a physical space as well as a space of interaction, which allows for various approaches and attitudes which exist in a relationship of mutual tensions with the exhibition space. As a physical space, the education 9 | Up until the end of 2012 the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich did not have a substantial position for the area of education. The concept was developed by Franziska Mühlbacher who was subsequently employed by the Institute for Art Education (IAE) at the ZHdK and the museum. 10 | The exhibition was developed in cooperation with the Drosos foundation which financed the international tour and the entire education programme in Zurich including the position of the curator education up until a month after the end of the exhibition period. The foundation permitted free of charge access to the exhibition and therefore also played an important role in building the audience. Regarding the role of the museum in the conception of the visitor, see E. Sturm, Im Engpass der Worte, p. 36. 11 | In the Resonance Space, artistic positions and contributions by participants in the workshops were presented side by side without making any distinction between them.

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area occupied a third of the entire exhibition display. In terms of the exhibition architecture, it was divided up by several wall units. The transitions to the exhibition area however were mostly fluid, so as to integrate it into the exhibition display. Education was thus attributed a special form of visibility. As part of the exhibition space, it was possible for the education area and its educational activities to attain a higher profile amongst the broader public; on the other hand though, incorporating its representational character into the exhibition posed a challenge.12 For in what form can interaction or its traces be made visible for visitors if they are not converted into an image that other visitors can interpret through the presence of people? What took place in the integrated education area were not only practical, actual educational activities, but also the development of “a [specific] image of art education”, as Susanne Kudorfer writes of the integrated project room for art education in the Art Museum Lucerne.13 The action space attempts to widen the possibilities for action and communication for discussing socially relevant questions. The educational activities in these spaces were to enable visitors to slip into an active role, and in doing so, to publically negotiate which exhibits are of interest, which questions they bring up for different people.

I nfo L ounge , A ction S pace and R esonance S pace The educational area integrated into the exhibition was composed of three parts. The Info Lounge, equipped with books and computer workstations, offered the possibility to delve deeper into the topic. Apart from background information on the exhibition website, it was also possible to find out about laws, initiatives and organisations. The seating offered a place for relaxation and were mostly used for groups to reconvene. The integrated cinema played short films in a loop and documentaries at special points throughout the program. The Action Space was a design room with the feel of a workshop, equipped with tables and benches, a wall with blackboard paint and hands-on material boxes for group workshops. However it was flexible and could be adapted for different purposes (such as talks, films, theatre, design workshops or as a discussion room). The Resonance Space presented the traces of the interaction with different audiences. The concept can easily be described by way of the physical meaning of resonance: resulting from a stimulus on the same or a similar wavelength, a (re-)action is caused which is perceived as reverberation or amplification. In the context of the exhibition, the issue of plastic pollution and the interaction with 12 | See A. Schröpfer, Integrierte Vermittlungsräume in Ausstellungen, p. 25. 13 | See S. Kudorfer, Projektraum Kunstvermittlung, p. 53.

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the audience served as the impulse. The Resonance Space reacted to interactions with different stakeholders and made the processes visible. Presentation elements which could be flexibly deployed, like magnet walls, wall shelves and special table pieces, facilitated the arrangement of the diverse contributions. The changing curation of the resonance space was the task of the internal education team.14

I nter action be t ween the space and the education format Looking at a number of different education formats, it is possible to establish which dynamics developed in the education area and how they interacted with the way the space was used. The official educational program started at the opening of the exhibition, thus raising the question of what was to be shown in the Resonance Space at the opening. To begin with, we partially solved the problem by addressing the idea of the room and its initial ‘emptiness’ by installing the display structures to be used later on, such as empty frames. Additionally, we looked for a cooperation partner, in order to integrate contributions to the exhibition from the outset. Four semester courses from the city of Zurich’s Universikum program participated in the cooperation.15 The works created addressed the students’ everyday associations with the issue of plastic and the environment, allowing them to reflect upon their lived environment. Two eleven year olds, for instance, documented all the plastic products they could find at home in a photographic work and asked the visitors which objects they could do without most easily. As the question could be answered using little stickers, it quickly turned out that a mobile phone and toothbrush were indispensable to almost everyone. This work functioned as a yardstick for the interaction: the more stickers, the higher the participation. Furthermore, the work demonstrated how a contribution that came out of a participative element could come to promote interaction in the Resonance Space. The educational area was strongly marked by the materiality of the plastic. In the Resonance Space, during the opening, we had a PET-robot on display that had been developed by a six-year-old in Universikum. The research diary outlined the child’s search for practical strategies to solve construction problems. 14 | The internal education team was composed of the curator for education, a research assistant, and three interns from the Master of Arts in Art Education Curating & Museum Education from the ZHdK. Furthermore, the team was expanded by three staff members for short-term projects (school workshops, holiday programs, and collaborations) and tours. 15 | An educational program for gifted children from the city of Zurich’s Department of School and Sport Zurich. See www.stadt-zuerich.ch/universikum.

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The materiality of objects and their formal and functional properties are key elements in design education. Design and its teaching do not just work on the object itself, rather they also deal with the design of structures and processes, as well as the socio-cultural factors of their development and uptake. For the conception of the educational formats, we were guided both by these aspects of critical design education16 and by artistic and creative strategies. The materials boxes in the Action Space contained used PET bottle tops, Tetra Pak and plastic packaging, which were collected via a public callout. The material collected functioned as a tangible counterpart to the exhibits in the exhibition, in order to raise awareness of the materials. The materials furthermore functioned as the basis for the Design Workshop format. On eight Saturdays, the Action Space was transformed into a design workshop in order to create something new out of disposable materials or in order for visitors to develop their own ideas and stories out of them. The results of the design workshops were shown in the idea pool in the Resonance Space. Prefabricated template sheets were mounted on the wall as part of the installation. With the appeal to share knowledge and to develop DIY instructions for the reuse of plastic garbage, a growing collection of ideas was developed. At first the ideas were still generated in workshops with the support of the education team. At later stages of the exhibition period, the instructions were also created independently; they were sent to us via email; and one visitor installed a vase made out of a PET bottle as a display object, off their own bat. Onlookers of the wall installation took notes and photographed the filled-out sheets. A dynamic of idea-exchange developed, which was visible directly on and in front of the wall installation. The weekly format Trashy Wednesday also took place in the Action Space. It aimed to create a spontaneous context for the participation of the people we came into contact with over the course of the exhibition period. The format was defined by its timespan, its location and its experimental character. With the spontaneous participation of the artist Andrea Kuster on one Trashy Wednesday, the exhibition was able to create links with the surrounding urban environment. She displayed her material collected from Lake Zurich and complemented her presentation with a walk to the hydraulic power station. Through the unpredictability of its content for the visitors, this period of time opened up into a fascinating zone of contact and conversations with visitors who happened to be in the exhibition space at that moment, or who participated in this format on a weekly basis. The interrelation between the space of the city, the exhibition and the education space turned out to be most dense in the educational activities for the Street 16 | See B. Settele, Design kritisch vermitteln, pp. 242–245.

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Parade, which took place during the exhibition period.17 Aiming for a nuanced engagement, we developed a design workshop under the motto Get Dressed, and followed the mass event with a video camera, and invited the public to a film-screening and open discussion on a Trashy Wednesday. The focus on the mass event’s garbage production didn’t match up with the profile envisaged by organisers of the Street Parade, which meant that a cooperation did not materialise. As a result, the program items that came out of this dealt with aspects of the Street Parade instead of developing them with its organisers and participants. The conflict between the informative-pedagogical message of the exhibition and the education team’s desire for a space for thinking that is open in all directions was at its most palpable in this project. In the Resonance Space, this was also shown to be potentially fruitful, since the discussion manifested in the expression of a range of opinions on response cards and on the wall which, similar to a digital blog, contained contradictory statements or commented on individual opinions. The production of ambiguities here took the place of the voice of the institution of the museum and opened up a space for dialogue.18

W hat ’s lef t ? The exhibition was shown in 2012 with great success in the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, and since then has been on an international tour with stops in Europe, Africa and Asia. We believe that it is part of our social responsibility as a design museum to use our resources to call attention to the consequences of the thoughtless use and disposal of products made from one of modernity’s most important materials; to examine questions like consumption, health risks, or material cycles, and to present approaches to resolving them by encouraging action in the form of reduction of consumption, re-purposing and or re-usage. We leave it to our visitors to draw their own conclusions from this. For us it is important to take a position and to establish a dialogue with our visitors. The public interest in the exhibition and its educational program is large, and the feedback has been so positive that we feel encouraged not only to show best practice examples of design across the whole spectrum of this field, but also to discuss the problems that it creates. The number of visitors, the broad participation and dynamic of the integrated education space also changed the way we exhibit and teach. According 17 | Techno parade for love, peace, freedom, generosity and tolerance. See www.street​ parade.com. 18 | Gioia Dal Molin describes this production of plurivocity by way of the format Kunstsprechstunde (Art Speaking Hours) in the project space in the Kunstmuseum Luzern (see G. Dal Molin, Projektraum und Ausstellungsraum als Dialogräume, p. 84).

Curation & Education as an Integrated Concept

to the statistics, about 35 per cent of 35,000 exhibition visitors participated in different educational programs. Before this exhibition, this number only comprised an average of 7 per cent. The education concept created an activity space which also transformed the structure of the museum such that it now has a permanent position for a curator of education. According to Carmen Mörsch, the role of education did not only prove to be deconstructive in this exhibition, since the opinions and objects of other individuals were made visible – but it also showed signs of a transformative function.19 The exhibition and its cultural education expanded the role of the museum insofar as they became participants in a collective process of social creation and invited their visitors to participate. The changing role of education manifests itself nowadays in an expanded field of responsibilities, which spans from dialogical tours and formats about the design of creative processes through to an integrated educational area. The collaboration with the curators of the exhibitions is constantly being explored anew, with the demand increasingly coming from the curators, and occurring outside of the traditional hierarchical structures. For themes and exhibitions that are suited to the kinds of approaches we have described here, the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich has generated an open space for realising experimental exhibition and education formats.

19 | See, for example, Institute for Art Education (IAE), University of the Arts, especially chapter 5 ‘What does cultural mediation do?’, and http://www.kultur-vermittlung. ch/zeit-fuer-vermittlung, accessed 13.04.2016.

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Figure 1: The Plastic Garbage Project, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, 2012. Central installation with plastic flotsam.

Figure 2: The Plastic Garbage Project, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, 2012. Exhibition section Plastic Garbage in the Sea.

Curation & Education as an Integrated Concept

Figure 3: The Plastic Garbage Project, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, 2012. Design workshop in the Action Space.

Figure 4: The Plastic Garbage Project, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, 2012. Schools’ workshop Von Plastikinseln und Müllmusik (Of Plastic Islands and Garbage Music).

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In Dialogue with the Visitors The AFRITECTURE Exhibition and its Interactive Display Andres Lepik Exhibition design is, in my view, much more than mere presentation. It is a medium of visual communication or, to put it more simply, something for both the eye and the mind – broadly speaking, it helps us to notice things that would otherwise escape our attention, or which we cannot extract from descriptions and pictures alone.1

Architecture exhibitions in museums usually depend on presenting planned or completed constructions via models, drawings, photos, and videos. In general, the contents and concepts of architecture are conveyed using the same elements as art exhibitions: sketches, plans and drawings are framed behind glass, and three-dimensional models and materials are exhibited in vitrines and on plinths. These museum exhibitions on architecture mostly take place in the neutralising ‘white cube’, which denies the viewer any visual reference to the outside world, and which also eliminates all other possibilities of contextualisation.2 For the visitor of an architecture exhibition, its similarity to the art exhibition is the source of a fundamental misunderstanding. Because this places the work materials used in the drafting and implementation process of architecture on the same level as artworks, where they do not belong. Their purpose is a different one: they serve to define spatial concepts which only become ‘architecture’3 through their material realisation, whereas artworks are already possess an inherent validity. In the presentation of historical (architec1 | B. Rudowsky, lecture in Tokyo on 05.12.1958. 2 | For basic information on the definition and history of the ‘white cube’ as the standard for art presentation in gallery and museum contexts, see B. O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube. 3 | The term ‘architecture’ refers hereafter to plans and concepts which are intended for a real-world implementation.

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tural) materials, for reasons of conservation there is no alternative to framing and to the usage of vitrines to protect original objects. However, particularly in the case of architecture exhibitions with contemporary themes, it is possible to develop specialised forms of display which make the differences between art and architecture exhibitions visible to visitors, and which independently articulate the medium of the architecture exhibition. The following text will present a concrete example of an exhibition that shows how this can be put into practice. The AFRITECTURE: Building With the Community exhibition, which was shown by the Architekturmuseum der Technischen Universität München (Architecture Museum of the Technical University of Munich) in the Pinakothek der Moderne in 2013-14, aimed to make a complex topic in contemporary architecture accessible to a wide audience. Given that it is physically located within the Pinakothek der Moderne,4 the Architekturmuseum der Technischen Universität München is forced to also address an audience which may not have a direct interest in architecture. This was achieved by incorporating specific elements of the theme of the exhibition into the concept of its presentation. The motivation and starting point for the exhibition’s conception was the fact that a dynamic development in the area of construction was occurring in many countries across the African continent at the time, in which the question of the social connections between planning and political and economic interests have remained in the background. While megacities such as Lagos, Johannesburg and Addis Ababa continue to grow at a rapid pace, there is a general lack of architectural concepts that take into account a long-term integration of these construction projects into local societal, cultural, and social structures. This leads to an increasingly unequal distribution of the architectural and spatial circumstances of large sections of the population, with the number of slums is growing at an alarming pace.5 However there are exceptions: some architectural initiatives are actively fighting back against the complete commercialisation of construction, and integrating the genuine needs of low-income earners and neglected segments of the population. The curatorial approach for the conception of the exhibition in Munich was based on two exhibitions – which I had previously developed and presented at other museums  – which focused on the social relevance of architecture. Their goal was to use concrete 4 | The museum also houses the Sammlung Moderne Kunst der Bayerischen Staatsgemäldesammlungen (Modern Art Collection of the Bavarian State Painting Collections), the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München (State Graphic Collection of Munich) and the Neue Sammlung (New Collection) as independent collections. 5 | The last UN Habitat Report (The Challenge of Slums – Global Report on Human Settlements, UN Habitat, 2003) has more detail on this situation – see http://www. grida.no/graphicslib/detail/slum-population-in-urban-africa_d7d6#

In Dialogue with the Visitors

and successful examples to stimulate a discussion of the active social relevance of contemporary architecture. The first of these exhibitions was Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement, which was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2010.6 Alongside the social embeddedness of a particular architectural project within a local community and its ecological and cultural aspects, the question of the artistic quality – the aesthetic 7 – was also a particularly important criterion for selecting the projects. The exhibition at MoMA presented eleven buildings and construction projects from all over the world, including two model projects from Africa, namely Primary School in Gando, Burkina Faso (architect: Francis Kéré) and the Red Location Museum (architects: Noero Wolff). In its form of display, the exhibition adhered to the usual standards of MoMA: large-format photos, drawings, sketches and models were displayed, although the models were exhibited without the use of vitrines, in order to at least enable a direct experience for the visitor with these aspects. For the presentation of other design material, a table system was developed in which the display cases were placed on sawhorses. The goal was to keep the form of display as simple as possible in order to showcase the quality of the projects on display.8 During the research process for Small Scale, Big Change, we found many more case studies than those that could be displayed in the exhibition. However we were able to publish further projects in the ensuing publication Moderators of Change: Architecture That Helps.9 Due to the growing public interest in the subject, a further exhibition based on existing research and additional findings titled Think Global, Build Social was able to be presented at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum (German Architecture Museum) in Frankfurt in 2013, which subsequently made its way to the Architekturzentrum Wien (Vienna Architecture Centre).10 This exhibition carried on from the findings of the MoMA exhibition and the publication which followed it, and aimed to more clearly define the selection criteria. Special emphasis was placed on the question of the participation of users in the planning and 6 | See http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/smallscalebigchange/, accessed 13.04.2016. 7 | This was, among other things, intended to be a critical response to the Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2002, which bore the motto Less Aesthetics, More Ethics. The terms ethics and aesthetics, however, are in my opinion better thought of as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. 8 | The exhibition design originated from MoMA’s in-house designers Jerry Neuner and Betty Fisher. 9 | A. Lepik, Moderators of Change. 10 | Instead of a catalogue, a special issue of the magazine ARCH+ was published: ARCH+ 211/212.

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implementation processes. The exhibition also included new buildings, some of which weren’t begun or completed until after Small Scale, Big Change. The fundamental prerequisite for the spatial design of the exhibition was to develop a system that was both as affordable as possible, and easy to install at both locations. The layout by designer Sanaz Hazegh Nejad was based on the use of Euro-pallets as the central exhibition element. As a recycled material, they could be loaned out at each respective exhibition location, printed paper webs were hung on them, and they served as the main bearers of pictorial and textual information, with stacked pallets also serving as plinths for models. This element also helped to achieve the goal of connecting the form of the presentation as closely as possible to the subject, in order to create a visible unity between form and content. In particular, the low-budget aspect of many of the exhibited buildings was mirrored in the simplicity of the exhibition’s architecture. Additional elements that complemented the MoMA exhibition were created from materials such as cob bricks, complete bamboo support structures or the installation of a machine for manufacturing mud bricks. The use of such objects created a direct, visual link between the projects on exhibit and physical materials and tools. The idea of the exhibition as a dynamic knowledge platform was developed during the project’s conceptualisation, which was worked out in conversations between the Director of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt (Peter Cachola Schmal), the Director of the Architekturzentrum Wien (Dietmar Steiner), and me as curator, as well as the curatorial teams from each location (Philipp Sturm and Peter Körner in Frankfurt and Sonja Pisarik in Vienna). The concept envisaged the possibility of a modular form of display which could flexibly adapt (both in terms of content and display format) to the respective local conditions. As a result, in Vienna the exhibition Think Global, Build Social was expanded to include a room dedicated to projects that had been planned either in or from Austria – in total, 72 extra buildings were added to the exhibition. The AFRITECTURE: Building with the Community exhibition in Munich was conceived as a thematic continuation of the two aforementioned exhibitions, albeit geographically limited to sub-Saharan Africa.11 The focus on contemporary architecture projects in Africa made sense for a number of reasons. The primary reason was that despite the fact that the continent had for some time found recognition in international finance magazines12 due to its stable rate of economic growth, it had so far played almost no role in an archi-

11 | Limiting the exhibition’s content to projects from sub-Saharan Africa was a consequence of the politically unpredictable situation in the Maghreb region at the time. 12 | See for example the title of the December 2011 issue of The Economist, ‘Africa Rising’, which was also used one year later by TIME Magazine.

In Dialogue with the Visitors

tecture discourse predominantly steered by Europe and the USA.13 At the same time it was obvious that the growth of the economy and the concomitant urbanisation of Africa would offer great opportunities for architecture. In the search for relevant projects it became clear that it was difficult or even impossible to find socially-engaged architecture projects in the various countries south of the Sahara.14 The reason for this is twofold. Firstly, there are virtually no architecture schools that directly address the subject; and secondly, the fact that some countries completely lack any structured architectural education system whatsoever. Construction is controlled by large firms and developers, many of whom come from overseas  – as do the designs.15 Nevertheless, 26 examples from 10 countries were able to be found. The common factor among them was the strong engagement on the part of the architect(s) with a neglected region or neighbourhood. A crucial element in many socially-engaged architecture projects is the participation of the future users in the design process, and sometimes even in the construction process. Because participation was recognised as a central theme to many projects, the idea was formed to include this participatory element in the presentation of the exhibition itself, in order to encourage visitors to engage directly with the theme of the exhibition. Together with the architecture office Stiftung Freizeit from Berlin (Ines Aubert, Ruben Jodar, and Rusmir Ramic), a design was developed which was responsive to both the local conditions of the exhibition rooms at the Pinakothek der Moderne and to the low levels of architectural knowledge of the predominantly non-professional visitors. The first prerequisite of the spatial concept was to keep the window side of the exhibition rooms open, in order to create a two-way form of transparency within the exhibition – on the one side, the visibility of the exhibition from outside; and on the other, the confrontation of the visitor with the urban reality of the museum’s surroundings. Two essential features of the educational aspects were identified in the conception phase: firstly, a focus on explaining the various architecture projects in a way that was as vivid and easy to understand as possible. The aim is to address all visitors equally: from professional architects, for whom dimensional plans were made available; right through to children, who were led through 13 | The first World Architecture Congress in Africa took place in 2014. 14 | This research was significantly and enthusiastically supported by the numerous Goethe Institutes located throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Special thanks go to Lien Heidenreich-Seleme and the regional office in Johannesburg. 15 | For an overview of architecture schools in Africa see page 16 of the AFRITECTURE: Building with the Community catalogue. On the situation of the powerful presence of Chinese firms and developers in Africa, see J. Zhuang, How Chinese Urbanism Is Transforming African Cities, http://www.archdaily.com/?p=529000, accessed 13.04.2016.

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the history of the projects via a series of comic-style illustrations. Due to the decision to leave the glass façade open, this side of the exhibition space was not able to be used as wall space. Because there had already been plans during the preparation phase to use honeycomb cardboard panels, which can function as a simple and flexible manufacturing material for exhibition walls, the decision was made to also place such panels on the floor, thereby providing additional exhibition surfaces for graphic elements, text and illustrations. But since the visitors were invited to walk through the horizontal exhibition spaces directly, it was therefore necessary to find a way to protect the graphics against wear and tear. The simplest solution was to request visitors to remove their shoes at the entrance and go through the exhibition in their socks. During the planning stage, the exhibition designers and the curatorial team discussed this request extensively. Despite all concerns (for example that visitors could refuse the request because they would find it uncomfortable, which would lead to reduced visitor numbers) this rule was implemented. From the beginning, it was met with positive reactions from the visitors, many of whom experienced the gesture as a kind of physical ‘initialisation’, comparable with entering a Japanese house. As a result of this experience  – unusual for a museum – the memory of the exhibition remained firmly fixed in the minds of many visitors. The visitors’ books – proposed and produced by Stiftung Freizeit – constituted another interactive element of the exhibition. The yellow ring binders were attached to the wall next to each project, so that visitors could grab them in their hands, sit down on a stool provided and write their comments in them. Visitors’ books are usually found only at the end of the journey through an exhibition and allow all kinds of commentary, which often leads to a high level of arbitrariness in the entries. In AFRITECTURE, however, the curators and exhibition designers formulated specific questions which had already been stuck to the walls; for example, “Should modern architecture around the world only use locally available building materials?” In this way, visitors were required to answer a specific question in the visitors’ book. Only a few days after the exhibition’s opening, it was clear that a large number of visitors had happily accepted this opportunity for direct interaction, with some leaving very long and thoughtful entries. At the end of the exhibition’s run, 48 books had been filled with roughly 3500 comments. An even greater number of Post-It notes were used by visitors, who could freely write comments and suggestions and stick them around the exhibition. An additional medium for commenting on the exhibition and its contents was an ‘Opinion-o-mat’, styled after a passport photo booth, which was installed in the last exhibition room and gave visitors the opportunity to leave 20-second-long video comments. At the end of the recording, selected video comments (following editorial checks) were projected onto a wall. In this case, too, the reactions were so numerous that a decisive

In Dialogue with the Visitors

analysis during the period of the exhibition became impossible. Through the many visible comments and entries made by users, the face of the AFRITECTURE exhibition changed so many times throughout its duration that it could be understood as an ‘interactive’ exhibition in its most literal sense, as it was not a matter of abstract digital responses but rather a physical transformation of the exhibition itself. With over 70,000 visitors across 20 weeks, AFRITECTURE proved itself to be an outstanding success for an architecture exhibition, something reflected in the extensive press coverage it received.16 The intense engagement that all the visitors had with the themes of the exhibition and the unique way they were presented proved that an integrated conception that blends an exhibition’s content with the form of its display and its interactive and educational elements substantially increases its comprehensibility. At the same time, for many visitors, the AFRITECTURE exhibition became associated with the experience of being touched by the concrete social effects of architecture. Figure 1: Wall installation with plans, cross-sections, photos and yellow stickers and post-its for visitor comments.

16 | A complete collection of press clippings can be found in the museum’s archives.

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Figure 2: View of the exhibition space. The windows onto the urban environment were kept open to encourage a dialogue between the buildings in Africa on exhibit and the surroundings of the museum.

Figure 3: For every project exhibited, a visitor’s book with a specific question was supplied. In the end, over 2000 entries were catalogued.

Figure 4: The communication of the exhibition content was carried out on various levels: through texts, images, comics, videos … in order to address different kinds of visitors.

PUZZLE Education as Curatorial Practice Julia Schäfer

A puzzle is a mechanical game of patience. We can assume that a puzzle is composed of a number of parts that taken together constitute a whole. I have never been able to cultivate a passion for puzzles. I lack the ambition, patience and perseverance required to assemble something pre-fabricated from its constituent parts. Luckily however, there’s more to the puzzle metaphor than merely putting together a whole. In puzzles, each piece has its place, they join up and support one another. If pieces are missing, you can still assemble and experience the whole. In 2010-11, the idea of the puzzle served as my point of departure for the development of an experimental exhibition project in the Neubau (new wing) of the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig (Leipzig Museum of Contemporary Art; hereafter GfZK). The GfZK is located near the centre of Leipzig, a city of some 500,000 residents and a comparatively large amount of museums, galleries and artist-run initiatives devoted to contemporary art. The GfZK focuses on projects that are topical, socially engaged and relevant to society. It operates thematically and seeks out new forms of contestation in curation, education and communication.1 The institution was founded in 1992, and since 1998 has been located in a converted Wilhelminian villa, as well as, since 2004, a new building (the ‘Neu­ bau’), which architecturally reflects the museum’s program. Its legal status as a foundation and its funding model based on public-private partnerships permit a degree of freedom for experimentation. Thus, for example, unlike institutions which are entirely publicly funded, visitor numbers needn’t exert an undue influence on exhibition conception and design. This also has positive consequences for education work, which has had its own department in the GfZK since 2004. The work done by the GfZK FÜR DICH (YOUR GfZK) focuses on 1 | J. Schäfer; Vor heimischer Kulisse, pp. 107 ff., 190 ff., 221, 237. See Backstage, http://www.gfzk-leipzig.de/?s=Backstage, accessed 13.04.2016.

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long-term partnerships with kindergartens, refugee accommodation providers, charity organisations, special needs schools and primary, middle and trade schools. It is often the marginalised parts of the city or society which are picked up on and addressed in the debates that take place within the art education projects. The resulting projects are rarely aimed at places where an excess of cultural education programs can be found.2 With reference to the image of the puzzle mentioned at the outset, we could also say of our cultural education programs that we don’t do pre-fabricated programs designed only to increase visitor numbers. Investigation and experiment remain the driving forces not only of curation, but also of the education program at the GfZK.3 I was assigned the task of designing the first ever year-long exhibition from the museum’s collection for the Neubau building. Until then, such shows had always taken place in the GfZK’s old building, the Villa. The aim of the exhibition concept was to break with this custom in an interesting way. The Neubau is located at ground level. A large glass façade opens onto the city and passers-by. As I perceive them, its spatial proportions create a pleasant harmony with the human body. There are two different levels, with alternating floor and ceiling lighting. The spaces flow into one another: neither is really separated from the other, whether acoustically or in terms of light.4 Many of the walls can be shifted manually, so that new paths can be created for each exhibition: sometimes there is a fixed route, sometimes there are various possible points of entry. Floors, walls and ceilings all have the same surface texture and look all of a piece. The Neubau’s interior is differentiated by a number of shades of grey: a light grey and a dark grey define the floor areas as display and non-display zones, different grey tones also distinguish fixed and moveable walls. Additionally there are numerous exposed concrete walls. The floors and walls of the ‘cinema’ are made of black rubber, which also covers the building’s facade. It was a challenge for me to develop a long-term, static exhibition for the Neubau. The site is a flexible spatial structure and couldn’t simply remain still, especially when considered in relation to the collection. It has a history and is itself a narrative. It shows traces of its founders and founding initiatives, for example the works donated by the Association of Arts and Culture of the Federation of German Industries5 or the endowment of works of various provenances 2 | See also, http://www.gfzk.de/foryou/?cat=4, accessed 13.04.2016. 3 | Other education programs at the GfZK include: education cards, services, writing points, corridor as display, home game, etc. See www.gfzk.de, accessed 13.04.2016. 4 | J. Schäfer, Curating in Models, p. 85. 5 | “The Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e. V. (Association of Arts and Culture of the German Economy at the Federation of German Industries) has supported arts and culture since 1951 and campaigns for a society in which art is seen as an essential resource.” See www.kulturkreis.eu, accessed 13.04.2016.

PUZZLE

by private collectors and artists. Purchases made over time reflect the different emphases of the museum’s various administrations. But the collection is also a reflection of the interests of a number of people currently working in the museum, whether in terms of organisation or content. Taken as a whole, the collection is very heterogeneous and lively, yet it also has very few gaps.6 Often the fact that museums are showing their own collections produces a certain lack of enthusiasm. It isn’t easy to find an audience for such exhibitions. So for me it was important to bring out a sense of the space itself as forming part of the exhibition: to develop something specific to the Neubau, something which couldn’t have taken place in the Villa, the older of the two buildings. I responded to this challenge with a kind of dynamic curating – the concept of PUZZLE. By the concept of ‘dynamic curating’ I mean leaving behind the system that dictates that once an exhibition is open, it shouldn’t be altered. During the initial planning phase I worked without thematic brackets and without formulating a focal point. I divided the floor plan of the Neubau  – 800 m² of exhibition space  – into ten polygonal slivers. Reassembled, they make up the whole Neubau. While considering the play between the different zones, I arrived at the idea of having each one dedicated to a different theme, and of inviting co-producers to work with me to puzzle together an image of the museum’s collection. Hence the exhibition’s title. In line with my occupational leitmotif of education as curatorial practice, I invited eight different protagonists or groups to create the exhibition of the collection with me. All participants were given the task of engaging and working with the collection, but how they implemented this requirement was left up to them. Those invited were given a tour through the storerooms to get to know the collection, and anybody who requested it was given the entire database on CD, so that all participants could explore the collection beyond simply ‘rummaging around on-site’. After the participants had developed their ideas, a total of 34 puzzle pieces in the form of projects, exhibitions and installations came together for PUZZLE, some being presented simultaneously, some consecutively. Each of the zones had different co-producers and focused on different things: for Interventionen (Interventions), I invited artists to respond to the collection with new artworks.7 The Klasse Intermedia (Intermedia Class) of the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig developed six artistic projects related to the collection, ranging from performance to installation and video works.8 Anders Sammeln (Collecting Differently) showed what was missing from the collection, thereby 6 | H. Stecker and B. Steiner, Sammeln. 7 | The artists were Carola Dertnig, Tadej Pogacar and Cornelia Friederike Müller. 8 | The students involved were Angelika Waniek, Sabine F., Guillermo Fiallo Montero, Stefan Hurtig, Franzika Jyrch and Meta Einvald.

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shedding light on the politics of the collection.9 Under the title Neuerwerbungen? (New Acquisitions?) works were presented that were originally created in collaboration with the GfZK, but which (at the time of the exhibition) were not yet part of the collection.10 For Puzzle im Puzzle (Puzzle in a Puzzle) the collection manager chose pieces from the collection.11 Kabinett (Cabinet) referenced an existing exhibition series, in which the conservator presented unknown (mostly graphic) works from the collection.12 For the GfZK FÜR DICH zone, GfZK’s art educators worked together with children and adolescents to prepare two presentations.13 The Vermittlungsteam (V-Team) (education team) participated with projects concerned with the question of attitudes towards contemporary art.14 In Konservierungmaschine (Conservation Machine), also a pre-existing GfZK project, restorers used an example artwork to demonstrate restoration methods and the difficulties involved in preservation.15 Finally, I invited members of the Förderkreis (Friends of the GfZK) to curate exhibitions with works from the collection or to comment on them.16 With the division of the zones, I tried to avoid creating any hierarchies, allocating no more space to the invited artists than to the children and adolescents. This democratic principle was crucial to the success of PUZZLE. I saw my own role as that of a director and host, a manager and mediator, who provided the framework, who demarcated and allocated the zones, and who stood by as an advisor, coordinating and monitoring all the projects. 9 | Angelika Richter (curator) presented Inszenierungen des Eigen_Sinns (Staging Strong-Mindedness), Julia Schäfer (curator) presented Covergirl/Wespenakte (Covergirl/ Wasp Nudes). Both presentations involved a critical engagement with the GDR, as well as featuring women artists, who were under-represented in the collection at the time. 10 | The artists involved were Antje Schiffers, Dorit Margreiter, Dora Garcia and Sofie Thorsen. 11 | The collection manager was Angela Boehnke. 12 | The conservator was Heidi Stecker. 13 | Group 1: Lena Seik and Alexandra Friedrich (art educators), Tristan Schulze (interaction designer), with Willem Conrad, Leo Hingst, Max Fechner (students); Group 2: Lena Seik and Alexandra Friedrich (art educators), Tristan Schulze (interaction designer), Erika Miersch (teacher), Martin Reich (technician), Gereon Rahnfeld (intern) and year 7 students from the Petri School. 14 | Franziska Adler (illustrator and art educators), Kristin Meyer (comic artist and art historian), Julia Kurz (drama scholar and art educator), Luise Schröder (artist), Christin Müller (art educators) and Andrea Günther (artist). 15 | Syblle Reschke and Angelika Hoffmeister zur Nedden (restorers). 16 | Anneliese Böhm (teacher), Stephan Schikora (financial officer), Verena Tintelnot (art historian and Feldenkrais teacher), Henrik Pupat (arts journalist), Doris Staufenbiel (cardiologist).

PUZZLE

For this project, letting go of my responsibility as a curator was a crucial action to take. Trust became the support which held everything together. I had provided a framework and defined a system that was as self-perpetuating as possible. I had provided all participants with the same conditions. Anyone could contact me at any time to discuss particulars. Many, but not all, took up this offer. Incidentally it was often organisational or technical issues that needed to be discussed. Basically, for each group, and for each individual within a group, a different curatorial language had to be found. My task essentially consisted in accompanying and facilitating this search. With a total of 48 team members, the project couldn’t succeed in every case. Mishaps were a part of the system. In one case we displayed a contribution on a wall which was still empty, right around the corner from where it was supposed to be positioned. For a long time the conceived project stagnated and the work just wouldn’t reach a conclusion. The previous presentation was extended and the following one brought forward. We also had lengthy discussions with the artist Sofie Thorsen, but were unable to show her work in its required form due to financial limitations. By the time we had found a satisfactory solution for all participants, the actual opening date had already passed. We opened this particular section two weeks later. PUZZLE was designed with this kind of flexibility in mind, which would hardly have been imaginable in any other exhibition at the GfZK. But this also meant that it was challenging for visitors who wanted to see every contribution. Sometimes the project that they’d come to see had already been de-installed, which we had completely forgotten to announce. In spite of our democratic standards, responsibility for the design of the exhibition as a whole still lay with me as the curator. I decided to colour-code a number of the walls. For this I applied the colour system used in the collection catalogue17 for the exhibition rooms. In the catalogue, colours organise the works according to their acquisition date and periods in the museum’s history. The colours provided an orientation for the exhibition in much the same way. While the contributions on show in PUZZLE were continually changing, the coloured walls remained the same.18 In order to further facilitate orientation, our graphic designers developed a system of magnetic signs for the exhibition. Additionally, thanks to a large display board in the windows of the Neubau, people could see which pieces of the puzzle were currently on display and which would be in future. Within the zones themselves, the signs provided information about the particular zone and the participating team members and artists. 17 | H. Stecker and B. Steiner, Sammeln. 18 | The coloured walls also turned out to be a helpful means of orientation for the photographic documentation of PUZZLE. This is just one example of the many cases in which something developed out of the process, rather than being completely planned out from the beginning.

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The concept and procedure of PUZZLE reflected my own approach to museum education as a curatorial practice. Coming from a museum education background, for me curation without educational elements remains unthinkable. Every time I curate an exhibition I pose myself questions regarding its reception, and very time the attempt to answer them takes a new form. With PUZZLE, thanks to the involvement of so many different co-producers, there was a particular diversity of voices which was more or less self-explanatory: mostly we needed nothing more than a panel text with a brief introduction to the particular theme. To this end, all the invited participants were asked to prepare their own texts, in order to best communicate something of what their piece was about. The only exception to this was a zone-crossing project developed by the education team: the ‘foldout tours’. They guided visitors through PUZZLE with maps and suggestions for activities, each time following a specific aspect of the whole exhibition. The different curatorial signatures were a source of enrichment. All those invited were now permitted to do what is usually the exclusive preserve of artists: they could build, extend, annotate, curate, and treat the collection as their equal counterpart. Artists curated, educators built installations, children taught, students made new work and annotated the collection.19 Many suggestions were taken up as we went along, and made productive in unplanned and unexpected ways. For example, while the collection manager was giving the education team a tour of the storerooms, she mentioned that ‘adequate images’ had not been taken of a lot of the works. This prompted the education team to deal with this situation, using Rosmarie Trockel’s O. T. as an example. In their contribution to PUZZLE, entitled Für diese Arbeit existiert keine adäquate Abbildung (No Adequate Image of this Work Exists), they displayed all the reproductions of the work that they could find. The worst of them was printed on a new postcard. People could also listen to an audio track describing the work in great detail. The work itself remained out of sight. Then it happened that the Slovenian artist Tadej Pogacar displayed his contribution to PUZZLE as part of Interventionen (Interventions) after a delay. He curated a selection of works from the collection, including Trockel’s. Each party was unaware of what the other was doing, and for two weeks there was the most compelling synchrony. In the first few weeks, an unplanned emphasis on performance developed. Carola Dertnig (Interventionen) designed a kind of score for a performative confrontation with the collection. At the exhibition opening, Angelika Waniek (Klasse Intermedia) performed the history of the founding of the GfZK. Ange­lika 19 | Four years after the end of PUZZLE, Franziska Jyrch, a former art student, sent the GfZK a work she had produced for it, entitled Wahl (Choice) 326 B1/B2 (2010), and thereby became part of the collection herself.

PUZZLE

Richter (Anders Sammeln) presented performance-based artworks by women artists from the GDR. In his work Zwischensicht (Inter-View), Guillermo Fiallo Montero (Klasse Intermedia) conducted video interviews with various GfZK personnel, asking them to describe a work from the collection that they found particularly striking. The works themselves were not on view. Initially, the contribution of the education team (No adequate image) was on display in the adjacent space. This was then replaced by another work by the same group entitled Pile this end up. Andrea Günther displayed a multitude of wooden crates, cardboard boxes and packaged artworks from the collection. She had also resolved to not display the actual objects from the collection. Foreseeing the parallels between Montero and Günther, I decided to leave the door separating them ajar. On one occasion, this kind of interplay led to a new acquisition for the collection: Tina Bara and Alba D’Urbano’s work Covergirl (Wespenakte) was displayed in the Anders Sammeln section, where works were shown that might suit the collection, but that lacked any common focal point (such as the critical confrontation with the GDR). The work was itself the result of a response to an exhibition by Dora Garcia, which I had curated in 2007. The Leipzig professor Alba D’Urbano had taken a tour of the exhibition with her students. As she left I gave her a copy of the catalogue. Her colleague Tina Bara, with whom she occasionally collaborates on art projects, saw the catalogue a few weeks later and recognised herself in the cover photo.20 It was an unbelievable coincidence. We had no way of knowing who the people in the photographs were. Garcia had obtained the materials for her exhibition from the Stasi Records Agency (BStU, then the Birthler Office) by submitting an official research application. The film Zimmer, Gespräche (Rooms, Conversations), which Dora Garcia shot in 2007 as part of her Blinky Palermo Grant, is about the Stasi and the different roles played by its key figures. The Stasi Archive was the project’s basis and point of departure. The film was purchased by the GfZK while PUZZLE was running. Parts of it were screened concurrently with the presentation of works by D’Urbano and Bara. The two artists had carried out extensive research on Tina Bara’s own past as an activist in the GDR, resulting in an installation

20 | J. Schäfer, Zimmer. Note: this catalogue was taken off the market one year after the end of the exhibition. In the context of the exhibition, Dora Garcia had the right to show images from the Stasi Archives. However her gallerist decided to offer the photographs for sale at the Berlin Art Fair. As a result, a number of people recognised themselves in the photographs and complained to the authorities. This scandal of personal rights led to the exhibition catalogue being taken off the market. This occurred even though all images in the catalogue and the exhibition were anonymous and their use in the catalogue had been approved by the authorities.

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work.21 After a tour of the exhibition, the Friends of the GfZK spontaneously decided to purchase the work for the collection. As the above examples make clear, shifts of meaning were continually taking place in the system of PUZZLE. What supposedly stood in a fixed relation could only a week later have lost its footing, or it may have had to re-assert itself and enter into new dialogues. Meanings and layers were continually over-lapping. Regarding the concrete practice of education in the exhibition, this meant that it was necessary to update the content weekly. The aforementioned brochures focusing on different key themes were created to respond to this challenge. They were conceived by Christin Müller, a colleague in the education team. Six tour routes were created: a colour tour, a movement tour, a listening tour, a materials tour, an artist tour and a tour of the changes that had taken place.22 The overarching curatorial concept of the exhibition – in accordance with a democratic approach – was grounded in horizontality. Artworks were rarely mounted on plinths. They were placed alongside everyday objects, complementing and expanding them. For example, the children involved in the first contribution for GfZK FÜR DICH, entitled Monster und Sport (Monsters and sport), placed an exercise bike in front of a work by Plamen Dejanoff and Svetlana Heger, which if you sat on it and pedalled really fast, began to play a song which was intended to increase the visitor’s pleasure at viewing the BMWs depicted. Upon being shown the work, colleagues of other museums often responded with: “This would be just unthinkable in our gallery!” Working on the exhibition catalogue it became clear that this many-sided, interlocking project would be very hard to reproduce in book form. Presenting and conveying the processes involved in process-based curation are a real challenge, because the book is a comparatively static medium. We had to ask ourselves questions like: are we going to proceed in a linear or chronological manner? Will we present each of the puzzle pieces independently, or will we probe the in-between and/or emphasise the connections, simultaneities and coincidences? Together with editor Tanja Milewsky and designer Annalena von Helldorff, we ultimately produced both – an overview with remarks on proximities and an interlocking network of references to parallels in content. The latter was also able to be integrated – especially subsequent to the exhibition. Someone who visited the exhibition multiple times will be able to orient themselves in the catalogue. Someone who encounters it for the first time in the book will initially be challenged.

21 | It just so happened that the image in which Tina Bara recognised herself was confiscated when the Stasi carried out a search of the premises of one of her former companions. 22 | J. Schäfer, PUZZLE.

PUZZLE

So a puzzle was created. But not one that produces only one specific image and allows no other. A puzzle of 34 project fragments. Taken all together, they produce a tension, a togetherness, a dynamic that we never experience in other group exhibitions, where the spaces and sequences are designed and occupied exclusively by artists. This vitality and dynamism expanded my thinking about curation. Collaborating with such different protagonists enlivened my work; it also demanded that participants communicate in a variety of languages. Artistic concepts tumbled about chaotically, yet everyone came together through their very own engagement with the GfZK’s collection. The collection itself received a real breath of fresh and very diverse air, and we all benefited from each other’s perspectives. PUZZLE was my most comprehensive attempt to date to conceive and implement a different kind of curation. A total of 48 people took part, aged from 5 to 75, of various backgrounds and professions. Artworks by 57 different artists were shown, as well as a further 19 items that weren’t part of the collection. Many contributions related to works from the collection that weren’t themselves on display. Nine new works were created for PUZZLE. In addition, members of the Friends of the GfZK contributed privately-held works. During the exhibition, five works were acquired for the collection. Works which had either never been shown or not shown for a very long time were put under the spotlight. The exhibition also helped create new relationships both between items within the collection, and between the collection and items outside it. Moreover, the puzzle method established a community, connecting many participants and their friendship circles to the museum. People once only vaguely or distantly interested now stay in contact and bring other people along with them. This is a big win for the GfZK. At the conclusion of the project it became clear that perhaps something like ‘Tangram’ would have been a more fitting title, seeing as a multitude of connections had been created within the exhibition, going far beyond the quality of a precisely defined entity. PUZZLE became much more an open system for countless possibilities, many of which are yet to be fully explored, with impacts that are still blossoming.23

23 | By this I mean firstly the experience of thinking about the exhibition, but also, the fact that many participants have continued to collaborate. It is also worth noting that since the completion of the project other exhibitions with dynamic approaches have taken place at the GfZK: Europa N [Europe N] (2011), Kunst-Kunst. Von hier aus betrachtet! [Art-art: From the inside out!] (2012), Hausgemeinschaft (Family Affairs), (2013) Travestie für Fortgeschrittene 1-3 [Travesties for the advanced 1-3] (2015/2016). See also www.gfzk.de, accessed 13.04.2016.

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Figure 1: Education team (Space Zone), Für diese Arbeit existiert keine adäquate Abbildung (No Adequate Image of this Work Exists) (Title).

Figure 2: Interventions (Space Zone), Tadej Pogacar, THE PARASITE (Title).

Figure 3: Education team (Space Zone), Pile this end up (Title), Interventions (Space Zone), Tadej Pogacar, THE PARASITE (Title).

Figure 4: Education team (Space Zone), It’s just a game (Title).

PUZZLE

Figure 5: Education team (Space Zone), foldout tour #3, Hinhören (Listening In). Wie klingen Kunstwerke? Was erzählen die Stimmen? Wie tönen sie in unserem Ausstellunsraum? Klingt ein Kunstwerk anders als es aussieht?

Zur Ausstellung „Puzzle – Die Sammlungsausstellung 2010“ in der Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, vom 19. Juni 2010 bis 30. Januar 2011, erscheint monatlich eine neue Faltblattführung.

#1 Führung in Farbe #2 Führung mit Bewegung #3 Führung zum Hinhören

Hören Sie ein Kunstwerk an und schauen Sie dabei zu einem anderen oder einfach aus dem Fenster! Was entsteht aus der Mischung? Hat eine Ausstellung einen eigenen Klang?

© V-Team der GfZK / Christin Müller September 2010

#3 Führrrrung zum Hiiiiinhööööören

Figure 6: Education team (Space Zone), foldout tour #4, Werkstoff (Work Material). Die Werke in der Sammlung der GfZK sind stofflich. Fragen, die sich in einer Werkstoff-Führung stellen, könnten sein: Wie ist etwas gemacht? Woraus ist etwas gemacht? Und warum?

Zur Ausstellung „PUZZLE – Die Sammlungsausstellung 2010“ in der Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, vom 19. Juni 2010 bis 20. Februar 2011, erscheint regelmäßig eine neue Faltblattführung.

#1 Führung in Farbe #2 Führung mit Bewegung

Bei der Entscheidung für ein Material mag es rationale Gründe geben. Hierzu zählen Statik und Handhabung genauso wie Kostenfaktoren. Das ist natürlich nicht zwangsläufig. Materialentscheidungen fallen viel häufifiger aufgrund sensueller Eigenschaften: Haptik, Optik, Geruch und der auditive Charakter eines Materials. Diese Eigenschaften vermitteln bestimmte Merkmale, welche wiederum inhaltliche Intentionen transportieren.

#3 Führung zum Hinhören

Die Werkstoff-Führung geht der Materialität einiger Arbeiten in PUZZLE nach und über eine Materialangabe hinaus.

© V-Team der GfZK Julia Kurz und Christin Müller

#4 Werkstoff-Führung

November 2010

#4 WerkstoffFührung

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Curatorial Work Towards a New Relationship Between People, Places and Things MUDE Museum Action to Boost the Intrinsic Relational Value of Culture Barbara Coutinho During the last twenty years, radical shifts occurred in the geopolitical and global socioeconomic map, which correlated with developments in culture, education and technology. This transformation goes along with “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space”.1 Bourriaud links these contemporary art practices – which he describes as marked by a relational aesthetic – with the collaborative processes enabled by the internet, and the need for a physical, alive and intersubjective relation triggered by the virtual world and the detached mode of interaction that we all inhabit.2 These artists and their art create open-ended environments in which people come together to participate in a shared activity, producing different encounters. In spite of Bishop’s qualms over the real political significance of this perspective,3 the trendiness of this aesthetic which readily lends itself to commercial purposes in the spheres of leisure, business and entertainment,4 or the quality of the relations promoted,5 Bishop recognizes the lively debate around these new practices that have emerged with the relational aesthetic. The emphasis on participation and collaboration to increase public awareness and thereby lead social change is a common phenomenon in other disciplines. In design and architecture, multiple projects announce a new perspective on the material culture. Rather than to create more consumers, 1 | N. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, p. 113. 2 | N. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, pp. 15–17. 3 | C. Bishop, Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, p. 65. 4 | C. Bishop, Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, p. 52. 5 | C. Bishop, Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, p. 65.

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these projects intend to create more knowledgeable, aware and critical users in the face of successive humanitarian catastrophes, environmental problems and growing social inequalities. Making use of the advantages of globalization, these projects recover ancestral practices and stimulate intergenerational exchange. If the traditional relation between artist, art and audience is being expanded and everyone can be a producer with the user-friendly technologies available in a DIY culture, it is also true that “the spectacle became the increasing reality for not only culture makers, but all people”.6 Consequently, “far from being oppositional to spectacle, participation has now entirely merged with it”.7 Therefore it is crucial to discuss the real role of the audience as participants or as the concept of active spectatorship,8 to be aware of the instrumentalisation of these participatory processes and evaluate the real intentions of each artwork.9 And what about the museums? They became one of the central institutions of neo-liberal cultural tourism, whilst the consciousness of their political and social role has been growing towards the perspective of education for citizenship. Bourriaud, Bishop and several other authors all agree with the need for institutions to change their framework, especially as places of artistic mediation and consumption. It is of utmost relevance that each museum finds its own scope, even if that implies a certain tension and risk; and re-invent its acquisition policies, audience target, temporary exhibitions programme and educational purpose accordingly. In a re-invented museum, Bourriaud’s encounter can become a meaningful encounter with ourselves. Museums can boost and enhance the intrinsic relational value of culture and its power to affect us, as a place that generates a deeper and more intimate relationship, encouraging the re-evaluation of our own attitudes, values, emotions and skills, and making us more capable and aware of the full scope of citizenship. For such impact, exhibition galleries have a crucial role. However although museum architecture underwent drastic changes over recent years, the same did not happen in exhibition galleries. Besides more or less dramatic displays, interactive formats continue to appear, frequently creating a false or superficial notion of parti­ cipation. It is fundamental to rethink exhibitions, their themes, curatorial discourses, scenography and aesthetics to activate a self-reflective intersubjective participation (at intellectual, psychological, spiritual and emotional levels). To achieve this, it is important to contradict the idea that contemplation is merely passive consumption of information. In fact, the idea that “the interactivity of relational art is, therefore, superior to optical contemplation of an object, which is assumed to be passive and disengaged” is not necessarily true, 6 | N. Thompson, Living as Form, p. 30. 7 | N. Thompson, Living as Form, p. 40. 8 | C. Bishop, Artificial Hells; C. Bishop, Participation and Spectacle. 9 | N. Thompson, Living as Form, pp. 31–32.

Curatorial Work Towards a New Relationship Between People, Places and Things

as Bishop noticed.10 Participation can be superficial, merely physical, or a more effective and subliminal means of alienation. Through the time, attention and deep consideration that contemplation entails, we can increase the essential capacities for subsequent aware action: think, imagine, create or criticize. In fact the oppositional definition of active participation versus passive contemplation is narrow and dangerous. With that in mind, exhibitions must articulate cognitive, emotional and sensory aspects, contributing to a holistic sensibility. Twenty-first century museums must be “something close to that mix of part community centre, laboratory, part academy, alongside the established showroom function that encourages disagreement, incoherence, uncertainty and unpredictable results”.11 This approach has historical precursors in the European avant-garde and in the dematerialized art of the late 1960s and 1970s that challenged institutions and discourses12 . While the white cube ideology13 was becoming dominant, curators, artists and architects experienced alternative proposals. Despite its utopianism, the idea of a unity between art and environment towards a total work of art influenced many. Frederick Kiesler’s radical ideas developed during the 1930s and 1940s are still paramount when talking about the redefinition of the relationships between exhibition object, spatial design and spectatorship. Seeing the exhibition as a galaxy, a total environment or an imaginary space, forms/time/space/visitor had equal importance and were in a continuous and dynamic tension or correlation14. The aim was to question how art was being displayed in museums or galleries, detached from their real magical, spiritual and emotional meaning to the human being. To re-establish that, Kiesler created a space to feel vibrant and dynamic, where life and art merged.15 Almost fifty years after, Urbach continues to say “the atmosphere of an exhibition is, simply, its vibe. It is something to be felt and inhabited, not only seen, and it can be remembered.”16 A space that “envelop[s] their viewers, who are now as much participants as observers or viewers”.17 10 | C. Bishop, Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, p. 62. 11 | Charles Esche, quoted in T. Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating, p. 213. 12 | Cf. The restaging of Harald Szeemann’s 1969 major exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern, Live in your Head: When attitudes become form (crucial towards the appreciation of the process, rather than the object, the democratic art and the spectator’s vital role in the conclusion of the work issues) at Fondazione Prada in Venice in 2013, curated by Germano Celant with Rem Koolhas and Thomas Demand. 13 | B. O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube. 14 | F. Kiesler, Note on Designing the Gallery. 15 | S. Davidson & P. Rylands, The Story of Art of this Century. 16 | H. Urbach, Exhibition as Atmosphere, p. 14. 17 | H. Urbach, Exhibition as Atmosphere, p. 16.

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Lam18 draws attention to the challenges that this approach raises for the whole team involved in an exhibition, from conception and design to communication and education. The work must be developed in a circular, close and collaborative way, and not in a linear sequence. This perspective raises issues around exhibition authorship, specifically the possibility of reconfiguring the curatorial modus operandi and different museological disciplines.19 This perspective leads to a consideration of the exhibition as more than a gathering and presentation of works or a sum of different elements. The exhibition is a medium with a specific language, i. e. a work itself. In this context MUDE  – Museu do Design e da Moda, Coleção Francisco Capelo has been designing in Lisbon, since 2009, assuming the existing space as generator for curatorial content. The preservation of the modern ruin as a legacy intended to explore an alternative way to the white cube ideology, too authoritarian, exclusive, close and abstract solution where each artwork is displayed alone, sacralised. Looking on the physical and financial constraints not as a limitation, but rather as a potential for creativity our approach was the opposite to the spectacular architectonic gesture. “Preserving by using” has been our motto, aware of the importance of building a bridge between past/ present/future, accepting the inherent tensions. The history of the building, the National and Overseas Bank and the colonialist history associated with both have been gathered. The remaining furnishings are being reused, the original fine art pieces are relocated and the existing facilities – such as the auditorium and the safes vault  – are used on a daily basis. The building has also been used as a theme for exhibitions, publications, artworks or research projects. In the exhibition National and Overseas (2012), the chambers of the bank’s administration offices were entirely recreated in situ with the original Empire Style furniture. For the first time, the general public was able to visit one of the restricted areas of the former bank, and in tandem, to see a video with the interviews to former employees conducted by us in November 2012. These interviews confronted each visitor with personal memories about hierarchical use and social segmentation of spaces, access and facilities in the former bank headquarter, once a symbol of authority and a power institution in the relations between the metropolis and the ex-colonies.

18 | M. Lam, Scenography as New Ideology, pp. 35–36. 19 | M. Lam, Scenography as New Ideology, p. 24.

Curatorial Work Towards a New Relationship Between People, Places and Things

Tempor ary E xhibitions : S ubjects and P roblematics To boost the intrinsic relational value of culture we have been developing a precise programme of temporary exhibitions. To illustrate this strategy, three exhibitions (presented in chronological order) show the museum’s intervention in a debate that concerns us all: a greater awareness of the importance of innovative and socially responsible works in the areas of artisanship and design; its meaning for the development of local economies; and the importance of designing new services and attitudes that will contribute to a sustainable, truly equal and global future society. The themes and exhibitions are guided by these criteria. In 2010, the old bank vaults were opened up to the general public. Designed specifically for this place in 1964 by the prestigious brand Chubbsafes, originally from England, the 3532 rented safe deposit boxes enclosed money, riches and other personal valuables until 2009. The decision was to re-open the safe deposit boxes with an exhibition devoted to a real treasure upon which the survival of the species and the global sustainability depend on. Therefore, they were open to show 500 varieties of traditional seeds from Portugal and Spain. Simply displayed cereals, pulses, vegetables and aromatic herbs mirrored the diversity and wealth of the Mediterranean diet. The Seeds. Capital Asset exhibition enabled visitors to become acquainted with a cultural treasure (seeds) that is now under threat, at a time when seed banks, genetic manipulation, plant biodiversity, genetically modified food and impoverishment of diet is becoming increasingly topical. Seeds. Capital Asset provoked surprise due to its unexpected context in a design museum. For us, it was quite opportune, given the existence of the safes vault as a potential gallery space, and especially at a time Figure 1: Exhibition Seeds. Capital Asset, MUDE – Safes Vault, 2010, seeds details.

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when the production and distribution of foodstuff are under debate. One of the exhibition’s goals was to recall the importance of seeds in the development of humankind; they were once understood to be the origin of agriculture, the first settlements, monetary system, arithmetic and writing. The other goal was to call the attention of the media and help to raise the general public’s awareness for the preservation of this capital asset. To this end, debates were conducted with speakers from different backgrounds, under the topic of the Preservation of seeds and their importance in food diversity. The main conclusions were gathered in a catalogue, together with several healthy recipes created by young Portuguese chefs.20 In 2013, the exhibition Dentro de ti ó cidade (Within thee Ó! City)21 unveiled the participation process going on in the different neighbourhoods of Lisbon, through 30 BIP-ZIP (Priority Intervention Neighbourhoods or Zones) projects22 . These projects contribute to increasing citizenship and bottom-up organization, helping to establish a positive image of each territory. Following this spirit, the exhibition was conceived as an open, on-going process rather than an end in itself. The first floor was divided in 30 places, one for each of the 30 projects presented. Each promoter was responsible for the content, discourse and display. Although the result was fragmentary, the exhibition became very much alive and diverse. Among a wide range of activities, visitors could parti­ cipate in a communal kitchen that exchanged knowledge and recipes from various cultures. A feeling of belonging fulfilled the exhibition while visitors exchange ideas with each promoter, permanently present, discussing new forms of governance. The exhibition brought into the museum strategies that induce creativity to solve the daily life problems, invite interaction and local complicity, enhancing the anthropological dimension of each place. In 2013, MUDE presented The Institutional Effect, as part of the Architecture Triennial. More than an exhibition, this was a space for production and training, to speak and listen, to share experiences with workshops, reading areas, and screenings. Organised by various international institutions invited, the initiatives forged new paths and met the challenges architecture is facing. Curated by Dani Admiss, different organizations, from magazines to museums23, were invited to take up subsequent residencies. During three months, the second floor of the 20 | B. Coutinho, Seeds: Capital Asset. 21 | The title of the exhibition is a verse of José Afonso’s revolutionary song, Grândola, Vila Morena (1972) that was broadcasted on April 25, 1974, dawn as the second signal to start the Carnation Revolution. 22 | Cf: https://www.facebook.com/Energia.bipzip; http://bipzip.cm-lisboa.pt/; https:// lisboas.wordpress.com/2014/08/12/bipzip-program-2014-15-projects/ 23 | Center for Urban Pedagogy (US), Design as Politics (NL), Fabrica (IT), Institut für Raumexperimente (DE), Jornal Arquitectos (PT), LIGA, Espacio para Arquitectura (MX),

Curatorial Work Towards a New Relationship Between People, Places and Things

museum became a space for contemporary debate on architecture, urban planning and social action. The exhibition space provided everything each institution would need to host its event and treated the programming as a dynamic residency. Any visitor could simply join in on-going debates. The aim was to raise questions rather than give answers about the present and future society, through a diverse, participation-driven programme. The process of the exhibition itself, the words, the thoughts and ideas of everyone that crossed this “exhibition” were displayed throughout. Figure 2: Exhibition The Institutional Effect, MUDE – Second floor, 2013. Space and furnishings designed by the first resident institution, Italy-based Fabrica, for talks, meetings, workshops and other events.

E xhibition as an O pen D iscourse To explain in detail the open discourse strategy behind all MUDE exhibitions I will discuss two examples. Head to Head: Political Portraits was an exhibition from the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich that gathered together 250 political posters, showing the importance of image and design in the construction of the political discourse. At MUDE (2009) it was organized thematically, presenting the different strategies and communicative patterns used by politicians. For each theme, different times, political systems and personalities were displayed in close proximity, giving clues to evaluate the SALT (TR), Spatial Agency (UK), Storefront for Art and Architecture (US), Strelka Institute (RU), Urban-Think Tank (CH) and Z33 (BE).

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similarities, persistence and changes in each field. One of the advertisements was the 2007 Louis Vuitton billboard featuring Mikhail S. Gorbachev inside a car with a Louis Vuitton bag while devising the Berlin wall through the car window. In MUDE, it gained additional importance because it was displayed in a special way; directly hung on a ruined wall to draw the visitor’s attention and reflection. The exhibition Preview (2009) assembled a range of iconic pieces that changed life and society in the twentieth century. Rather than offer a linear historical presentation, the design and fashion pieces were presented under topics such as The Modern, between Concept and Image; Technology and Consumerism; Design, Communication and Image; Tradition and Modernity. This exhibition greeted visitors with the moment of explosion in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), a film that discards linear narrative to present new, experimental cinematography. Shot by shot, the explosion was brought closer and closer, with everyday objects projected onto the space, heading for the spectator. Intensified by Pink Floyd’s soundtrack, this explosion set the tone for the whole exhibition. In front of it, Russel Wright’s American Modern Dinnerware Service (1939)  – a product that brought about a revolution in American middle-class homes and contributed to the growth of consumer society – was exhibited. The intention was to create disjunctive tension and encourage visitors to question the reasoning behind this juxtaposition. Figure 3: Exhibition Preview, MUDE – Ground floor, 2009: The final explosion of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) as background to Russel Wright’s American Modern Dinnerware Service (1939). A short tension between middle-class consumer society and a counterculture.

Curatorial Work Towards a New Relationship Between People, Places and Things

At MUDE exhibitions are staged in a stark, half-ruined space, with no visual barriers. Pieces are presented in correlation with each other the space around each artwork and several open circuits, offering multiple visual dialogues. Visitors can almost touch the objects; walking around them, seeing them in the round. With small captions and interpretative texts, visitors can choose their own route: following the trajectory proposed by the museum through texts, maps or graphic elements; or exploring other routes, attracted by particular objects, images or music. Rather than a corridor with a one-way path, exhibitions promote different pathways to walk forward and backward. Conceived following Umberto Eco’s (1962) concept of open work, exhibitions challenge the public to construct both meaning and value. This curatorial approach is based on Eco’s theory, since we perceive an exhibition as a work and not merely as a device for the presentation of other works. Moreover, the reference to the concept of open work in the curatorial field is left open by Eco himself, as his theory focuses not on the inherent quality of art – by nature open to the interpretation of each visitor, especially from the second half of the twentieth century onward – but in the relationship and the communication established between the work and each one of its receivers.24 Bishop had already mentioned Eco as one of the pioneers of the relational aesthetic, calling attention to the fact that his theory concerns the reception of the work of art and not the work itself.25 Therefore, the exhibition works on the ideas of ‘discontinuity’, ‘unpredictability’ and ‘dialectic opposition’ between the exhibits. A further example of this tension, which Bishop refers to variously as “discomfort”, “awkwardness”, “friction” or “antagonism”26 is provided by Hans Wegner’s Classic Model JH 501 (1949) presentation, which is juxtaposed with the video of the television presidential election debate Kennedy vs. Nixon (1960) as background (Exhibition Preview, 2009). Displaying the chair with this broadcast stimulates reflection on the relationship between democracy and the power of the media and enacts the museum’s approach of suggesting various readings, rather than presenting a single and closed message. Thus each exhibition may be open to endless perspectives. Consequently, in a curatorial work the viewer must be taken into account: it is essential to create moments to stop, think and allow an individual’s autonomous interpretation to happen. This takes place within a certain order, but the exhibition relies on the visitor’s conscious and active participation. The strategy of an open discourse is also born from the awareness that our visual experience has become more complex, enriched by a century of photographic images, then cinematography (introduction of the sequence shot as a new dynamic 24 | U. Eco, Obra aberta, pp. 28–29. 25 | C. Bishop, Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, p. 62. 26 | C. Bishop, Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, pp. 77–79.

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Barbara Coutinho unity), enabling us to recognise as a ‘world’ a collection of disparate element (installation, for instance) that no unifying matter, no bronze, links. Other technologies may allow the human spirit to recognise other types of ‘world-forms’ still unknown. 27

Therefore, it is imperative that museums reflect the complexity of contemporary perceptions of reality. In an increasingly virtual era, galleries continue to be an opportunity to experience a direct relationship with art. Above all, assenting with Bourriaud when he says, “the aura of artworks has shifted towards their public”,28 an open discourse exhibition can contribute to a deeper, broader and inner participation. As a result the encounter with art and design may recover the notions of ‘here’ and ‘now’ and reinforce their importance for the development of a new sensibility and consciousness towards the implementation of global change.

27 | N. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, p. 20. 28 | N. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, p. 58.

Curating and Museum Education as Expansion of the Museum

Introduction Thomas Sieber When people speak about the expansion of museums, they are generally talking about the construction of a new wing. In the context of the following articles, these are only significant in so much as they can be a point of departure, an expression or outcome of a renewal of the conceptual framework of a museum. The postulate of the expansion of the museum through new forms of curation and education can be variously related to an institution which, until well into the twentieth century, was understood as a site of objects, of displaying and of instruction. Over the past four decades, the almost unquestioned assumptions of the museum became the subject of increased interrogation: the focus was and remains “its apparent neutrality and objectivity, its […] influential distinctions, the power of its forms of display and its overwhelmingly bourgeois, Western, patriarchal and national gestures of display”.1 The contributions in this section inscribe themselves into these critical confrontations. They deal with museums of cultural history which are connected to nations, regions, cities or neighbourhoods, and document various approaches to questions of representation and participation. A central subject is the construction of identities. The conception of museums as a site of identity politics oscillates in the contemporary discourse between the image of the factory or agency on the one hand, and the forum, arena, laboratory or contact zone on the other.2 The first image emphasises the meaning of the museum as an instrument of hegemonic domination and conveys a more mechanistic, unidirectional and dirigiste conception of the associated interpretive processes. The second image is different, evoking the image of the museum as a site of the negotiation of social values and forms of social belonging, which is in no way a conflict-free process. From this perspective – which is dominant in the contributions in this section – there is an increasing focus on those questions which are addressed by the concept of participation: which stakeholders are incorporated into decision-making processes on the subject and form of representations and identity 1 | N. Sternfeld, Involvierungen. 2 | On this, see J. Baur, Was ist ein Museum?, p. 39 ff.

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politics, and how? The possibilities of participation discussed in this context range from forms of interaction in exhibitions right through to forms of collaborative curating, and fulfil diverse functions with respect to the self-conception of the institution concerned.3 The article by Hanno Loewy deals with forms of interaction and the productive consequences of a strategy of ambiguity. Using the example of the Jüdisches Museum Hohenems (Jewish Museum Hohenems) – where he is the director – he looks into the question of how a museum whose name oscillates between the ascription of an identity and the designation of a field of study can be designed as an open space in which various conceptions of identity, different self-images and interpretations can come together, and in which cultural hegemony can be questioned. Paul Spies’ contribution also interrogates narratives of identity. He investigates the question of how a city museum with a rich tradition, such as the Amsterdam Museum, can address communities from the city which have rarely or never been reached, and integrate them into the ‘big picture’ of the history of the city. The former director of the institution argues for a process of renewal to expand the forms of representation and participation in museums, which would not fundamentally place in question the conventions of the institution and the expectations of their audience. It can hardly be a surprise that the question of how migration is dealt with in exhibitions plays a role in some of the texts gathered here. This is at the crux of the article by Thomas Sieber, who teaches in the field of the history and theory of museums and curating at the Zurich University of the Arts and who identifies two tendencies in the representation of migration in exhibitions in the German-speaking world. On this basis, he points out omissions and weak spots in the permanent exhibition Geschichte Schweiz (History of Switzerland) of the Landesmuseum Zürich (National Museum Zurich), which is a rare and important example of an institutionalisation of the history of migration. Against this backdrop, artistic and participatory strategies for the expansion of a normalising representation of migration are discussed. The contribution from Susan Kamel, who teaches at the University of Applied Sciences Berlin with a focus on critical museologies and postcolonial theory, is also dedicated to a critique of representation. Using the examples of the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum and the Museum für Islamische Kunst (Museum of Islamic Art) in Berlin from the research and exhibition project Experimentierfeld Museologie (Experimental Museology), the author shows how the practice of curation and education can be thought together in the process of exhibition development. Connected with this is the aim of both expanding 3 | On this, see Institute for Art Education, Zeit für Vermittlung, pp. 85–91 and pp. 112–118. See http://www.kultur-vermittlung.ch/zeit-fuer-vermittlung/, accessed 13.04.2016.

Curating and Museum Education as E xpansion of the Museum – Introduction

access to the participating museums and changing their content in terms of a post-representative form of curation and critical cultural education. The text by Jan Gerchow and Sonja Thiel deals with a second city museum, the Historisches Museum Frankfurt (Frankfurt Historical Museum). The Director of the institution and the curator of exhibitions in the Stadtlabor unterwegs (Mobile City Lab) format take a look at the renewal of an institution which as early as the 1970s had reinvented itself as a ‘museum for a democratic society’. With the current strategy, which focuses on the theme of the city, the institution wants to become an important site for public debates about the history, present and future of the Metropolitan Region of Frankfurt. Since the aim is to expand participation and to incorporate the knowledge of different communities, the article focuses on the Stadtlabor exhibitions, which have been carried out since 2011. These exhibitions allowed for explorations of new forms of collaboratively curating and representing different histories and groups. If it can be said that immaterial cultural assets already play a crucial role in the Stadtlabor exhibitions, then they are integral for the District Six Museum in Cape Town, which was opened in 1994 as the first ‘post-Apartheid museum’. In her article, the director of the institution, Bonita Bennett, shows how an institution can position itself as a site of remembrance for a neighbourhood whose population was relocated upon being declared a ‘whites-only area’ in 1966, and which was destroyed as a consequence. Using the example of two projects, she presents a museum in which curation and education work are not hierarchically arranged, but rather are understood as interrelated practices of a commitment to social change. This stance has its origins in the anti-Apartheid struggle of the 1980s and remains guided by the concerns of politically, socially and culturally discriminated groups.

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Identity and Ambiguity Experiences from Hohenems with the Objects of Dispersal Hanno Loewy

Peter Sloterdijk once referred to museums as the “school of alienation”.1 If it is true that museums are a space where the self can become estranged and the strange can become familiar, then this is extremely true of Jewish museums. At least in Europe, where the majority of Jewish museums post-1945 have not been established under the management of Jewish organisations, they spark never-ending discussions simply through their denomination. This sometimes means reformulating the names in an attempt to prevent the simplification of identity issues. In Warsaw today there is the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews; in Amsterdam, the Jewish Historical Museum; in Augsburg the Jewish Culture Museum; and in Laupheim the Museum on the History of Christians and Jews. Eventually though, colloquial language turns them into ‘Jewish museums’. And the ambiguity of such a term, which oscillates between an ascription of the subject matter and an ascription of identity, becomes constitutive for the museums themselves. However, they share this ambiguity with other museums as well. Cultural museums are a product of the history of secularisation and the process of democratisation. With their creation, the Wunderkammern of the rulers were opened to the people, and sacred art was opened up to the profane gaze. But the fervour of the Enlightenment also created new gods. And so the museums of the people became the museums of peoples, and the national museums became sites of nationalist worship. Their history begins with the founding of the Louvre in the spirit of the French Revolution. Opened on 10 August 1793, marking the celebrations of the anniversary of the storming of the Tuileries Palace and the festival of the unity and indivisibility of the Republic, the newly-founded museum was one of the “riches of the nation” and represented “the right of all people to this pleasure”, as Jacques Louis David put

1 | P. Sloterdijk, Museum.

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it in the national assembly.2 In the second half of the 19th century, however, there was an invocation of common cultural roots, which led to a prioritisation of unity, transcendeding the political demands of social movements. The museums of democracy became temples of a secular cult. Through this, museums had become a battleground and instrument of those who wanted to bring into play the (new) nations and regions, with their own claims to political validity and power. In 1857, when liberal representatives of the bourgeoisie in Vorarlberg formed a state museum association and demanded the foundation of a state museum, the unity invoked (and thereby ultimately the invention of the state of Vorarlberg) was expressed in the form of a political separatism from Tyrol, for which this new ‘unique’ culture and history was then put to use. With this differentiation of museums as places where ‘identity’ was constituted – indeed, invented – there was of course a shift in focus onto the culture of daily life, the valuing of the lowly and the average, on what was considered ‘typical’. Just as aristocratic-colonial access to foreign cultures gradually led to an appropriation of their ‘own folklore’, thereby invoking a quasi-natural unity of cultures through the medium of European ethnology, newly-created regional and local museums also began to simultaneously ennoble and defamiliarise everyday objects. In his attempt to conceive of the aura of an object as the flash of signification, Walter Benjamin pointed to the ambivalence that results from such processes: “the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be”.3 In the moment that we ennoble the object by placing in a museum, it also becomes foreign to us. Although physically near, it recedes from us when wrenched out of its everyday context and placed in a space of signification. The more desires of identity that we attempt to connect to it, the more foreign it becomes to us.

S paces of ambiguit y : the museum as a site of rel ation A museum is a place in which we can view things in rooms, and that also means from two (or more) sides. It is the movement of the visitors in the room that creates a context which is at turns narrative and discursive, in which conscious and unconscious decisions can create and dissolve new associations at any time. At the same time, the museum is a place in which we can  – in contrast to the reception of other cultural media – enter into a direct dialogue via this difference; a dialogue and a series of decisions that directly intervene in the reception of the medium itself. In doing so, it is important to consider the space that the museum offers as an ensemble of possibilities that provides the visitor 2 | G. Fliedl, The Invention of the Museum; The Pyramids of the Louvre, p. 306 f. 3 | W. Benjamin, Selected Works 4, p. 272.

Identity and Ambiguity

with real freedoms, to bring their own experiences to bear, setting them in relation to the viewing of objects and communicating them with other visitors. In this way, the ambiguity of the presented objects, their spatial presentation and annotations develop along different lines of tension. The tension between the sacred and the profane is inextricably perpetuated in the museum. That which was transferred from churches and monasteries into the museum in the course of secularisation is now a part of cultural history. And that which found its way from the profane culture of daily life into the museum was mythologised and charged with an aura of national culture reminiscent of religious devotion. The tension between past and present is addressed just as ambiguously in the museum. The musealisation of objects provides them with a presence that celebrates physical continuity, lifts them out of time, and confronts us with the direct presence of the past, while at the same time transforming them into something that they never were. Their spatial arrangement in the museum creates a further field of tension, namely that between the narrative intent of the curators and the will of the visitors, who trace their own paths through the exhibition, thereby – alone or in negotiation others – building their own network of relations and producing a discursive space which is constantly being recreated and can be repeated identically. Finally, every object is caught up in the tension between biography and history, belonging to its own web of meaning that a human life constitutes, from whose context it has now fallen out; at the same time though, as a social object, it also belongs to a history that was already there before the object came into the possession of an individual, from which it in turn – voluntarily or by force – has been torn. Museums are filled with objects by historical ruptures.

J e wish museums Jewish museums also emerged from the break with (religious) tradition and its reinvention as ‘cultural heritage’. The first foundations in 1900 already occurred ‘thanks’ to the dissolution of religious and traditional daily practices, the dissolution of lifeworlds under economic and political pressure, and migration – from rural communities to the cities as well as the mass migration flows from East to West. All of these ruptures – sometimes perceived by individuals as catastrophes, sometimes as departures  – transformed a religiously-shaped concept of Jewish tradition into a question of identity and culture. This tradition’s most important medium, the family, was not only under threat from the breakdown of the traditional structure of the large family through the course of migration, urbanisation and economic mobility, but also from the products of mass culture – and ultimately also the museum. The first Jewish

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museums mostly came into being through funding from Jewish communities or associated cultural organisations: in 1895 in Vienna, 1904 in New York, 1906 in Prague, 1909 in Budapest, 1912 in Worms, 1917 in Berlin, 1922 in Frankfurt, 1927 in Breslau (now Wrocław) and in 1932 in London.4 What they had in common was the attempt to preserve a particular tradition as a universal culture while at the same time inscribing it into the cultural heritage of the various countries. In this way the objects, which had been displaced from a disintegrating lifeworld, became carriers of a newly constructed cultural tradition and a special historical identity. And at the same time, they served as a testament of the survival of these cultures in the process of assimilation and acculturation which were intended to annul all particularity. The promise of the Enlightenment, for which they still advocated, was not delivered. What remained after the Shoah was a more radical homelessness than that which had already characterised the museum objects upon the founding of the museums prior to 1933. Now, the idea of ‘Jewish museums’ itself had become homeless, and for the diaspora therefore stood both for its destroyed reality as well as its still unrealised utopian potential. For this reason, Jewish museums are necessarily situated on the border, even if it is not a national border as it is in Hohenems. They deal with the history and present of a minority, including its religious dimension, that is simultaneously a source of the majority culture of Europe, of Christianity and of Islam. They mirror the ‘self’ in the ‘other’, without allowing themselves to be restricted to which ‘self’ and ‘other’ is being referred to. They question belonging, identity and demarcation more fundamentally than their trustees would have it, as well as sometimes their audiences. From the beginning, the Jüdisches Museum Hohenems (Jewish Museum Hohenems) has been an experiment that combined subjects, time periods and places in provocative, unsettling and sometimes ironic ways. Although founded under the formula of a ‘Jewish museum’ by ‘non-Jews’ for ‘non-Jews’, the history of its own foundation and the complex, individual heritage of some of its key figures was significantly more contradictory than this formula would have one believe. The museum openly challenges the preconceptions that its visitors bring with them, and is conscious of the local, regional and global networks that managed to push their way through in surprising ways, as it is for the political, social and cultural reality of the present. The diaspora of the Hohenems Jews and their descendants, and the diversity of their perspectives and affiliations is 4 | On the history of the foundation of Jewish museums, see J. Hoppe, Jüdische Geschichte und Kultur in Museen, p. 261 ff.; F. Heimann-Jelinek/W. Krohn, Das Erste Jüdische Museum; F. Heimann-Jelinek, Was übrig blieb; F. Heimann-Jelinek, Eine Sammlung in Wien; D. Rupnow, Täter – Gedächtnis – Opfer.

Identity and Ambiguity

also to be found in the museum’s projects – from the world-wide genealogy on the internet to the questioning of the ‘museum object’ in itself.

C ommunit y and diversit y The Hohenems museum has a specific community that facilitates this access. It is the intellectual centre of what is considered a cross-border region as well as the centre of a global Hohenems diaspora. It is thus both a regional ‘critical museum of local history’ and a diaspora museum that operates worldwide, a site of concentration and dispersal. It has therefore also always been a place confronted with the present’s questions of migration and acculturation and their attendant conflicts. At the time of its opening, it was emphasised that it would also be a place to interrogate questions relating to contemporary migration flows, a political venue able to go beyond the questions of Austrian or German processes of ‘coming to terms with the past’, as well as those of Jewish history. From its beginning, the museum, often in cooperation with partners in the community, has addressed fundamental and topical questions connected to the relations between ‘home’, ‘foreignness’ and socioeconomic reality (as with the educational outreach project Das Nützliche und das Fremde [The Useful and the Foreign]), intercultural communication (the Emser Halbmond community news supplement) and ultimately also the immigration story of the town itself, which can be seen in the Jewish quarter of Hohenems (the exhibition Lange Zeit in Österreich. 40 Jahre Arbeitsmigration [Long Time in Austria: 40 Years of Labour Migration]). The museum is also not afraid of using ironic interventions to undermine politicised and resentment-charged conflicts (for example the exhibition Wie baut man ein ‘ortsübliches’ Minarett? [How Do You Build a ‘Regionally Appropriate’ Minaret?]). Considering that the urban population of the Vorarlberg Rhine Valley is around 20 % Muslim and Alevi, most of whom have a Turkish background, it would seem obvious that cultural institutions whose remit involves community service should make an effort to address migrants as a target group. However the Jewish museum was for a long time one of the few established cultural organisers to take this part of their potential audience seriously. Thus the show Die Türken in Wien (The Turkish in Vienna) (Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek et al., 2011) was the first exhibition in Vorarlberg to be completely presented in both German and Turkish. This exhibition about the Sephardic Jews in Vienna and the Habsburg Empire, shown in Vienna primarily with German and English descriptions (and only limited text elements in Turkish), circumvented all conventional historical myths – the Ashkenazi myths, which had supplanted the Sephardic Jews, as well as the Turkish myths, which had consigned the multiculturalism of the Ottoman Empire to oblivion, but also the Austrian myths which only had space

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for the conflicts, but not the later close relationships and alliances between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Presenting this exhibition completely bilingually not only broke with cultural myths, but also with the established cultural hegemony of everyday life. Even though the visitors of Turkish origin were equally able to find their way around the exhibition via the German texts, the presence of Turkish texts was not only a symbolic recognition: they now had a head start in an unfamiliar area of representative culture. Where otherwise only deficits are recorded, here they were challenged to articulate their own wealth of experience, which consists substantially in being themselves one of the diverse minorities which find no possibility of articulation in homogenising Turkish discourses.

A mbiguit y as productive str ategy In a Jewish museum, visitors encounter themselves in the mirror of the ‘other’. And that is just as true for the non-Jewish visitor as it is for the Jewish visitor. This presents an opportunity: visitors are jarred in productive ways and are faced with decisions in which the museum and the people that work there act not as instructors but as interlocutors. This requires one thing above all: the fear of ambiguity must be cast aside. Additionally, the museum must of course also understand itself as an ‘open space’, as a place where various identities, conceptions of self and interpretations are able to meet, and where cultural hegemony can be questioned. In order to reach this goal, curiosity has to be cultivated – in both the visitors and the museum itself. In Hohenems, we have conducted a wide range of experiments in order to provoke in our guests a kind of intellectual vertigo, through which it is possible to ask new questions, but where it is also necessary to accept uncertainty. What does that mean for our work? It means that we look for themes which are not about conveying entrenched identities and information, but rather about posing questions which can be argued about in a civilised manner. So we do not explain why ‘the Jews’ do this or that, but instead look at why people give different answers to existential questions, and together we examine how cultures, traces of life, and identities emerge and transform. Ambiguity as a productive principle also means working consciously with irony. That can also be provocative. Irony also means not immediately knowing how something is meant. And that is exactly what challenges people more acutely than anything else. Exhibition titles can be precise and descriptive, but also irritatingly ambiguous. This can really approach the threshold of a provocative deception. Our exhibition Die ersten Europäer. Habsburger und andere Juden (The First Europeans:

Identity and Ambiguity

Habsburgs and other Jews) (Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek and Michaela FeursteinPrasser, 2014) was of course not an attempt to produce evidence of a Jewish origin of the Habsburgs, but rather to investigate the proto-European lifeworld of the Jews of the Habsburg Empire and other Jews in Europe across seven centuries: their mobility, multilingualism, and role in cultural transfer, their transnational networks and reflections, and their suffering in the European catastrophe of 1914. Although the House of Habsburg urged us to disclose that their lineage can supposedly be traced back to King David, many visitors became agitated and consequently went into to the exhibition keenly alert. Every museum curator knows those visitors who are primarily looking to see that the things they want to see can be found in a particular exhibition, and when that is not the case, they just can’t wait to set the museum staff straight. We attempt, however, to create exhibitions for people who are curious about things they have not yet been able to imagine. Of course, that requires a particular attitude: we don’t want to create exhibitions because we know better, but rather because in doing so we can find out something new. We invite our guests to help us in this task. We not only draw out the curiosity of visitors, but also confront them with our own curiosity. Each of our exhibitions demands participation from them. That can mean involving a large number of people, along with their experiences, stories, and relationships with objects in the development of an exhibition – as in the projects So einfach war das (As Easy As That) (Hanno Loewy, 2004), Ein gewisses jüdisches etwas (A Certain Jewish Something) (Katarina Holländer, 2010), or the exhibition Jukebox. Jewkbox. Ein jüdisches Jahrhundert auf Schellack und Vinyl (Jukebox – Jewkbox! A Jewish Century on Shellac and Vinyl) (Hanno Loewy, 2014). In all of these exhibitions, people were asked for objects, pictures and stories, whose discourse the exhibition then arranged. This demands design concepts that not only situate visitors in relation to the exhibition’s objects – or more precisely, offer them a decision-making space full of possible relations – but which also allow them to enter into relationships with each other, with the infinite variety of human possibilities, for which the museum provides a civil framework. Treten Sie ein! Treten Sie aus! Warum Menschen ihre Religion wechseln (Step Right In! Step Right Out! Why People Change Their Religion) (Hannes Sulzenbacher with Regina Laudage, 2012), the exhibition about conversion and converts, developed a biographical treasure hunt between different forms of transition that confronted the visitors with their own religious doubts, objections and desires. In the same way, the giant counter of a utopian ‘Jewish record store’ in Jewkbox directly asked visitors to mutually observe each other upon their immersion into individual histories via existential experiences with records, and at some point to take the issue into their own hands and seize the opportunity and to share a story with their random counterpart that they had been carrying around with them for half of their lives. In doing so, the visitors ulti-

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mately transformed from something very private into something popular, participated in a process of ‘self-reinvention’ and in the face of a loss of tradition and migration and wishes for recognition and belonging, added a new chapter to the largely ‘Jewish history’ of popular culture and of the 20th century music industry. In one project, we took these approaches – irony, mirroring, ambivalence, participation  – to the extreme. In the exhibition Was Sie schon immer über Juden wissen wollten… aber bisher nicht zu fragen wagten (Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Jews… But Were too Afraid to Ask) (Hannes Sulzenbacher, 2012) we radically called into question the status of the subject of the exhibition itself, openly articulating those questions that visitors would like to ask in Jewish museums but don’t ‘dare’ to pose, and then turning them back on the visitors themselves. For often the fantasies and imaginary worlds behind such questions prove to be more exciting than the subjects are in reality. Thus we confronted the visitors with contradictory answers and with objects for which it was often not possible at first glance (and also at the second) to see whether they were documents or artworks, ‘real’ or ‘fake’. Emblematic of this was an object that to date has always been presented as an ‘artwork’: the Lego Auschwitz by Zbigniew Libera – seven boxes that resemble Lego packaging containing pieces (including piles of corpses and SS guards) that allow kids to recreate Auschwitz in their bedrooms – just like on the package. Libera used only commercially available Lego blocks and the imagination of the visitors in order to provoke an illusionary scandal: is art allowed to do this? However, with the associated question “can we ever be done with the Holocaust?”, some visitors began to ‘misunderstand’ the object and actually began to ask themselves why Lego had transgressed this final taboo. In doing so, they arrived where Libera had wanted them to: a state in which reality and fantasy are no longer easy to separate and begin to question each other in truly radical ways. In the mini-cinema of the Hohenems exhibition, Yael Bartana’s project about a fictional Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland – or, more precisely, a movement which exists only within her artwork, which was first presented at the 2013 Venice Biennale in the secure cocoon of the art world – also became the object of the question “do all Jews belong to Israel?”, and a source of disagreement among visitors as to whether this heretical movement (and its call to ‘return’ to Poland) really existed and, more importantly, “What if…?”. Harley Swedler circumvented all boundaries with his karaoke video on the question of where Jews can feel at home. To the tune of ‘Edelweiss’, Swedler imitated the singing of Christopher Plummer (who played Baron von Trapp in the 1965 film version of The Sound of Music) with deceptive accuracy, albeit undressed and sitting in a meadow behind his own house on Long Island. In what many visitors found an uncomfortable form of participation, a microphone and a question asked visitors: “Is it permissible to say Jew?” Those

Identity and Ambiguity

who dared were able to hear themselves five seconds later and could then answer the question: “Did it sound the way you meant it?” Zoya Cherkassky’s installation of two identical, somewhat swollen coke bottles cast in aluminium, with one label in Hebrew and the other in Arabic, commented on the question of whether Israelis and Palestinians should live in one state or two, suggesting the heretical answer that this might not even make a difference. Finally, the kosher stamp of the Hüttenbach community, which was a loan from the Jüdisches Museum Franken (Jewish Museum of Franconia), was presented in relation to the question of “what is kosher” in such a way that it wasn’t clearly visible, and the viewer was left with no other choice than to believe that it was a real kosher stamp (in the same way that in other situations, we are forced to believe that a kosher stamp is ‘real’, event though we know that isn’t always the case…). In any case, the discussions that these exhibitions triggered, both amongst visitors and amongst colleagues, were certainly very real. And at the end of the exhibition everyone was able to leave any questions that hadn’t been asked or answered over the course of the exhibition in a mailbox, which we then answered seriously on our blog. Every single one! Anyone wishing to view the answers is more than welcome to do so.5

Figure 1: Hanno Loewy, Harley Swedler and “Edelweiss”.

5 | See http://www.wassieschonimmerueberjudenwissenwollten.at/, accessed 13.04.​ 2016.

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Figure 2: In the exhibition Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Jews …

Figure 3: Zbigniew Liberas “Lego Auschwitz” in the exhibition Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Jews …

Figure 4

City History Museums as Generators of Participation Paul Spies

The concept of museum education is constantly changing. A modern museum encourages active participation from its visitors. The Amsterdam Museum (before 2011: Amsterdams Historisch Museum) has been experimenting with education for over four decades and is still seeking the most effective way to reach out to different target audiences. Here I will focus on two projects which exemplify these efforts: Buurtwinkels (Neighbourhood Shops, 2011) and Turkse Pioniers in Amsterdam (Turkish Pioneers, 2012). Both projects tried to reach out to city inhabitants that are not regular or natural visitors of museums, and both took place in the local neighbourhood. In both cases we tried to give the floor to the inhabitants to be the storytellers. In our view both cases were (and are) core business for a city museum. And in both cases we succeeded in reaching our goals, but after thorough evaluations we also had to conclude that both projects could be improved on.

The A msterdam M useum and its satellites The Amsterdam Museum opened in 1975 on its current location, the former orphanage of the city.1 The museum consists of an elaborate complex of buildings from the seventeenth century. The orphanage was founded on the original site of a secluded cloister and as a consequence it is hidden behind the houses of the Kalverstraat, for centuries the most popular shopping street in town. The three entrances are all difficult to find for everyone but the tourists who follow the subtle signposts in the streets, or the directions in their guidebooks. Consequently, more than half of the visitors consist of tourists from abroad that admire the beautifully restored inner courtyards (the complex has 1 | On the origins and history of the Amsterdam (Historical) Museum, see: R. Kistemaker, (ed.), Barometer van het stadsgevoel.

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no front along the street!). The interior consists of a maze of rooms that are connected by countless steps and stairs. Therefore, it’s quite difficult to offer visitors a clear and telling route. For disabled people the visit is very complicated and some parts of the building are impossible for them to visit. In 1975 this was apparently no issue, but today we question the democracy of such an institution. Therefore, the Amsterdam City Arts Council has recently charged the alderman of culture with the task of securing a more visible and easier to find building, that is more suitable to show the rich collection of Amsterdam and to welcome visitors without barriers to access. This will give the curatorial board of the Amsterdam Museum the opportunity to reinvent the concept of the city history museum. The mission of the Foundation Amsterdam Museum, the privatized institution that directs the museum since 2009, is twofold: 1. to take care of the Amsterdam Collection (the historical objects and the art objects [mostly] dating from before 1900) and three buildings: the main building, the canal house museum Willet-Holthuysen and the new storehouse in the north of Amsterdam; 2. to present the Amsterdam Collection and to tell the history of the city and its classic art to the general public. The second mission is especially complex, because of the many dualistic aspects of a city museum in a popular and museum-dense touristic city and with a very prestigious art collection, as is the case with the Amsterdam Museum. It raises questions such as: • Should we focus on the popular art (-historical) aspect, which brings us many traditional museum visitors, or should we focus on storytelling to reach out to other, less museum-minded goal groups? • Should we focus on tourists, who love the museum for the explanation of the Dutch Golden Age (17th century) and of the permissive society (since the seventies), or should we focus on the current and former inhabitants of the city who are mainly interested in ‘nostalgia’ and/or current social issues? • Should we primarily promote the museum as a leisure attraction, or should we be a scholarly institute for serious research and public debate? The truth is, of course, that we are expected to meet all of the above-stated needs, a situation which most city museums are in.2 The consequence of 2 | See P. Spies, Verbinding aangaan, pp. 13–18; and R. Kistemaker, Barometer van het stadsgevoel, pp. 45–48.

City History Museums as Generators of Par ticipation

catering for all these groups is that we suffer from an unclear reputation, which is – in marketing terms – a very bad idea: if you try to reach out to ‘everybody’, you will attract almost nobody! Therefore, the Amsterdam Museum has already developed several locations with different products for different goal groups and we are thinking of dividing the collection into further permanent and/or temporary locations. A good example of this is the new permanent exhibition, called Gallery of the Golden Age, which we developed in one of the two wings of the Hermitage Amsterdam, the (independent) Dutch satellite of the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. There we display spectacular group portraits from the seventeenth century that mainly attract art lovers from Holland and abroad. Naturally we combine these great (in both senses of the word!) works of art with storytelling about the renowned former Dutch Republic, but the chief attraction for visitors remains the art, which is always the central focus of the temporary exhibitions of our partner in the Hermitage Amsterdam. In fact we ‘use’ the reputation of our partner to gain more exposure for the great art in our collection and consequently achieve more success: every week 4000 – 5000 additional visitors see our masterpieces. Only once inside visitors can read that the real curator and beneficiary of this gallery is in fact the Amsterdam Museum. In this way, we meet our obligation to show our masterpieces, so that we can focus elsewhere on other goal groups. I will now focus on two of these goal groups and the products we developed for them: the inhabitants of the neighbourhoods (Buurtwinkels) and the Turkish-Dutch community (Turkse Pioniers in Amsterdam).

The dualistic museum : education and participation But before I describe our efforts to reach out to these communities, I would like to elaborate a little on the development of museum education in general. Museums, especially city museums, are more and more aware that the audience should not be regarded solely as receivers of information. A modern museum encourages its visitors to take an active role.3 Therefore, contemporary museum education professionals dedicate much of their time to developing new means of communicating with audiences. But I like to stress here that the same museum professionals still have to work with more ‘conservative’ forms of education too, especially in history museums. Many visitors, from the youngest to the elderly, expect the history museum to tell about historical events and to explain what these events have meant to the city. They first want to look, listen and understand before they feel encouraged to participate with their own knowledge, ideas or feelings. They 3 | N. Simon, The Participatory Museum; A. Odding, Het disruptieve museum.

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even feel annoyed if the museum gives no information first, since they still see the museum in the first place as an active institute for leisure and learning, not as a facilitator of self-help or as an organizer of workshops: “We paid for our tickets, didn’t we?” Therefore, the core business of the educational (history) museum staff is still to research, write and tell. But the dualistic attitude demands that having met this obligation, the museum must switch to asking and listening. Finally, they have to assist the audience with integrating the participatory content into a cohesive whole. Many new educational means have been developed to combine these two sides of education from the start. New media are instrumental in this respect. In the permanent presentation on the city’s short history, Amsterdam DNA, for instance, we included a computer game in which every visitor discovers their own dominant Amsterdam-DNA-component (“Are you foremost an entrepreneur, a creative, a freethinker or a well-doer?”). After the result of this playful self-analysis is revealed, visitors can download an app which guides them along the historical sites in the inner city that are linked to their dominant Amsterdam-DNA-component. We call this interactive, but it’s still not as participatory as described by Nina Simon in her work The Participatory Museum. For thoroughgoing participation, museums must involve a visitor and ask him about his own experiences, stories and ideas. Our website and social media are instrumental in this respect. For nearly every product, exhibition or event, we compose an interactive site on the subject. The first renowned interactive internet site the Amsterdam Museum developed and that served and still serves as example or inspiration for many identical sites was Het Geheugen van Oost (The Memory of East, since 2002). For this project, countless stories on a specific neighbourhood were written by museum professionals, volunteers and (site) visitors. This first truly interactive museum website still exists and is managed by now by an independent group of volunteers.4 In the initial stages of the development of most of our projects we research content by launching a website on the subject and inviting the audience to deliver stories. Thus, the exhibition Football Hallelujah! (2014) was partly composed with the objects and stories we collected through the specific internet site developed for this project. Even more drastic in this respect was the exhibition Johan en ik (Johan and me, 2013), which focused on encounters of fans with the famous Dutch soccer player Johan Cruyff. Both the website and exhibition consisted solely of the photographs and stories of people who had met Cruyff, and which we received from them mostly through our website and social site Het Hart (The Heart). 4 | See www.hetgeheugenvanoost.nl.

City History Museums as Generators of Par ticipation

Recently, we developed with five Dutch partner museums the project Mix Match Museum, that enabled the audience to produce their own exhibition from the collections of the participating museums: first anybody could propose a personal idea on the internet, and later – if your proposition was selected by a jury – a version in the real museum was realized (www.mixmatchmuseum.nl/ home). Four out of nearly one hundred proposals for the Amsterdam Museum were selected. The ‘winners’ assisted also at the mounting of their exhibitions (April to July 2015).

N eighbourhood shops The subject of a city history museum is by definition very participative: potentially every inhabitant can contribute with his or her personal story as part of the whole of the city history. The city museum can benefit from the content inhabitants provide to write the story of the city. And the city itself can benefit from these projects if they cover a relevant current issue. Such was the case in the ambitious and comprehensive project Buurtwinkels (Neighbourhood shops, 2011). The research for this perennial project was started in 2008, when it was launched as the Amsterdam contribution to a larger European project, Entrepreneurial Cultures in European Cities.5 Together with research institutes and partner city museums from all over Europe we ascertained the development that since the last decade of the twentieth century most small shops in the neighbourhoods are taken over by migrants. Thus, the character and atmosphere of these neighbourhoods change from a ‘traditional’ into a multicultural appearance. Thanks to the enterprising, hardworking and undemanding newcomers many small shops in the neighbourhoods stay alive in spite of the ever-growing dominance of large supermarkets. The survival of small shops seems to be of great value for the neighbourhood community: they bring liveliness and safety to the streets, social interaction within and between the different communities, and personal service to needy clients. On the other hand the takeover of shops by migrants is frequently experienced by native inhabitants as alienating: they tend to look back in nostalgia to their own youth when “everything still was good” (true or not). For the Amsterdam Museum this issue seemed to be the perfect subject to reach out to the neighbourhood communities. We developed an elaborate program consisting of a large exhibition in the museum (Buurtwinkels, March to August 2011), two temporary satellites in the neighbourhoods in the same period, an elaborate website (launched in 2009 as part of the participative research program) and many, many more products made by the museum and/or all kinds of partners. 5 | R. Klags et al., Involving new audiences.

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For perhaps the first time in the history of the museum, the exhibition in the museum building itself wasn’t regarded as the main focus by the museum staff: it was the real integration of all sub-projects into one whole. The website and the satellites were seen as important as the central exhibition. Also, the museum staff altered their normal routine for the first time: about half of the staff served as ‘story collectors’ and event organizers in the neighbourhoods and satellites. In this respect Buurtwinkels was an extremely innovative project for the museum. The results and evaluation where published in In de aanbieding. Dilemma’s, aanbevelingen en resultaten project Buurtwinkels (On offer. Dilemma, recommendations and results of the project Neighbourhood Shops). The most important conclusions are as follows: Innovative as it may have been, Buurtwinkels was quite expensive and the result in numbers was rather modest. The museum spent an estimated 350.000 €, not counting the hours of the staff.6 About half of this budget was provided by specialized funds: Fonds voor Cultuurparticipatie (fund for cultural participation) and the participatory department of the Mondriaan Fund, the state art fund. A board member of the museum stated: “One visitor of the local satellites is worth at least ten visitors of the museum”, which shows that the participation of people that are not common museum clients was one of the greatest ambitions of this project. One could ask oneself whether all these temporary efforts had a permanent result. Did ‘newcomers’ continue participating in cultural activities and engaging with historical institutions after the introduction we offered them through Buurtwinkels? This is difficult to say, but the website still exists and stories are still added to it regularly, the exhibition in one of the two satellites is continued by the local shopkeeper (a Turkish teahouse; the owner even started to collect and display historical objects of local shops himself!) and the shop windows in some streets still present the history of the shops concerned. Also, or maybe even more importantly: many contacts the museum made in the neighbourhoods still exist, thus the museum has developed a useful network in the neighbourhoods, waiting for the next communal project. 6 | A. van Eekeren, In de aanbieding: For this budget some 400 shops participated, 15.000 to 20.000 people visited the central exhibition, about 2.500 people visited the two temporary museum locations in the neighbourhoods and were invited face-to-face to contribute to the exhibition (about 50 percent of them never visited the Amsterdam Museum before), approx. 80.000 people visited the website, 500 personal stories about 300 different shops were collected and published on the website, 130 current shopkeepers were portrayed, 50 events were organized, 180 objects were collected, and 60 institutes worked together.

City History Museums as Generators of Par ticipation

Furthermore, we believe that we contributed to the political discussion on the value of small shops in the neighbourhoods in general, and especially in the neighbourhoods we were active in. The existing society of shopkeepers in the neighbourhood in Amsterdam-East (Javastraat), where we rented out the front part of the mentioned Turkish teahouse, was empowered by the project and since then the big local supermarket takes more responsibility for its smaller counterparts in the street. The housing corporation that is the main renovator of the neighbourhood in Amsterdam-North, where we were present with a second satellite, is even more aware now of the importance of small shops in the neighbourhood and has been systematically planning and promoting small shops ever since the project. But we should also be honest about many critical observations: • The ‘price per participant’ is rather high (mainly one-time financed by funds and stakeholders such as housing corporations and local authorities); • The (rather costly) central exhibition could have been left out if we had focused on the main ambition: participation of newcomers in the neighbourhoods; • The organization and exploitation of stand-alone, temporary satellites is a very complicated and expensive enterprise, therefore it would have been better if we would have installed ourselves in already well visited, existing locations, such as local galleries, theatres and libraries; • Many participative contributions were delivered by educated, ‘traditional’ museum clients. Many of them provided us with rather nostalgic stories about ‘historical situations’. Most stories from migrants the museum staff had to collect (very!) actively and were therefore not as participative as we had hoped for; • The political influence of a museum shouldn’t be overestimated in a field where big parties spend high investments on the cityscape. They listen to us with a polite smile and continue to do their own thing. Our warnings against the disruption of communities through gentrification do not win the battle against the always rising prices of city space; • and museum staff aren’t ‘street corner workers’ for a reason: although they enjoyed the field work for this one time, they were also very glad to return to their offices for the next project, which in most cases involved more ‘traditional’ museum work.

Turkish P ioneers Consequently, the Amsterdam Museum teamed up with local institutions to present the end results of the next neighbourhood project: Turkse Pioniers in

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Amsterdam (Turkish Pioneers in Amsterdam, 2012). This project was part of a larger one that celebrated 400 years of Turkish-Dutch relationships in 2012. Our main ambition was to show both historical and contemporary connections between Amsterdam locals and migrants from Turkey. We wanted to involve as many migrants as possible. This time, having learned from the Neighbourhood Shops project, we decided that the central exhibition in the main museum building should focus on the traditional museum audience. Therefore, the larger part of the exhibition presented the ever-popular Dutch Golden Age, when the contacts with the Osman Empire were initiated. To illustrate this adventurous (from the Dutch perspective!) period we could make use of a spectacular ensemble of old art objects, given on loan by the Rijksmuseum, depicting the historical situation in Istanbul in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Together with a set of beautiful photographic portraits of contemporary people in Turkey with Dutch origins, we covered the largest goal group of Dutch people traditionally visit the Amsterdam Museum, although we had also wished to welcome a considerable amount of visitors from Amsterdam with Turkish roots. We are not sure whether we succeeded there, but to reach out more to the Turkish community in Amsterdam we chose a location that is well known to them: the former shipyard Nederlandsche Scheepsbouw Maatschappij (NDSM) in Amsterdam-North. Many of the early Turkish “guest workers” from the seventies in Amsterdam got their first job at this shipyard, that has ceased to exist already a few decades ago. Since then this former industrial site has been redeveloped into a hip area for the creative class: artist’s and designer’s studios, multimedia and internet production companies, television and film production companies and the like. One of these new users is Nieuw Dakota (www.nieuw​ dakota.nl), a contemporary art gallery. We were somewhat surprised to hear that this sophisticated art gallery seemed to be interested to stage our exhibition on the first Turkish guest workers. The exhibition consisted of elaborate portraits of six elderly Turkish-Dutch men who had worked as guest workers at the wharf, in written and filmed form and through objects and old photographs. They were presented as proud heroes who left their homeland to find a better future for themselves and their families. To meet the wishes of the gallery this exhibition was tastefully designed and produced. It all worked perfectly: from the opening onwards, the elderly former guest workers and their families and friends took the opportunity to combine the exhibition with revisiting the former wharf, a site that was for many of them somewhat nostalgic, despite the harsh work they had been obliged to do there. The gallery was pleased to conclude that within the 40 days of the exhibition’s opening, hundreds of Amsterdammers with Turkish roots had visited the exhibition. In the visitors’ book and on the exhibition’s website many visitors and other interested people left stories about their personal experiences. Children and grandchildren tended to revise their

City History Museums as Generators of Par ticipation

opinion on their parents and grandparents: they now understood their history better, and because of the respectful, even sophisticated character of the exhibition they felt proud of it. Many Dutch visitors became more aware what bold and brave personalities these first guest workers had been. In short: their reputation changed from ‘foreign losers’ to ‘exotic pioneers’. Maybe Turkish Pioneers wasn’t as participative at the high level as described by Simon7 in her ground-breaking publication on participation; after all, it was constructed using traditional educational and curatorial methods. However, this project still demonstrated the potential impact of participatory processes on the Amsterdam Museum’s overall agenda: it showed that in city history nearly every personal story has some historical relevance. But more than that: by collecting and presenting these stories, the city museum seeks to include the history of minority communities that traditionally were not represented in the big picture of city history.

Figure 1: Portrait Gallery of the Golden Age, Hermitage Amsterdam, 2014. This gallery is a satellite of the Amsterdam Museum which shows the large group portraits from the seventeenth century and tells the story of civic virtue in the Golden Age of Holland.

Figure 2: Amsterdam DNA, Amsterdam Museum, 2011. 7 | N. Simon, The Participatory Museum.

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Figure 3: Turkish Pioneers, Nieuw-Dakota, 2012. This exhibition from the Amster­ dam Museum was mounted in several locations outside the museum, such as in the former harbour area in the north of Amsterdam, where the presented persons found their first jobs in Holland.

Figure 4: The counter of one of the satellites of the Amsterdam Museum during the project Buurtwinkels, 2011. Staff and volunteers of the Amsterdam Museum collected personal stories of locals on (the history of) their favourite neighbourhood shop.

Exhibiting Migration Forms of Representation between Visibility and Invisibility Thomas Sieber

The musealisation of migration is thriving. It has been noted on a number of occasions that exhibitions on the theme of migration are undergoing a veritable boom,1 and this has only been confirmed by research projects and reports by stakeholders in cultural and museum policy.2 But this does not mean that the representation of migration  – understood as a migratory movement that crosses borders  – by museums has attained the significance which would correspond to those developments which have led to the present era being described as the ‘Age of Migration’. It is true that even in Europe, issues related to migration phenomena are an integral part of the cultural, social and political reality. In order to describe a society permeated by a range of factors related to migration, the idea of the “migration society” has taken root in recent years.3 The question of how the history and present of migration is represented in national museums also appears particularly pertinent given that it is in this context that “national, ethnic and cultural conditions of belonging” are discussed.4 A look at the history of the modern museum since the eighteenth century reveals just how tightly it is bound up with the development and real1 | See for example J. Baur, Die Musealisierung der Migration, p. 11; R. Wonisch, Mu­ seum und Migration, p. 14. 2 | See for example C. Whitehead et al., Museums, Migration and Identity in Europe; Deutscher Museumsbund, Museen, Migration und kulturelle Vielfalt. 3 | For the term Migrationsgesellschaft (lit. “migration society”) see P. Mecheril: SubjektBildung in der Migrationsgesellschaft. The term does not neatly correspond to any of the terms that are prevalent in English-speaking discourse such as “immigrant society” or “multicultural society”, and refers to the fact that society as a whole is affected by processes of migration – in the fields of economics, politics, culture, education and others – and to the fact that the so-called “order of belonging” distributes privilege. 4 | P. Mecheril, Subjekt-Bildung in der Migrationsgesellschaft, p. 13. See also N. Stern­ feld, Kontaktzonen der Geschichtsvermittlung, p. 14 f. and p. 40 ff.

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isation of the idea of the nation and national identity.5 It is undeniable that the congruence of culture, population and territory, which was postulated until well into the second half of the twentieth century, has crumbled, and that “the construction of the nation as a community with a shared culture, history and memory […] is no longer convincing”6. Numerous studies have investigated the ways in which national museums have responded to these challenges.7 The diagnosed “crisis of the presentation of national themes in museums” has led national museums, especially those involved with cultural history, to seek new ways of representing the nation, and alternative kinds of community-founding narratives.8 It is against such a backdrop that I will consider the question of how migration has been dealt with in recent years in museums and exhibitions in German-speaking countries generally, and in Switzerland in particular. Firstly I will identify some of the tendencies of exhibitions on migration since the late 1990s. On this basis, and using the example of the permanent exhibition Geschichte Schweiz (History of Switzerland), which opened at the Landesmuseum Zürich (National Museum Zurich) in 2009, I will investigate how the history of migration is told, who is made visible and what kinds of effects this representation can have. Following this, I will discuss three exhibition projects that have dealt with issues related to migration. Using them as an example, approaches capable of revamping the representation of migration, broadening the discourse and opening up new spheres of agency need to be discussed.

M igr ation on show : tendencies in G erman - spe aking countries Although Switzerland has been a country of immigration since at least the 1960s, and questions regarding immigration and asylum policy are a major political issue, migration didn’t become a relevant theme of exhibitions until after the turn of the millennium. It was only in the late 1990s that museums – as was also the case in Germany and Austria – began to show an interest in this topic.9 There are a number of reasons for this. At this stage I would like to 5 | On this see T. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum; S. J. Macdonald, Nationale, postnationale und transkulturelle Identitäten und das Museum. 6 | J. Baur, Die Musealisierung der Migration, p. 60. 7 | See R. Beier-de Haan, Erinnerte Geschichte – Inszenierte Geschichte, C. Sutherland, Leaving and Longing; C. Whitehead et al., Migration and Identity in Europe. 8 | J. Baur, Die Musealisierung der Migration, p. 65. 9 | Regarding Germany, see D. Osses, Perspektiven der Migrationsgeschichte in deut­ schen Ausstellungen und Museen; regarding Austria, see C. Hintermann, Migrationsgeschichte ausgestellt.

Exhibiting Migration

emphasise two fundamental aspects regarding Switzerland. Firstly, museums are “identity machines”, whose “primary function is to spatially [establish] the homeland, tradition and belonging, and to [subdivide] them into national, cantonal, regional, valley-wide, city-wide, and neighbourhoods”10. From within this logic, migration appears as a “regrettable incursion” or even as an “interruption of the normal state of things”11. Secondly, in Switzerland this normality is linked in a particular way to a consensus-generating narrative of the nation as a so-called “nation of will”. In the absence of any ethno-cultural or politico-ethnic unity, since the end of the nineteenth century a narrative has been created that served to integrate “the people” and “the nation”, “ethnos” and “demos”, into a history of national development, thereby generating a sense of continuity and legitimacy.12 Phenomena relating to migration, however, concern histories, people and conflicts that could amount to moments of disruption to, and divergence from, this narrative. Therefore it is perhaps not surprising if cultural history museums – in particular those dedicated to a nation, canton or city and functioning as identity-generating “consensus factories” – struggle at length to acknowledge the reality of a society shaped by migration.13 Regarding the representation of migration in exhibitions in German-speaking countries since the middle of the 1990s, two tendencies can be identified. I would like to characterise the first development using the concepts macro-perspective, normality and integration. A long-term perspective, reference to major academic and scientific categories, a focus on the ‘normalisation of migration’ both historically and currently, as well as a reliance on the paradigm of integration is characteristic of exhibitions such as WIR. Zur Geschichte und Gegenwart der Zuwanderung nach Wien (US: On the past and present of immigration in Vienna: Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien/Historical Museum of the City of Vienna, 1996), Fremde in Deutschland  – Deutsche in der Fremde (Foreigners in Germany  – Germans Abroad: Museumsdorf Cloppenburg/Cloppenburg Museum Village, 1999) and In der Fremde. Migration und Mobilität seit der Frühen Neuzeit (Abroad: Migration and Mobility since the Early Modern Period: Historisches Museum Basel/Basel Historical Museum, 2010).14 The exhibition 10 | W. Leimgruber, Immaterielles Kulturerbe – Migration – Museum, p. 72 f. 11 | ibid., p. 73. 12 | See R. Argast, Staatsbürgerschaft und Nation; J. Tanner, Nationale Identität und kollektives Gedächtnis. 13 | On the concept of consensus factories, see O. Marchart, Warum Cultural Studies vieles sind, aber nicht alles, p. 8. 14 | D. Osses, Perspektiven der Migrationsgeschichte in deutschen Ausstellungen und Museen, p. 73. Cf. the exhibition catalogues: Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien, WIR; U. Meiners & C. Reinders-Düselder, Fremde in Deutschland – Deutsche in der Fremde; Historisches Museum Basel, In der Fremde.

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in Basel included a typology of 18 reasons for migrating – which ranged from “artist’s tours” to “political persecution and exile” – and, using “representative life stories” and corresponding exhibits, aimed to show that “migration history is self-evidently a part of Basel’s history”15. However the tendency to understand migration as a kind of atemporal, anthropological constant runs the risk of failing to adequately take into account the diversity of contexts, the plurality of the people involved and the variety of conflicts, thus contributing to its trivialisation.16 The second tendency in representing migration can be characterised by the concepts micro-perspective, multiple perspectives and participation. Along with the trail-blazing exhibitions Fremde Heimat. Eine Geschichte der Einwanderung aus der Türkei (Foreign Homeland – Yaban, Silan olur: A history of immigration from Turkey: Ruhr Museum Essen, 1998) and Gastarbajteri – 40 Jahre Arbeitsmigration (Gastarbajteri – 40 Years of Labour Immigration: Wien Museum/Vienna Museum, 2004), which were both created in cooperation with civic organisations, mention should also be made of the exhibition Da und fort: Leben in zwei Welten – Immigration und Binnenwanderung in der Schweiz (Here and Away: Living in Two Worlds – Immigration and Internal Migration in Switzerland: Museum für Gestaltung/Museum of Design, Zürich, 1999).17 It too was the result of a participatory research and exhibition project by migrants, socio-cultural advisors and social scientists and involved life-history interviews, object-oriented discussions and the creation of a collection of artefacts. This approach is distinguished by a focus on a specific issue, the use of field research methods and close cooperation between museums and organisations run by and for migrants. Yet the extent to which traditional narratives are being reproduced, socio-political problems rendered cultural, and whether the cooperation actually takes place on a level playing field remains to be critically analysed.18 Numerous exhibitions with a regional or local focus also have a more micro-historical, plural and participatory profile. Concerning Switzerland, mention can be made of a few exhibitions on nationally defined migrant groups, primarily those which arrived early and in large numbers, such as Italians. Exhibitions such as Einen Platz finden: Migrationsgeschichten zwischen Roccavivara und Pratteln (Finding a Place: Migration Histories between Roccavivara and Pratteln: Museum im Bürgerhaus Pratteln, 2010) and Destinazione Gränichen (Destination Gränichen: Museum Chornhuus Gränichen, 2015) have focused 15 | Historisches Museum Basel, In der Fremde, p. 13 f. 16 | See R. Wonisch, Museum und Migration, p. 12 f. 17 | See the exhibition catalogues by A. Eryilmaz & M. Jamin, Fremde Heimat; H. Gürses, C. Kogoj & S. Mattl, Gastarbajteri; H. Nigg, Da und fort. 18 | Regarding the education and outreach activities for the Gastarbajteri exhibition, see R. Höllwart & N. Sternfeld, Es kommt darauf an.

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on this history.19 Such projects, which generally focus on the history of everyday life and culture, are concerned with “making the immigrant visible” and the demand “for social recognition”20. Exhibitions such as Ig schaffe z Langetu/ Ich arbeite in Langenthal (I Work in Langenthal: Museum Langenthal, 2012) and Ankommen in CH-6010 Kriens (Arriving in CH-6010 Kriens: Museum im Bellpark Kriens, 2012) have pursued similar goals. Their political and pedagogical intentions are clear: the projects aim to contribute to the “prevention of racism” and show “why integration is demanding yet also enriching”21. Other exhibitions have brought topics to the fore that are considered especially relevant for a migration society. One such exhibition is Feste im Licht. Religiöse Vielfalt in einer Stadt (Festivals of Light: Religious diversity in a city: Museum der Kulturen Basel/Museum of Cultures Basel, 2004), which calls for a more sophisticated understanding of the “major ‘foreign’ religious traditions”22 . In this case, the contemporary relevance of the exhibition was ensured by the extensive participation of members of the religious communities represented. Presumably such projects contribute to an increase in the relevance and topicality of exhibitions about migration, to the quality of the education and outreach work, and to the degree of participation by those represented. The examples mentioned are temporary exhibitions, and therefore cannot be marshalled as evidence against the thesis that migration has scarcely succeeded in establishing itself in museums in German-speaking countries. Such an institutionalisation of the history of migration would need to be carried out in permanent exhibitions and purpose-built museums.23 Initiatives to this end exist in Germany and Switzerland, but so far they have remained fruitless.24 In 1998, an association for a migration museum was founded in Switzerland with the goal of creating a new museum that would represent “Switzerland as a nation of immigration and emigration” and that would become a “site for the 19 | See R. Brassel-Moser et al., Einen Platz finden; http://www.destinazione-grae​ nichen.ch/Start.html, accessed 19.07.2015. 20 | D. Osses, Perspektiven der Migrationsgeschichte in deutschen Ausstellungen und Museen, p. 87. 21 | See http://www.bellpark.ch/portfolio-items/ankommen-in-ch-6010-kriens/?port​ folioID=2575; http://www.museumlangenthal.ch/museum/live/Ausstellungen/Sonder​ ausstellungen/Vergangene/April2012.html; http://www.interunido.ch/cms/upload/​files/​ Ausstellung_2012_Didaktische_Materialien_juni12_1.pdf, ac­c essed 20.07.2015. 22 | See http://www.mkb.ch/sonderausstellungen/festeimlicht/details_e.pdf, ac­ cessed 20.07.2015; cf. G. Fierz & M. Schneider, Feste im Licht. 23 | On this see J. Baur, Die Musealisierung der Migration, pp. 11–16; R. Wonisch, Museum und Migration, pp. 9–22. 24 | Regarding Germany, see A. Eryilmaz, Migrationsgeschichte und die nationalstaatliche Perspektive in Archiven und Museen.

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promotion of identity”25. The ambitious project failed to find broader support and in 2009 the association was dissolved. Since then, the idea of a migration museum has been kept alive by the project Musée Imaginaire des Migrations (MIM/Imaginary Museum of Migrations, 2012), which was launched by members of the Association of Swiss Authors and which I shall address later.26 The question of whether it is productive to represent migration in museums dedicated to this topic is a controversial subject. Ultimately, each exhibition must be measured by its ability to “open up new discursive spaces” and “embed countervailing content into the dominant discourse of memory”27. Additionally, the question of whether and in what capacity those represented participate in the conception of the exhibition must be posed. These issues will now be discussed using the example of the permanent exhibition in the National Museum Zurich, which has a section dedicated to the theme of migration.

The history of migr ation in the permanent e xhibition of the N ational M useum Z urich The National Museum Zurich is the central site of the Swiss National Museum.28 It was opened in 1898 as the “embodiment of the idea of the nation” and intended to display “the big storybook of Swiss history”.29 Back then, the exhibition was arranged chronologically and lead the visitors from a “collection room with prehistoric antiquities” through some 40 exhibition rooms to the so-called Armoury, in which the image of the “wehrhafte Eidgenossenschaft” (militant confederacy) is displayed: in this “National Hall of Fame”, the teleological narration of the national self reached its apogee.30 The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and as such, the conflict-ridden history of the emergence of modern Switzerland was omitted. It was only with the temporary exhibitions Sonderfall? Die Schweiz zwischen Réduit und Europa (A Special Case? Switzerland Between Réduit and Europe, 1992) and Die Erfindung der Schweiz. Bildentwürfe einer Nation (The Invention of Switzerland: Sketches of a Nation, 1998) that the museum began to present the history of modern-day Switzerland as a relevant subject for its work. With the permanent exhibition History of Switzerland, opened in 2009, the museum has relinquished the idea of being able to tell “the ‘one’ Swiss history”, 25 | M. Hodel, Vorwort, p. 11 f. 26 | See http://www.mimsuisse.ch, accessed 27.08.2015. 27 | R. Wonisch, Museum und Migration, p. 18. 28 | See http://www.nationalmuseum.ch/e/, accessed 23.07.2015. 29 | T. Sieber, Das Schweizerische Landesmuseum zwischen Nation, Geschichte und Kultur, p. 17 f. 30 | ibid., p. 18.

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but without giving up on the claim of representing “the peculiarities of Swiss history in the context of its interconnection with European developments”31. The exhibition consists of four sections: Niemand war schon immer da (No One Has Been Here All The Time) deals with the history of settlement and migration, Glaube, Fleiss und Ordnung (Faith, Diligence and Order) with the religious and intellectual history, Durch Konflikt zur Konkordanz (Through Conflict to Concordance) with the political history and Die Schweiz wird im Ausland reich (Switzerland Becomes Rich Abroad) with the economic history.32 The title of the first section can be taken as a statement by those responsible for the exhibition, that “a contemporary representation of Swiss history is not able to put forward assertions on ‘national identity’”33. Here, a history of migration was sketched out, which spanned from the Völkerwanderung right up to the history of twentieth century migration, in which four points of focus can be identified: the first depicts the history of settlements from prehistoric times up until the Early Middle Ages, and evokes a connection between the settlement by the Celts, the Romans and the Germanic peoples with the “multilingual Switzerland” of today. A second focus is formed by a gallery with portraits of people who migrated to Switzerland after the sixteenth century. The individuals selected here to represent “non-natives” were those who made great contributions to “the increase in prosperity and to the enrichment of cultural life”34. This leads to a gallery, which for the most part depicts a white, male elite. The third focus deals with migratory movements from the thirteenth up to the beginning of the twentieth century – the economically-motivated emigration of the nineteenth century as well as the immigration of politically and religiously persecuted people between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here there is an emphasis on the fact that, along with well-known political refugees from the cultural and intellectual spheres, “qualified engineers” also migrated: “Switzerland can use them”. Economic utility is also an important motif in the depiction of the history of twentieth century migration, which makes up 31 | P. Sarasin, Die Geschichte der Schweiz neu erzählen. 32 | See P. Meyer, Four narrative perspectives on Swiss history; E. Hebeisen & P. Meyer, Geschichte Schweiz. Unless otherwise stated, the citations are from the exhibition texts outlining the themes of the museum sections. 33 | P. Sarasin, Die Geschichte der Schweiz neu erzählen. The exhibition section No One Has Been Here All The Time was closed at the time of writing, as it had to be relocated and adapted due to construction work. In a significantly reduced space, the exhibition now only encompasses three sections: one on migration, one on politics and one on religious beliefs and economics. My discussion refers to the initial presentation. See http://www.nationalmuseum.ch/d/zuerich/ausstellungen.php?aus_id=76&​ show_detail=true, accessed 25.09.2015. 34 | Landesmuseum Zürich Bildung & Vermittlung, Geschichte Schweiz, p. 10.

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the fourth focal point. Under the title “Überfremdung” (over-foreignisation) it focuses on immigration since the 1950s, in particular on the “more than one million Italians” who have migrated since 1961, and the post-1980 developments, as “hundreds of thousands” of people from Portugal, Turkey and the former Yugoslavia came  – “followed by their families”. Here photos of Gast­ arbeiter (guest workers) with familiar motifs – such as suitcases or construction sites – are shown together with posters relating to referendums on the tightening of legislation against foreigners, asylum seekers and religious minorities. The images all depict people who are marked as ‘foreign’ through their bodies, clothing and other accessories.

M igr ation has been around fore ver : making visible and staying invisible As should now be clear, this exhibition aims to represent migration as the norm, and emphasises the contribution of immigrants to the economic and cultural evolution of the host society. Despite this fundamental recognition of migration as an important social phenomenon, in the following, I would like to point out a number of omissions and weak spots in this representation. Stuart Hall conceives of representation not just as the depiction of something which already exists outside of its process of representation, but rather of something which only comes into existence through a complex system of constructing signification and reality construction.35 Museums and exhibitions are important sites of a representational practice understood as an “active labour of making things mean”, which is why the question of what is created in the process of representation and how this occurs is raised. Against this backdrop, my representational critique is concentrated on three aspects: which stories are told? Which social groups are made visible? And which relations of power are manifested?36 My first observation pertains to the narrative which frames this section of the exhibition and which conceptualises migration as the rule rather than the exception, and as a form of social enrichment. The texts in the exhibition, the catalogue and the educational materials make it entirely clear that here, a history is being told of a territory “that is marked by the traces of countless people who are all […] united by one thing: they’re on the move; just as people were 5000

35 | S. Hall, The rediscovery of ideology, p. 64. On this, see also N. Sternfeld: Aufstand der unterworfenen Wissensarten; R. Muttenthaler & R. Wonisch: Gesten des Zei­­gens, pp. 13–45. 36 | See for example T. Sieber, Machtfragen.

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years ago on the Schnidejoch37”.38 This anthropologising perspective postulates continuities over thousands of years, and pushes economic, social, political and cultural differences and upheavals into the background. There is another motif which is constitutive for this: mobile people enrich the societies which they join. Most convincing are examples of people who were originally marked as “culturally foreign” and incapable of assimilation, like the Italians who were brought in as cheap labour and who become “trusted neighbours” who “enrich the Swiss lifestyle with their Italianità”39. As previously mentioned, the narrative discussed here runs the risk of trivialising migration. Also, it invites visitors to find connections between a bygone era and the present. This is particularly explicit in the learning materials for schools: in these, not only is a connection established between the settlement by the Celts, the Romans and the Germanic peoples and the “cultural diversity of Switzerland”, but also, a continuum is evoked in which the material traces of these histories are described as being “part of our past and culture” and as “bearing witness […] to our ancestors”.40 Although this narrative does indeed differ from the fin-de-siècle narrative which drew a direct connection to the Pfahlbauer (neolithic lake dwellers) and created “the image of a culturally self-contained ancestral community”, it still produces a narrative which spans epochs and ultimately produces the idea of a community which is brought together by a common cultural heritage.41 My second observation relates to the question of who is made visible in the exhibition, and conversely, who remains invisible. In one area, a revealing situation arises: on the one side is the portrait gallery of successful migrants; on the other side, photographs of the working world and daily lives of migrants are shown, as well as posters about referendums on migration and asylum policies from the 1960s onwards. Who is made visible? On the one hand, there are the successful migrants; on the other hand, nameless “Others” who are marked as foreign. This mise-en-scène (re)produces the narrative of the successful integration of individual subjects from abroad and of the fear of ‘Überfremdung’; that is of being “invaded” by an anonymous, foreign mass. In addition, a constitutive narrative of the popular discourse on immigration is affirmed, which emphasises migrants’ economic capacity and ability to culturally adapt. From this perspective there are many people and many issues which remains 37 | The Schnidejoch is a mountain pass in the Bernese Alps, and the discovery site of some of the oldest artefacts found in Europe. Recent discoveries have been dated back to the 5th millennium BCE. 38 | W. Leimgruber, Nomadisieren, p. 46. 39 | ibid. 40 | Landesmuseum Zürich Bildung & Vermittlung, Geschichte Schweiz, p. 8 f. 41 | W. Leimgruber, Nomadisieren, p. 48; see also T. Sieber, Das Schweizerische Lan­ desmuseum zwischen Nation, Geschichte und Kultur, p. 16 f.

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invisible, in particular migrant groups and stories which would disturb such a narrative full of ascriptions and omissions. The importance of making invisible as a mode of representation leads me to the third observation. Despite the fact that the posters show political controversies, other exhibits make reference to conflicts and there are also indications of tensions in the texts, there is still a marginalisation of the “conflicts, oppression and social dislocation associated” with migratory movements.42 Both the tendency to anthropologise and stereotype, and the predominance of a paradigm of integration contribute to the fact that conflicts within migrant groups and with social groups in the so-called ‘host society’ barely come into view. In this portrayal, representatives of the state and party politicians also dominate, while voices from organisations and movements which have advocated for the social recognition of migrants since the 1960s are by and large absent. The barely present polyphony and multiperspectival nature of the exhibition narrative leads me to the fourth observation, which relates to a central aspect of any critique of power: who decides on what is to be represented? In the case at hand, the answer is not hard to find – the institution, with its authorised spokespeople. The tendency toward increased collaborations with stakeholders from migrant organisations was not reflected here. That the interpretative power of the institution remained untouched is not surprising: since even a museum which represents marginalised positions is not required to provide “a space for transforming the power relations determining the definitions of terms and themes”43. The examination of the exhibition section No One Has Been Here All The Time has identified deficits in a presentation which remained largely untouched by the developments towards a microhistorical, multiperspectival and participatory representation of migration. Dietmar Ossess differentiates between “historically […] and encyclopaedically conceived exhibitions”, which aim to inscribe the history of migration into the “grand narrative” of the nation, and exhibitions which are invested in a “dissolution of the national narrative and the establishment of a new, transnational perspective”44. The exhibition being examined here does not go that far: it represents a timely, if not already overdue expansion of the hegemonic national narrative, but without transgressing its interpretive framework. Thus it is not surprising that the permanent exhibition – first opened in 2009 – has scarcely triggered academic, media or political debate. In fact, the exhibition being discussed has hardly managed to open up any new spaces of social discourse at all, nor has it managed to embed new topics in the dominant discourse of public memory. 42 | W. Leimgruber, Immaterielles Kulturerbe – Migration – Museum, p. 75. 43 | N. Sternfeld, Aufstand der unterworfenen Wissensarten, p. 39. 44 | D. Osses, Perspektiven der Migrationsgeschichte in deutschen Ausstellungen und Museen, p. 81.

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In various respects, it does not live up to the demands of a migrant society: to take the premise of a migrant society as a conceptual foundation does not just mean understanding migration as a constitutive element of society, but rather “to turn the metanarratives, perspectives, institutions and sites of the national self-image upside down, and to reformulate them, and in doing so, to make the museum itself […] ‘post-migrant’”45.

N egotiating migr ation : ne w forms of representation , narr atives and stakeholders Based on three recent exhibition projects in Switzerland, I would like to discuss a number of approaches which experiment with new forms of representation, produce new narratives and incorporate new stakeholders in the representation of migration. My first example is the aforementioned Imaginary Museum of Migrations, which since 2012 has been attempting to create a “collective mental space” with its website.46 It gathers “real stories of life and migration” that are composed on request by writers, and are intended to form a “unique imaginary museum” comprising 100 individual stories. But even this project cannot do without a ‘real’ space: it is presented in existing museums with “suitcase vitrines”, each exhibiting one object which “succinctly recounts a story of migration”. The aim here is not to pass judgment on the relevance and quality of the project – this is also true for the following examples – but rather to identify a promising approach. What is interesting here is the consistency of the biographical approach, which facilitates a multiperspectival representation of migration history. In addition, this is a productive response to the reification of cultures which is constitutive for the museum: object-centred forms of representation can hardly appropriately represent the “heterogeneity of migrant phenomena”, also because “cultures in motion” are not characterised by the accumulation of material artefacts.47 My other examples refer to exhibitions in the Shedhalle in Zurich. It has gained an international reputation as “a place where new forms of artistic and cultural practices  – particularly those related to socio-political topics  – can 45 | N. Bayer, Post the museum!, p. 64. 46 | The project is run by the Association of Swiss Authors (AdS), the Swiss Museums Association (VMS) and the organisation p&s network culture. Citations are taken from http://www.mimsuisse.ch, accessed 26.09.2015. Since the response to the project was not as great as expected and the collaboration with the museums turned out to be rather difficult, the concept is currently being rethought (pers. comm., Beat Mazenauer, p&s network culture, 22.07.2015). 47 | R. Wonisch, Museum und Migration, p. 26.

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be tried out, produced, and presented”48. A focus of the four-part project Die Schweiz ist keine Insel (Switzerland is Not an Island, 2013/2014) was to “bring up the issue of social exclusion and persecution, but also political and cultural self-organisation of Jeni, Sinti and Roma in Switzerland as well as in Europe”49. The video works shown in the opening exhibition In lästiger Gesellschaft (Undesirable Society, Inconvenient Company) by artists such as Mo Diener, Tamara Moyzes or Marika Schmiedt, dealt with strategies of engaging with “ascribed identities” and associated forms of social marginalisation. The third exhibition, Jenseits der Nation (Beyond the Nation), consisted of the installation Romanistan, which bears the name of “an imaginary (nation) state for all Roma” and which “emerged in the framework of intended collaborations […] with self-organised groups in Zurich and elsewhere”. What is interesting here is the questioning of the potential of artistic positions when it comes to the representation of themes related to migration. This initially minimises the risk of “defining the latter according to a reductive perspective” through an object-based form of narration with supposedly authentic witnesses.50 Particularly in the close collaboration between academic research and art – as, for example, has been attempted in projects such as Projekt Migration (Project Migration, Cologne, 2005), Crossing Munich (Munich, 2009) or Movements of Migration (Göttingen, 2013) – artistic works can function as “catalysts for reflection” and generate other stories about migration.51 In the case at hand, the space of reflection is formed through the collection of publications present in the exhibition space, the program of events, the Pilotprojekt kritische Kunstvermittlung (Pilot Project Critical Art Education) and the Soundarchiv (Sound Archive) presented in the final exhibition Über die Grenzen (On the Borders and Beyond) consisting of interviews with stakeholders and experts.52 This approach, which is based on an interaction between artistic, academic and discursive practices, is expressed programmatically in the designation of the exhibition as a “research exhibition”. Here, it is not a question of the representation of themes in the medium of the exhibition, but rather of a

48 | Unless otherwise noted, the information and quotations are taken from the texts available on the website. See http://www.shedhalle.ch/2016/en/71/ABOUT_ SHEDHALLE, accessed 12.09.2015. 49 | See http://www.shedhalle.ch/2016/en/114/SWITZERLAND_IS_NOT_AN_ISLAND, accessed 12.09.2015. 50 | N. Bayer, Post the museum!, p. 79. 51 | R. Wonisch, Museum und Migration, p. 24. On the projects, see http://www.domid. org/en/ausstellung/project-migration; http://www.movements-of-migration.org/cms/; http://crossingmunich.org/, accessed 13.09.2015. 52 | On the art education and outreach for this project, see for example C. Franz, Die Shedhalle ist keine Insel, p. 34 ff.

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critical examination of forms, functions and effects of representations “in a format which proceeds in an interrogative mode”.53 My third example is the 2015 Shedhalle exhibition … the others have arrived safely. Gedächtnisverlust und Geschichtspolitik: künstlerische Strategien (Memory Loss and the Politics of History: Artistic Strategies), in which the work Das Gedächtnis der Geflüchteten (The Memory of Refugees) by Mirkan Deniz, Catalina Gutiérrez, Onur Karakoyun and Felipe Polanìa was exhibited.54 Over an extended period of time, the creators of this work engaged with their own experiences of flight.55 In the process, controversy surrounded the question of whether, in light of the heterogeneity of stories of flight and refugee groups, something like a “collective memory of refugees in Switzerland” can even exist, and which story or stories would be recounted by such an archive.56 The work, which bears the traces of “archival research on asylum and refugee politics”, shows that the research and representation have been shaped by biographical, associative, aesthetic, political and pragmatic factors. What interests me here is the question of the possible outcomes of collaborations between institutions and stakeholders – including organisations and other social actors from different communities  – who are to be represented in exhibitions. In the example of Switzerland is Not an Island, it already becomes clear that important contributions to exhibitions can be produced from an on-going collaboration with “self-organised groups” if it is carried out in the most egalitarian way possible.57 However, such cooperations are time-consuming and often bring with them conflicts around unequal power relations and divergent interests, which are usually not addressed in the respective exhibitions. At the same time though, questions are sometimes (co)negotiated in the process, which can expand the exhibition’s space of reflection. In the case of the memory project, it could be a question of what is understood by ‘memory’ at all. While the collective memory 53 | Katharina Morawek, curatorial and managerial director of the Shedhalle and co-curator of Switzerland is Not an Island (pers. comm., 10.09.2015). 54 | See http://www.shedhalle.ch/2016/en/122/, accessed 12.09.2015. 55 | The group, whose membership numbers fluctuate, emerged as the result of a collaborative project between the Shedhalle and the Raum für die Autonomie und das Ferlernen RAF_ASZ im Kochareal (pers. comm., Felipe Polania, 05.09.2015); see also http://www.shedhalle.ch/2016/en/345/MEMORY_PROJECT, accessed 30.09.2015. 56 | Felipe Polania (pers. comm., 05.09.2015). 57 | It is typical for such cooperations to have consequences which are not visible in the exhibition. According to Katharina Morawek (pers. comm., 10.09.2015) individuals and groups were approached to participate who had never before received such a request, and who understood the initiative as recognition of their work. This collaboration led to the evolution of the artist collective Roma Jam Session, see http://romajamsession. org/

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has a “mythical structure and is organised synchronically”, history as academic research attempts to “maintain an analytical distance to the events” and has a critical view of bringing the past to life.58 This underlying question leads me back to the permanent exhibition in the National Museum Zurich. The approaches discussed here, which I would like to characterise with the keywords ‘biographical’, ‘artistic’ and ‘participatory’, show strategies for the renewal of this representation of migration, in order for the exhibition to be able to make a substantial contribution to the establishment of counter-narratives to the hegemonic discourse of memory and to the expansion of the social spheres of discourse and action. For the museum is not just a site which is constituted by the tension between history and memory, it should also be a site where conflicts and the interpretation of historical and contemporary social phenomena are put on display. A significant challenge in achieving this is posed by the culture of consensus, which is a constitutive element in the narrative of Swiss national identity, and without which “social cohesion” seems unthinkable.59 The National Museum is not just a part of this culture, it is a major agent in the representation of a consensus-based narrative of Switzerland. Particularly in the Swiss context it is sometimes important to remember that although consensus does indeed appear necessary, in a democratic and pluralist society, it must be accompanied by dissent. In her theory of democracy, the political scientist Chantal Mouffe sketches out the concept of a “conflictual consensus”: this is characterised by a “common symbolic space among opponents who are considered ‘legitimate enemies’”, in which antagonisms can be negotiated in a domesticated fashion, so to speak.60 A museum like the National Museum Zurich could also be guided by such a conception, so that contradictions, controversies and conflicts become increasingly recognised, visible and negotiable.

58 | J. Tanner, Die Krise der Gedächtnisorte und die Havarie der Erinnerungspolitik, p. 27. On the discussion around the relationship between commemoration, historio­ graphy and memory, see, for example E. François & H. Schulze, Einleitung; in relation to museums, K. Pieper, Resonanzräume; and in relation to work on memorial sites, N. Sternfeld, Kontaktzonen der Geschichtsvermittlung, p. 70 ff. 59 | See http://www.lebendige-traditionen.ch/traditionen/00248/index.html?lang=​ de, accessed 30.09.2015. 60 | C. Mouffe, On the Political, p. 52; see also B. Jaschke & N. Sternfeld, Zwischen/ Räume der Partizipation, p. 176 ff.

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Figure 1: The gallery with portraits of successful Swiss personalities in the exhibition section Niemand war schon immer da (No One Has Been Here All The Time) in the permanent exhibition Geschichte Schweiz (History of Switzerland), opened in 2009 in the Landesmuseum Zürich.

Figure 2: View of the exhibition section Niemand war schon immer da (No One Has Been Here All The Time).

Figure 3: View of the opening exhibition In lästiger Gesellschaft (Undesirable Society, Inconvenient Company) in the four-part project Die Schweiz ist keine Insel (Switzerland is Not an Island in the Shedhalle Zürich (2013/2014).

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Figure 4: Detail of the display Das Gedächtnis der Geflüchteten (The Memory of Refugees) in the exhibition … the others have arrived safely: Gedächtnisverlust und Geschichtspolitik: künstlerische Strategien (Memory Loss and the Politics of History: Artistic Strategies) in the Shedhalle Zürich (2015).

How Access-iting? Museums as Cultural Educators or Shelters of Knowledge1 Susan Kamel Understanding ways in which people experience the world differently from one another ideally improves social relations; the museum thus becomes a progressive institution, in the sense of becoming a site for combating prejudice and nurturing appreciation of cultural diversity. 2

The research and exhibition project presented in this article, Experimentierfeld Museologie. Über das Kuratieren islamischer Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte (Experimental Museology. On Curating Islamic Art and Cultural History), which the social scientist Christine Gerbich and I organised from 2009 to 20143 was inspired by what Richard Sandell and Jocelyn Dodd call an “activist museum practice”.4 The representation of diversity in every respect and the struggle for social justice were for us the driving force and the objective of our research and exhibition experiment. In the following article, by way of two practical case studies, I would like to show how this research project attempted to think together curating and education right from the beginning of the process of the exhibition development, and in doing so, to establish practical implementations of museological approaches which are influenced by a critical and transformative pedagogy, as described by Lindauer in her essay Critical Museum Pedagogy and Exhibition

1 | My thanks go, as ever, to my colleague Christine Gerbich, with whom I carried out the research project on curating and teaching Islamic art; and Susanne Wernsing, who did more than just edit this article. 2 | M. A. Lindauer, Critical Museum Pedagogy and Exhibition Development, p. 305. 3 | The project team originally included the cultural studies academic Susanne Lan­w erd. 4 | R. Sandell/J. Dodd, Re-presenting Disability, p. 3.

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Development.5 Our project poses the following questions: how can ‘access’ to the museum be created, as well as making its contents more ‘exciting’ in the sense of post-representative curating6 and critical art education?7 Who is represented in the museum in front of, inside and behind the vitrines, and who is kept outside?

D avid and G oliath : a ( very ) short history of t wo institutions Over the three years of the project we collaborated with numerous museums. Our main partners were the Museum für Islamische Kunst (Museum of Islamic Art) of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in the Pergamonmuseum, and the district museum FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum. The selection of two very different museums – of the large, national, state-run institution and the small, district museum – was part of the concept. The differing ‘magnitudes’ of the two museums influence factors such as the position of the education and outreach departments within the institutional hierarchies. In the large, national museum, there are strong, embedded hierarchies which have previously hindered the incorporation of educators into the conceptual development of exhibitions, while in the smaller, district museum, there are no resources at all available for permanently employed educators. Despite this, the district museum views itself more strongly as a social organisation. The Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin belongs to the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Foundation of Prussian Cultural Heritage), and, founded in 1904 by Wilhelm von Bode, is the second-oldest institution of its kind, after the museum in Cairo.8 In terms of visitor numbers, it is actually the biggest: in 2013, almost 800,000 visitors saw the exhibitions on the Museum Island.9 The museum exhibits “art, culture and archaeology from Muslim societies from Late Antiquity up to the modern era”10. Though it is only in 5 | Borrowing from Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux, Lindauer distinguishes between four kinds of education: “hegemonic, accommodating, critical and transformative”, M. A. Lind­auer, Critical Museum Pedagogy and Exhibition Development, p. 308. 6 | N. Sternfeld, Kontaktzonen der Geschichtsvermittlung, p. 180 f. 7 | C. Mörsch, Am Kreuzungspunkt von vier Diskursen. 8 | On the history of the museum in Cairo, see I. R. Abdulfattah, Das Museum of Islamic Art in Kairo; on the history of the museum in Berlin, see S. Weber, Zwischen Spätantike und Moderne. A critical reading of the Museum für Islamische Kunst Berlin is provided in W. Shaw, The Islam in Islamic art history; S. L. Marchand, German orientalism in the age of empire; S. Kamel, Coming back from Egypt. 9 | S. Weber, Zwischen Spätantike und Moderne, p. 356. 10 | Ibid. p. 358.

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a footnote of the same publication that director Stefan Weber remarks that Muslim regions in East Asia and Central Africa still remain outside of their “disciplinary activities” and that “large parts of North Africa” have attracted “little research interest in Germany”.11 I have described elsewhere12 the history of the museum, which mirrors the Western dominance over numerous countries of the so-called Islamic world, thus playing its part in a mapping of the world into “the West and the Rest”.13 The museum was created in a time in which the German Empire was working together with the Ottoman Empire: in 1903, the Sultan Abdul Hamid II gave the German Emperor Wilhelm II the Jordanian desert palace Mshatta, in thanks for the construction of the Baghdad railway. With this, the foundation of an ‘Islamic Collection’ was sealed. In 2015, the Museum für Islamische Kunst had at its disposal four curation positions, some of which bore the older title of ‘custodians’ (Kustoden),14 and a position for the field of education and outreach, which until April 2015 had no permanent position in the museum itself, but was housed within the central visitor services of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. The education and outreach department of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the former ‘museum pedagogy and public relations department’, has existed since 1992 as an amalgamation of the education services from the east and the west.15 Nowadays, the museum educators are designated as ‘Education and Outreach Curators’ and have the status of ‘Research Employees’. As such, they occupy the same salary category as the custodians. However my research into the exhibition team revealed that the education staff have until now only been involved in the facilitation work after the exhibitions have already been planned, and not in the conception stage. They were only involved in the development of the school programs, in the tensely debated editing of the exhibition texts, guide pamphlets or flyers, they were at most of assistance. As a consequence, the decision-making authority always remained with the custodians; that is, with academics in Islamic art history.16 Upon the 2009 appointment of Stefan Weber as director, the management of the museum was entrusted to an art historian (a researcher in building history) who recognised the great socio-political responsibilities of a museum 11 | Ibid. Fn. 6. 12 | S. Kamel, Coming back from Egypt. 13 | S. Hall, The West and the Rest. 14 | On this differentiation, see A. te Heesen, Theorien des Museums zur Einführung, pp. 24–29. 15 | K. Schmidl, Mit Spaß und Freude das Museum entdecken, p. 138. 16 | This is taken from my study of source material (V. Enderlein, Islamische Kunst in Berlin) and from a conversation with Jens Kröger, the former head curator at the Museum für Islamische Kunst, who was employed by the museum from 1985 until 2007.

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of Islamic art. For the first time, he plans to allow the results of visitor surveys and exhibition evaluations to influence the conception of the new permanent exhibition beginning in 2019. However a paradigm shift in the distribution of the curatorial authority of interpretation is not reflected in the organisational structure. The most significant task of the museum remains the transmission of knowledge. New visitor-centred job descriptions have not yet been created, or at least, existing positions have not been filled with personnel who are explicitly trained as educators. For the conception of the new permanent exhibition, only short-term, external funding was used.17 In the words of the director, the “objective of the redesign is for the state of research on the topic of Islamic art and archaeology to reflect the complexity and intricacy of these topics, and to communicate them with a broad audience.”18 The FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum (formerly the Bezirksmuseum Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg für Stadtentwicklung und Sozialgeschichte [Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg District Museum for Urban Development and Social History]) was founded in 1991 as an amalgamation of the Heimatmuseum Friedrichshain (Friedrichshain Homeland Museum) with the Kreuzberg Museum.19 The former West-German Kreuzberg Museum für Stadtentwicklung und Sozialgeschichte is the older of the two institutions and was founded in 1978 as the Museum für Alltagsgeschichte (Museum for Everyday History), located in the Kreuzberg Art Ministry. The East-German Heimatmuseum on the other hand, was founded in the late 1980s. According to the museum director Martin Düspohl, the Kreuzberg Museum did not possess its own collection upon its establishment,20 and was therefore ‘compelled’ from the beginning to collect in a participatory manner, that is, by involving the local population, whose stories were to be told. Today, the collection comprises not just photos, documents and files, but also everyday objects from people from Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg, and an evolving audio archive with voices from the neighbourhood. The museum is explicitly committed to the model outlined by the Ministry for Further Education and Culture in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, which was formulated in 2011 under the motto Qualify!  – Cooperate!  – Initiate! The model description explains: Community education and cultural work creates opportunities for active participation [my emphasis] in social life, guarantees low-threshold access to education and culture 17 | See, for example, the museum’s Ctesiphon project https://www.topoi.org/pro​ ject/c-3-1/, accessed 19.08.2015. 18 | S. Weber, Zwischen Spätantike und Moderne, p. 369. 19 | On the history of the museum see M. Düspohl, Geschichte aushandeln! Partizipative Museumsarbeit im Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum Berlin. 20 | Ibid.

How Access-iting? and promotes life-long learning. It opens up opportunities for participation, uses and strengthens the resources of those addressed – both through the appropriation of the education programs and their own cultural productivity. […] As the Ministry for Further Education and Culture, we see ourselves as a platform for the collective engagement with important social issues. 21

In contrast to the Museum für Islamische Kunst, where entry costs 12 Euros, a visit to the FHXB Museum is free. The director Martin Düspohl has a background in adult education, and his two colleagues Ulrike Treziak and Ellen Röhner are a historian and a designer respectively, meaning that the team forms the much-cited ‘magic triangle’ of exhibition work – curators, museum educators and designers.22

D e velopment of the rese arch and e xhibition project Our research and exhibition project occurred in two steps. In carrying out an survey of the field, we first of all visited over 30 museums in 14 countries,23 where we interviewed representatives of the ‘Curatorial and Education Departments’ and analysed exhibitions: what content is exhibited? Which strategies are chosen to open up different perspectives on objects and topics? How is the process of the exhibition development structured? Lastly we also inquired into the role of the visitors and non-visitors in the planning of exhibitions.24 Considering the focus of this particular book and the topic of repositioning education and outreach work, I would just like to highlight the following observation from our international research trips: in Anglo-Saxon countries like Great Britain, the USA and Canada, the field of museum education – which in Germany is still often referred to pejoratively as ‘Museumspädagogik’ (museum pedagogy)25 – has diversified and professionalised into a range of disciplines. It is divided up into categories including ‘interpretation’, ‘access’, ‘diversity and social inclusion’ and ‘community outreach’. We came across exhibitions that were accessible to broader audiences primarily in museums whose structure foregrounded the role of the education department in the development of the 21 | See http://www.fhxb-museum.de/fileadmin/user_upload/dokumente/LeitbildW​ BiKu.pdf, accessed 05.06.2015. 22 | H. Kirchhoff/M. Schmidt, Das magische Dreieck. 23 | The destinations included Egypt, Denmark, England, France, Canada, Qatar, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Scotland, Sweden, Turkey, the USA and the UAE. 24 | The results of the research project have been published in detail elsewhere. See C. Gerbich, Partizipieren und evaluieren; S. Kamel/C. Gerbich, Experimentierfeld Museum. 25 | And this generally only refers to work with schools.

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exhibitions, ahead of positions such as ‘subject curators’ and ‘designers’, for example. Additionally, the scarcity of critical and self-reflexive exhibitions was also notable. Where these existed at all, we found them in participatory art projects which had been initiated by individual artists without the participation of art educators.26 A highlight in terms of the representation of critical content and the accessibility of its exhibitions was the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow, which is known for its inclusive museum work.27 This institution responds to the diversity of its society with a range of educational formats  – from white cube productions to media-supported representations of multiple perspectives, through to an exhibition space which hosts different individuals, and in which the museum only provides design advice.28 Among the museums that we visited, Kelvingrove was the only one which, in our view, consistently implemented visitor-oriented approaches. That the curators for ‘access and education’ are provided with the same resources – in terms of staff numbers and salaries – as the ‘subject curators’ is an important detail of these objectives. We consider these structural changes in museums to be important first steps, which are silenced in many debates precisely because they – according to our observation – broach the issue of surrendering old privileges, and demanding new hierarchies.29 To this end, within our own research we have established the concept of ‘in-reach’, which describes the work in and with the museum team.30 We use the term consciously as a counterpart to the term ‘outreach’ which is concerned with deficits outside of the museum. According to this concept, to attract new visitors into the museum by ‘opening’ up the museum, there is no need for structural changes, to genuinely interrogate or change the existing power relations. Our thesis however – which we were able to confirm through our research in the context of this project – goes further: transformations in the structure of the museum are no guarantee for critical content or a critical and transformative form of education. How these come to be was the central 26 | See here the project Multi-Story, which was exhibited in 2010 in the Gallery of Mo­ dern Art in Glasgow (see http://www.multi-story.org/home.php, accessed 07.09.2015) or Nahnou Together from the Tate Britain in London from 2006 (see http://www.tate.​ org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/nahnou-together, accessed 07.09.2015). 27 | J.-P. Sumner, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. 28 | Nina Simon calls this approach “hosting” (see N. Simon, The Participatory Museum, p. 190 f.; J.-P. Sumner, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, p. 147 f. 29 | Carmen Mörsch is referring here to Spivak’s concept of “unlearning privileges” (C. Mörsch, Über Zugang Hinaus, p. 108). See also G. Spivak/D. Landry, The Spivak reader. 30 | On the concept of ‘in-reach’, see http://zonereflection.blogspot.de/2010/03/is-​ it-time-to-talk-about-inreach.html, accessed 06.06.2015.

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question of our experiment, which we carried out in the second stage of our project.

N eu Z ugänge  – in front of, inside and behind the vitrines ? Following on from the survey of museum exhibition development we carried out five experiments. The exhibition NeuZugänge (New Access Points) and the development of a media station within the exhibition Samarra will be presented here as examples. The theme of the exhibition project NeuZugänge31 was collecting in the ‘migration society’. Our point of departure was the observation that social diversity was reflected neither in the collections of Berlin museums and their displays, nor in the visitor groups or the museum personnel. We were inspired by the British concept of ‘revisiting collections’,32 which was developed by the Museums, Library and Archive Council, and which enabled museums – with the help of external partners  – to look at their collections in new ways. This includes groups which are marked as deviating from mainstream society, which have previously been afforded little to no visibility; for example, homosexuals,33 people with disabilities, or people with migrant backgrounds. With four different institutions, the two partner museums, the historical Stadtmuseum Berlin (Berlin City Museum) and the Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge (Werkbund Archive – Museum of Things), we investigated whether histories of migration also form part of their histories of collection, and asked museum staff about the extent to which visitors and personnel reflect the diversity of the society. In the first phase, the museum staff selected two objects from their collection which tell stories of migration or cultural diversity. Even this first step proved to be a challenge, since to begin with, the concept of a ‘history of migration’ had to be problematised.34 Did this refer to objects belonging to people with a migrant background? Should the objects themselves be expressions of what we refer to 31 | See L. Bluche et al., NeuZugänge. The project was developed in cooperation with Frauke Miera, Christine Gerbich and Susanne Lanwerd. 32 | See http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/item/13524-revisiting-collections, ac­ cessed 12.06.2015. 33 | On 24.06.2015 in the Deutsches Historische Museum, for the first time, an exhibition with the title Homosexualität_en (Homosexuality/ies) was opened, which perhaps alludes to the achievement of a critical re-reading of the history of these important institutions of German historiography and representation. 34 | On the discussion around what migration means in the local discourse, see P. Mecheril, Einführung in die Migrationspädagogik. On the concept of ‘migrational Others’

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as “connected” or “entangled histories”,35 which tell of the continual forms of exchange brought about by migration? Or does it refer simply to objects which have made their way to Germany – and more specifically, into German collections – from their countries of origin, for example the Ottoman Empire, Syria or France? We left the answers to these questions up to the curators and traced the discussion process within the exhibition with quotations. Figure 1: A look inside the NeuZugänge exhibition. The four museums presented themselves in four galleries.

In the second phase, we put the objects up for discussion in focus groups. The focus groups were intended to be as diverse as possible in terms of the categories of age, gender, social background, sexual orientation, disability, religion and education level.36 In the exhibition, the different perspectives were represented both by labels commenting on the objects written by the focus group participants, and through museum object labels. In the third step, we asked people from Berlin with a familial relation to the countries of origin to complement the collections of the four museums with objects which bear a special importance for them. Their selection criteria were documented in video inter-

he refers to the constructed character of the concept of “people with a migrant background”, which is dominated by relations of power. 35 | Siehe A. Appadurai, The Social Life of Things; B. Junod et al., Islamic art and the museum. 36 | H. Lutz, Framing intersectionality.

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views, and in the exhibition, eight private loan items were exhibited, together with eight objects selected by the museums.37 NeuZugänge has since been named a Model Project by the German Mu­ seums Association, and as of early 2015, has been implemented by four German museums.38 That the discussion is restricted to histories of migrations, whereas, in my opinion, it ought to also deal with diversity and social inclusion, is a result of the current funding priorities for project grants, which seem to have now discovered the issue of “migration”.39 Our project was nevertheless able to use this focus, in order to have an impact on the institutions and to encourage discussions about cultural diversity and social inclusion. As far as the diversity of the audience and museum personnel goes, the fact that museums are dominated by the educated elite was also apparent in our project, and that this elite is largely inaccessible for other social groups.40 It remains our hope that the awareness of employees around the topics of migration and cultural diversity which we tried to raise in NeuZugänge is enduring. At the same time though, we fear that the institutional interest in ‘migration’ as a thematic area will decrease as soon as it is no longer associated with funding opportunities. If we derive the recognition of cultural diversity from the plodding experiences in the process of achieving gender equality, then we would have to say that museums are less often forerunners than they are mirrors of the status quo.

S amarra  – “ whoe ver can see it will re joice ” As the second experiment, we would like to describe the development of a media station. The exhibition Samarra – Zentrum der Welt. 101 Jahre archäologische Forschung am Tigris (Samarra – Centre of the World: 101 Years of Archaeological Research on the Tigris) had the first large metropolis of the Abbasids as its topic, from the second Islamic dynasty, which reigned from the eighth to the thirteenth century, and is often placed on a par with the ‘Golden Age’ of Islamic 37 | A documentation of the exhibition with a listing of the objects can be found in L. Bluche et al., NeuZugänge. 38 | See http://www.vielfalt-im-museum.de/sammlungen/, accessed 04.07.2015. 39 | See, for example http://www.ifa.de/fileadmin/pdf/edition/kunstvermittlung_mi​ grationsgesellschaft.pdf or the statement from the alliance of critical cultural practitioners Mind the trap, https://mindthetrapberlin.wordpress.com/ or http://vernetzteuch.org/, accessed 04.09.2015. 40 | P. Bourdieu/A. Darbel, Die Liebe zur Kunst. Although the original text dates back to the 1960s and the investigations that Bourdieu and Darbel carried out are as such over 50 years old, the findings are, in my opinion, more relevant than ever. See also R. Sandell/E. Nightingale, Museen, Gleichberechtigung und soziale Gerechtigkeit, p. 97.

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culture. Samarra (Arabic from “sura man ra’a” = whoever sees it shall rejoice) is a city in modern-day Iraq, situated approximately 90 kilometres north of Baghdad, on the Tigris. For 45 years in the nineteenth century, Samarra was the site of residence of the Caliph. It is of particular importance for Islamic architecture and art history, since it was there that the first systematic excavations of Islamic arts took place between 1911 and 1913. The objects in the exhibition included paintings, ceramics, glass, metalwork, stucco wall claddings as well as burial photos. Previously, the objects in the museum were presented almost entirely without context; exemplary for this is the object description of one of the most important exhibits, a stucco relief of the palace façade: Iraq (Samarra), 9th cent. stucco, bevel cut technique. 1.30 × 2.25m Inv. no. I 3467.

Our curatorial activities as a national institution such as the Museum für Islamische Kunst in the Pergamonmuseum were aimed at creating not just diverse points of access, but also to create new content informed by postcolonial critique – a critical archaeology.41 Our postcolonial, anti-orientalist approach, which addresses the interrelations of Islamic aesthetics and art, drew the most criticism from the majority of the employees, as they considered meanings of objects beyond the realm of art history relevant.42 Experiences of visitors in museums which the literature in museum theory discusses as ‘generic learning outcomes’43 were not reflected upon. Together with various Berlin locals, we wanted to develop a media station through participation, which opens up a range of perspectives on history. In Nina Simon’s schema, which divides participatory work into four forms (contributive, collaborative, co-creation and hosted), the Samarra Project would qualify as ‘contributive’, since all interpretive authority remained with the museum – or more accurately, with us as the museum partner – the participants of the focus groups on the other hand had an exclusively consultatory function.44 To begin with, funders and external evaluators of the project recommended that we work ‘with Muslims’; that is, to integrate them ‘as a communi41 | See http://www.kritischearchaeologie.de/, accessed 04.07.2015. 42 | The custodian involved in the NeuZugänge project Gisela Helmecke summarised after the project: “We weren’t really able to gain knew knowledge about the two objects through this” [through the focus groups – S. K.] (G. Helmecke, Weitgereiste Objekte im Museum für Islamische Kunst, p. 67). 43 | GLOs are museum experiences which describe knowledge acquisition (knowledge and understanding) as just one outcome, alongside “skills, attitudes and values, enjoy­ ment, creativity and inspiration, activity behaviour and progression” (see http://www.​ inspiringlearningforall.gov.uk/toolstemplates/genericlearning/, accessed 04.07.2015). 44 | N. Simon, The Participatory Museum.

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ty’.45 This resulted in various questions for us: who speaks for Islam? Whom do we address, and from which community? Who would continue to be excluded by this? That we couldn’t simply follow this recommendation without repeating stereotypes and essentialisations through this kind of addressing of Muslims as a target group instead of critically undermining these recommendations quickly became clear to us.46 As an alternative method, my colleague Christine Gerbich founded the ‘Museum Divan’ as the accompanying panel to the exhibition development.47 Considering the regional and social characteristics, a heterogeneous group of visitors, non-visitors with an interest in museums and Berlin academics from the field also contributed to this divan. Of course there were also people there who identified as Muslims, whether they were religious or not. In focus groups, the members of the Museum Divan helped us to re-read museum objects, and also tested the media station. As a result, for the exhibition Samarra we produced seven films which approach the capital city of Samarra in different ways – from the perspective of cultural or art history and of the history of disciplines, from a contemporary Iraqi perspective and from the perspective of a German-Iraqi family from Berlin, from the perspective of an exiled Iraqi author and a book illustrator who has made work about the historic city of Samarra. In the exhibition, each film runs for three minutes. They are accessible via the museum’s website.48

45 | The concept of the ‘community’, particularly in museum theory literature, where it is often defined as ‘source community’, is not uncontested. About ‘source communities’ L. Peers and A. K. Brown write: “The term ‘source communities’ (sometimes referred to as ‘originating communities’) refers both to these groups in the past when the artefacts were collected, as well as to their descendants today” (Museums and Source Communities, p. 520). According to the authors, the concept previously referred to the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Pacific. More recently however, ‘source communities’ or ‘communities of origin’ also refer to the people who live near the museum and whose ancestors come from the ‘countries of origin’ of the collections. If, in 2012, I myself asserted that the concept is unusable, since it always contains an essentialisation of cultures (see S. Kamel, Gedanken zur Langstrumpfizierung, p. 75, Fn. 12), in our project Königreich Anatolien, which we carried out in the Kreuzbergmuseum in 2012, we identified a justification, in working together in the exhibition development with people who, for example, resemble each other in terms of their heritage (see also S. Kamel, Reisen und Experimentieren, pp. 419–423). 46 | In her book Wer ist hier Muslim?, Riem Spielhaus investigates the diversity of definitions and transforming self-determination and heteronomy of Muslims in Germany. 47 | C. Gerbich, Partizipieren und evaluieren. 48 | See http://www.smb.museum/museen-und-einrichtungen/museum-fuer-isla​mi​s che-​ kunst/forschung/samarra-und-die-kunst-der-abbasiden.html, accessed 19.08.2015.

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Figure 2: The media station as an element in the Samarra exhibition.

In conclusion, in relation to the project at the Museum für Islamische Kunst we should say that we did manage to bring new forms of content (the contemporary Iraqi perspective of Samarra, the Berlin perspective of an Iraqi-German family) into the exhibition. However critical content such as the history of the museum and its imperialism or comments on the construction of Islamic art as an instrument of a national narrative in the Pergamonmuseum didn’t make it into the media station and thus the exhibition. Additionally, we would have also liked to find out how, for example, children or people with disabilities lived in ninth-century Samarra; topics which are certainly investigated by academic research  – however they do not form part of the history of the masterworks which are recognised and canonised by the curators in the museum, and they are (whether consciously or unconsciously) silenced, or rather, have not been deemed relevant subjects of study for Islamic art history.

S ummary What is it that allows the FHXB Museum  – in contrast to the large national museum on the Museum Island – to become the site of exhibitions featuring elements of institutional critique, such as NeuZugänge, and what hindered our work in the Museum für Islamische Kunst on the Samarra exhibition? An important factor for understanding the two projects that we have outlined here is the fact that NeuZugänge, in the way that it was carried out and presented, could only take place in the FHXB Museum, where we could

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link it with the tradition of the Kreuzberg Museum, and expert and canonised knowledge and the concepts of masterworks associated with this could be questioned. The Museum für Islamische Kunst remains more committed to “gestures of showing”49 than to a post-representative form of curation which aims not at “representation but at agency”.50 The Samarra exhibition would certainly bring any art connoisseur who was equipped with advanced knowledge and could see the histories. The layers of a critical and self-reflexive form of access were however ironed out, or rather, neutralised. In my opinion, in particular the FHXB Museum, due to its social relevance and its staff, has the opportunity to become a “minoritised” museum (in the positive sense), as has been described by Nicola Lauré al-Samurai. It has the capacity to elude hegemonic narratives: “such places are for me the actual contact zones for entering into a relation with histories, […] and even more so, to have the chance to get to know those spheres of survival and resistance.”51 The Museum für Islamische Kunst on the other hand, as a government institution and as an academic flagship of academic research into Islamic art stands right in the centre – also in terms of political attention – meaning that it can only operate independently within a very narrow framework. Additionally, Islamic aesthetics has been permeated much less by the ‘reflexive turn’. As Wendy Shaw shows, the education of curators as ‘subject curators’ is indebted to a traditional, academic understanding and concept of the museum.52 Last but not least, the institution of the state museums of Prussian cultural heritage remains strongly committed to the construction of a national identity, meaning that structural changes and institutional transformation may be difficult to bring to fruition.

Figure 3: The Pergamonmuseum. 49 | R. Muttenthaler/R. Wonisch, Gesten des Zeigens. 50 | N. Sternfeld, Postrepräsentatives Kuratieren, p. 181. 51 | B. Kazeem et al., Das Unbehagen im Museum, p. 173. 52 | W. Shaw, The Islam in Islamic art history.

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Figure 4: The FHXB Museum in Kreuzberg, Berlin is known for its participatory work.

Figure 5: The entrance to the Museum für Islamische Kunst Berlin.

Figure 6: In video interviews, Berlin residents talked about their objects.

The Participatory City Museum Jan Gerchow, Sonja Thiel The historisches museum frankfurt (hmf) (Frankfurt Historical Museum) has reinvented itself time and again over the course of its 150-year history: from the city’s universal museum (1861) to the memorial site for the Free Imperial City (1878), to the museum of the Old Town and against the New Frankfurt (1924), to a virtual “Nazi homeland museum” (1938), to the regional museum of applied arts (1954) and finally in 1972, to the (historical) museum “for a democratic society”.1 Right now, another transformation is taking place, made possible once again by a major construction project. Not only were the historic buildings of the museum on the banks of the Main river, the Saalhof (built between the twelfth and the nineteenth centuries) extensively and carefully renovated between 2008 and 2012, but at the same time, the iconic exposed concrete building built in 1972 was also demolished. Preliminary construction work on the new buildings has already been completed, and they are expected to open in 2017. The new design of the hmf is oriented towards both the past and the future: it aspires to once again become a universal museum of the city (Frankfurt), as it was as the time of its foundation in 1861, focused on the past, the present and the prospects of the city.2 It also aims to integrate the city’s community into the museum’s work in a new manner and, conversely, to open the museum to the multi-perspectival nature of the city and its inhabitants.3 This is accompanied by a shift of the museum’s focus and subject areas: in 1972, its conceptual framework was organised around the then new ‘critical social history’. The hmf became the first historical museum (as opposed to museums of cultural history, art history or the history of style, etc.) in the Federal Republic of Germany, coinciding with the permanent exhibition Fragen an die deutsche Geschichte (Questions to German History) at the Reichstag (1971). The ‘Museum für die demokratische Gesellschaft’ (Museum for a Democratic 1 | See Historisches Museum Frankfurt, Die Zukunft beginnt in der Vergangenheit. 2 | See J. Steen, Das Historische Museum Frankfurt am Main. 3 | See Gerchow et al., Nicht von gestern.

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Society) was a response to the restriction of fundamental rights brought about by the emergency laws of 1968, Kultur für alle (Culture for All) was a response to the ‘education crisis’, and Lernort contra Musentempel (Site of Learning contra the Temple of the Muses) a response to the ‘domination’ of the educated middleclass: these were the key concepts in 1972.4 The hmf of 1972 was one of the first museums in Germany to elevate the educational and outreach mission of the museum to become the measure of its activities, and to design its exhibitions with this in mind.5 In 2015, much of this is yet to be delivered, and is therefore still relevant. However, the museum’s programs are currently not focused on education and outreach or on the topic of history. Instead, the new approach is focused on participation and the subject of the city. The starting point for this realignment is an analysis of the demographics of Frankfurt at the beginning of the 21st century. In 2014, 48 % of the inhabitants of the city had a “migrant background”.6 This tendency is growing rapidly; in 2010 the number was only 42 %, of which over 50 % did not have a German passport in 2014. The inhabitants are not united by any national sentiment, religious affiliation or common language, nor an awareness of a shared history or cultural heritage. Rather, the only common denominator for the people of Frankfurt is the city in which they all live and which they all share and ‘use’. For this reason, the museum now concentrates its work increasingly on the city (Frankfurt), and not only in terms of its history, but also with its present and future in mind. The museum aims to become a ‘relevant place’ for all the inhabitants of the city (which encompasses the entire Frankfurt Rhine-Main Metropolitan Region): a place that facilitates discussions about Frankfurt’s urban issues. In the future, the programs of the museum will have a stronger thematic focus on Frankfurt and the notion of the ‘city’. Given Frankfurt’s ‘cosmopolitan quality’– it has been described as Germany’s only ‘global city’ by to the sociologist Saskia Sassen (1996) – the museum is by no means restricting itself by concentrating on the city. Thus, it is possible to draw links between national, European and global topics in the areas of urban history, culture and town planning. With this shift away from ‘special interest’ history to ‘general interest’ city, the museum 4 | E. Spickernagel/B. Walbe, Das Museum. 5 | See J. Gerchow, Stadt- und regionalhistorische Museen; Historisches Museum Frank ­f urt. 6 | According to the micro-census of 2005, the Federal Office for Migration defines persons with a migrant background as “all those who have migrated to the current territory of the Federal Republic of Germany since 1949, as well as all foreigners born in Germany and all persons born in Germany as Germans with at least one parent who had migrated to Germany after 1949 or who was born there as a foreigner” (Statistisches Bundesamt Deutschland).

The Par ticipator y City Museum

aims to address and reach the inhabitants of Frankfurt’s metropolitan area in the 21st century. Frankfurt is the most culturally diverse city in Germany. From the museum’s perspective, this represents the biggest challenge for the established cultural institutions today and in the near future. Focusing on the shared and communally experienced city represents a response to this challenge. Another response is the opening up of the museum to new working methods and perspectives. With the advent of the internet, particularly the web 2.0, a new culture of knowledge was established at the turn of the century. Knowledge is no longer offered and provided exclusively by academically or governmentally legitimised institutions (such as universities, archives and museums) or by journalists and their organisations (newspapers, radio and news agencies). Rather, it is increasingly laypeople who are successfully generating and publishing knowledge on the internet. This usually happens in the form of participatory projects (wikis, blogs, etc.). The hmf sees great potential in this in terms of the micro-level of the city  – as opposed to the macro-level of the nation, Europe, or the world – and in relation to the topics of the city (topography and architecture, biographies, events/history, experiences/stories). There are numerous ‘experts’ in cities who are happy to share their knowledge, and whose knowledge is relevant and valuable for the nucleus of the museum: its collections. At the same time, through integrating these forms of knowledge, the museum becomes a place that remains attractive for its field of reference (primarily the inhabitants of the region) in the 21st century. In its re-conception, the hmf aims to become a museum that takes the knowledge of its visitors seriously by letting the ‘users’ design and contribute elements of its content. Drawing on the work of Nina Simon, 7 we can identify the forms of this participation in the museum as ranging from contributions to collaborations and joint authorship or co-creation. Translated into the formats of the museum it can take the form, for instance, of the handing over of the collection objects, of collaboration in the documentation of the collections and exhibitions, or of joint events and jointly curated exhibitions. The collaboration with participants should not be carried out from an academic or authoritative position, but as equals, meaning that the individual steps to integrate the knowledge of the participants into the work of the museum should be negotiated together. The museum has provided several interfaces for this in its new approach. One of the main interfaces will be the museum’s new web portal, which not only asks for direct commentary on the entire program, but also provides points of access for contributions ‘from the outside’ – both in the collection area and in the museum’s on-going research projects. The museum views the curation of exhibitions together with experts 7 | N. Simon, The Participatory Museum.

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on the city of Frankfurt as a special challenge. For this mode of co-creation, the museum’s new design designated an attractive area on the top floor of the new exhibition hall. Between the permanent elements Frankfurt-Modell (Frankfurt Model) and the Bibliothek der Generationen (Library of the Generations), which also have a participatory approach, there are approximately 500 square metres for a multi-purpose exhibition space, with a view of the city from 80 windows. Starting in 2017, projects created through different forms of participatory museum work will be presented here twice a year. However, the museum does not want to embrace this new format without ‘practice’. For this reason, it has been testing the City Lab since 2011 at various locations around the city, with rotating partners in different sections of the community: Stadtlabor unterwegs (Mobile City Lab).

The cur ation and education model of the M obile C it y L ab With a total of five City Lab exhibitions since 2011, the conceptual ideas developed and formulated in 2010/11 were able to be implemented in the format of a lab, allowing them to be tested and refined so that the vision of the participatory museum could be brought closer to reality.8 With a comprehensive outreach approach, it has so far been located predominantly at non-museum sites in the city. Each exhibition is the result of a year-long process of collaborative curation9 by the citizens of Frankfurt together with the hmf. For this purpose, whole districts (such as Ostend, Ginnheim or Gallus) and specific locations (such as the outdoor pool Stadionbad or the public parklands of the Wallanlagen) have been chosen as research and exhibition venues.10 The proposals for the locations often came from the population of the city itself, because a socio-political or historico-didactic interest was connected with the exhibitions in the district or on-site, or because a previous exhibition had served as a model. The presentations were preceded by an exploratory process with an open public invitation. The concept, program, process and design were jointly decided upon.11 Through incorporating its curatorial 8 | See Gerchow et al., Nicht von gestern. 9 | The concept of collaborative curation means a collaboration on exhibitions in which the different participatory forms outlined by Nina Simon (2010) are implemented. 10 | Alongside a project blog, each exhibition contained a detailed exhibition documentation in a print version, with descriptions of the exhibition concept, of the individual contributions and of the process. See Historisches Museum Frankfurt (Ed.), 2011; 2012; 2013; 2014. The blogs are accessible online, see http://blog.historisches-muse​ um-frankfurt.de/, accessed 13.04.2016. 11 | See O. Bäß/A. Canzler, Der Prozess der partizipativen Gestaltung.

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expertise and institutional knowledge, the museum sees itself as a companion in this process.12 The participants and co-curators (typically numbering approximately 100 people) of the respective projects are inhabitants of the city who want to shape their neighbourhood, reveal unnoticed aspects of local history and their present lives, or find a larger audience for their concerns. For the museum, the decision to veer towards participatory work is complex: primarily, the underlying idea is that people from Frankfurt can shape and co-design their city’s museum. Through the methodology of participatory museum work, the museum gets closer to the city’s contemporary issues: by collecting and exhibiting an (often intangible) urban culture, the hmf aims to represent a greater diversity of positions, to increase its profile in the city and to form a community that is lastingly integrated into the museum’s work. In the context of this new strategy, the hmf orients itself towards the museological discourse of the museum as a ‘contact zone’,13 the establishment of reciprocal relations between museum and the city community from ‘new museology’,14 and, primarily, the development of an open community15 as well as the discussions around the possibilities and effects of participation in cultural history museums.16 Based on the analysis of the fourth City Lab exhibition park in progress: Stadtlabor unterwegs in den Wallanlagen (Mobile City Lab in the Wallanlagen) from 2014 as well as individual examples from previous projects, it is possible to show the specific forms taken by the collections – in the context of the exhibitions as intangible networked knowledge, in the context of the City Lab on the levels of ‘community building’ and as an element of ‘social inclusion’.17

C ase study : the e xhibition park in progress With the exhibition park in progress, the City Lab carried out an exhibition in a public space: The Frankfurt Wallanlagen are a 5.2 km-long green belt created on the site of the former city walls. Its characteristic zig-zagged shape extends in seven sections around the inner-city of Frankfurt, intersected by several streets. The most controversial issue revolves around the exceptions to the so-called Wallservitut of the 1970s, a provision that regulates and restricts development on the parklands. Due to their location on the edge of the inner city, the facil12 | See W. Hijnen, The new professional Underdog or Expert?, p. 16 f. 13 | See J. Clifford, Routes. 14 | See S. Macdonald, Museen erforschen. 15 | See L. Meijer van Mensch, Von Zielgruppen zu Communities. 16 | See J. Gerchow et al., Nicht von gestern. 17 | See R. Sandell, Museums as Agents of Social Inclusion.

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ities serve today as residential and transit areas. Frankfurt’s cultural history is reflected in the parklands through numerous monuments and many other aspects. The fourth City Lab exhibition was inspired largely by a citizen who had the desire to start a public debate about the current handling and maintenance of the parklands. Additionally, different narratives were developed from the approximately 100 participants: largely unknown stories about historically important buildings (such as the Frankfurter Wasserhäuschen and its operator, the Jewish Museum in Rothschild Palais, or the Neo-Moorish architecture of the Maurisches Haus) strengthened the awareness of the historical development and significance of the parklands. In this way, the invisible was made visible again by recalling the city’s forgotten layers of meaning, as was the case in a contribution that addressed disappeared or relocated monuments, a testament to Frankfurt’s ever-changing history. Other contributions presented the parklands as a public space for discussion and debate about the city’s old and new ‘borders’, which have arisen around the former fortification. The 60 individual contributions were marked out for the event with yellow bars and made into a walking course, the bold colour intended to be reminiscent of surveying rods. The lines of sight that were created at each point guided the visitors to the next station. We call the specific knowledge which is exhibited in the City Lab exhibitions by way of participatory methodology ‘expert knowledge’, and thus establish the concept of shared knowledges between the museum and the city population. This knowledge consists of structural knowledge about modes of operation in the city, historical knowledge about people or neighbourhoods, oral traditions, opinions and attitudes, critiques or visions of development in Frankfurt, or empirical knowledge about the “inherent logic of the city”.18 It can refer to the description of the everyday practices of the inhabitants of the city and the networks of signification and identity-formation which are ascribed to these. The knowledge gathered in the City Lab exhibitions is a form of immaterial culture. It represents an ephemeral and therefore complex object of investigation. The scope of the community members engaged in the City Lab ranges from professional architects and local historians to school classes, associations, artists, political activists and minority groups. Accordingly, the term ‘expert knowledge’ entails different qualities of diverse results of participation. A specific survey of the places and the presentation of the different findings and opinions will be conducted in all City Lab exhibits. However, this interrogation does not claim to be complete and consistent, rather, it reflects the disparity of the participants.

18 | M. Löw, Eigenlogische Strukturen.

The Par ticipator y City Museum

C ommunication of ‘ e xpert knowledge ’ and communit y building In order to transmit this knowledge, in addition to the exhibition, an overarching program was implemented for every City Lab exhibition. The education and outreach programs for the Wallanlagen exhibition were combined in the form of a map of trails and a smartphone app that offered additional voice recordings and a game that ranged over the entire parklands.19 Furthermore, the education and outreach work was only partially carried out by the museum; to a large extent it was the participants themselves who were able to discuss their own research and positions with the audience. This process of appropriation and transmission of knowledge is particularly important for the acceptance of such a multi-perspectival exhibition. Ideally, the identification of the participants with the museum is high and constitutes an important precondition for sustainable community building. The multiplier effect of participatory projects causes the participants to generate new audiences through their social networks, which is often how they first come into contact with the idea and the work of the city’s museum. The intensive cultivation of relationships between museum and society is part of the idea of social inclusion. It can be applied in three aspects: access, participation and representation.20 Richard Sandell shows that social inclusion for museum work can operate on different levels – either on an individual level, where self-confidence and creativity are promoted, or on a community level, which encourages confidence in our ability to measure and ultimately to shape the city. Lastly, he identifies the level of representation, whereby the city’s multi-perspectival quality is portrayed as a positive, desirable characteristic, reaffirming the understanding of different points of view and ways of life.21 In the City Lab exhibitions the aspect of the representation of excluded social groups has been carried out in many sub-projects, for example in the cooperation with youth centres for structurally disadvantaged youth, with facilities for drug addicts or the homeless, or with a Parkinson’s self-help group – in short, with groups that are exposed to different forms of social exclusion. In some cases, particularly sustainable forms of community building (the establishment of a relationship between museum and participants) took place.

19 | The smartphone app for the exhibition in the Wallanlagen is also available from the end of the exhibition onwards (with Android 4.1. and iOS 5.1) in http://one.deliusbooks.de/alias/wallanlagen-app, accessed 13.04.2016. 20 | See L. Meijer van Mensch, Stadtmuseen and ‘Social Inclusion’, p. 83. 21 | See R. Sandell, Social inclusion, the museum and the dynamics of sectoral change, p. 45.

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This can be seen clearly in specific cases, such as that of the postcard collector who has opened up his Frankfurt collection for each of the five exhibitions, or the women from the National Association of Migrants who contributed their perspective on migrant life in the district of Ginnheim (2013), who stayed involved in the follow-up projects and also participated in the long-term format of the Bibliothek der Generationen. The one-year process is a process of rapprochement between the citizens and the museum, as well as between the participants themselves. However, ‘community building’ refers not only to the relationship between the society of the city and the museum, but also to the exchange amongst the participants. The City Lab becomes a meeting place, where for instance an artist and the director of a drug help group could meet for the first time and decide on a common project. This was the case in the project SkulpturMüllSkulptur (SculptureWasteSculpture), in which the daily work at the drug help centre adjacent to the park was made visible by arranging the collected garbage in a growing sculpture, in reference to the work of Joseph Beuys. The engagement of participants with opposing views and contributions in development workshops also contributes to the establishment of the museum as a ‘contact zone’. An example from the previous exhibition in Ginnheim (2013) illustrates how the City Lab can generate a form of empowerment which leads to a process of appropriation of public space and the city. There, by means of a small urban gardening project, awareness was raised about how the church square  – the centre of the former village, which is now a suburb of the city  – was being used in an insufficient and non-social way. In this way, the self-organised and temporary community garden managed to performatively sketch out a future vision and create a space for discussion about the future of the district. One of the initiators of the project, Jan Jacob Hofmann, summed up his most important realisation in the following words: “I have come to understand that the city is my space. And it doesn’t have to stay how it is”.22

The museum as a pl ace for communit y building , inclusion and politicisation In summary, the various functions of participation became clear within the context of the Mobile City Lab exhibitions from 2011 to 2015. The social function is identified with the term ‘community building’, which is also linked to the museum’s long-term ‘audience development’. This additional function attempts to permanently pose the question: for whom is the museum a place 22 | Oral statement from the “Stadtlabor-Debatte” at the Wallanlagen City Lab on the 29.10.2014 with Hanno Rauterberg.

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of representation? And: in what way does the museum reflect urban society? The city museum comes closer to fulfilling its duty when it offers different narratives about the city and opens them up for discussion. The continuous collection of multi-perspectival narratives results in a kaleidoscopic, constantly changing image of the city. Thus, the exhibitions reflect an important aspect of life in Frankfurt. Lastly, the City Lab also has a politicising function: on the cultural level, political awareness is actively engaged, in that it opens a discussion about the role of citizens and their awareness of their own agency. The five City Labs that have been conducted so far are an encouragement both to bring this format into the museum spatially, and, from 2017 on, to continue ‘going out in the city’. At the same time, this poses many questions that will occupy the museum in the future: these include matters of feasibility, given the high personnel costs of participatory work and also museological and theoretical issues. The new role of museum curators needs to be reconsidered as the museum departs from its claims of scientific methodologies and curatorial/authorial responsibility, and allows central decisions to be made collaboratively through the exhibitions. Moreover, it will be important to reflect on new forms, other areas of application, precise modes of action and the social significance of participation. How can the previous collection of intangible expert knowledge be developed further under the conditions of a digital approach? To what extent can the collection of material objects be processed in terms of participation? Can clear limits of participation in the museum be explained and justified? How sustainable can and should the structure of the City Lab community be in the future, and how can ‘community building’ continue to evolve strategically? Finally, there is a need for a more general understanding of what the role of the museum is as an identity-creating site of remembrance in the context of a participatory shift in a society with a transnational cultural image.

Figure 1: Opening of the new Historisches Museum, Frankfurt am Main, 1972.

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Figure 2: The walking map through the Wallanlagen outlining the various exhibition contributions.

Figure 3: Contribution from GroncyScheitterer ©, Menschen in den Wallanlagen (People in the Wallanlagen). An experiencebased approach to storytelling.

Figure 4: Audience contributions could be attached to the Grenzverhandlungen (Border Negotiations) fence around the building site.

Education at the Centre of the District Six Museum Bonita Bennett

A museum premised on absence makes for an interesting study. It provokes thinking about what people who have very little by way of material possessions, socio-political influence or formal education, and shaped by a history of excision, have to offer the world through a museum dedicated to their story: that of the destroyed community of District Six. Although only formally constituted in 1994 as the first post-apartheid museum in South Africa, the District Six Museum actually has its origins in the 1980s during the days of the anti-apartheid struggle. A conference called the ‘Hands off District Six’ conference in 1989 is referenced as the point at which a public call to create a Museum was made. It was framed as a place to become the keeper of the destroyed community’s memory, to explore with them how such memory could be mobilised to support their land claim, and to assist in the struggle for memory as a right both in the instrumentalist form referred to above, but also as an important constituent part of their bruised humanity. Reconstruction of lives was at the core of the Museum’s formation, in both material and intangible ways. District Six was a culturally diverse and vibrant inner city neighbourhood of Cape Town dating back to the 1800s. It developed a reputation for its vibrancy and rich cultural life, an area which was welcoming to new arrivals on the shores of this country. It thus became home to early immigrants  – some of whom were fleeing the Jewish pogroms in Europe, while others were merely seeking better economic opportunities; the enslaved people of the Cape who were legally freed in 1834 (from Indonesia, Java, India, Angola, Malaysia, Mozambique) and local inhabitants. The very diversity of its community made it a target for destruction by the apartheid government from the mid-1900s onwards. Apartheid needed wholesale belief in the system of divide and rule; it needed belief that the co-existence of difference was not desirable or even possible. District Six was a visible example that such premise was false. It was declared a whites-only area in 1966, its residents classified into different racial

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categories and then displaced to different areas based on their racial classification. Their homes, streets and signifiers of community were all bulldozed. Despite the destruction, the land remained vacant and the apartheid dream of the ‘whites only’ city to be reconstructed in its ruins, never materialised. It has become the site of a protracted land restitution process and a few families have returned.

W hy a museum ? The decision to make a museum as the vehicle for recovery and restitution was an interesting choice, and one which has been the subject of many debates and discussions. The decision was made at a time when museums were closely associated with the colonial and apartheid past in South Africa, representing a version of history which not only told the story of apartheid but also in overt and tacit ways justified its existence. It was at a time when, in Cape Town, the lives of indigenous people were represented in a diorama at the Museum of Natural History while the lives of white people were represented at the Cultural History Museum. Museums were neither friendly nor engaging spaces. The notion of a museum was completely outside of the regular discourse of black South Africans and was a concept that took those who were not part of the decision, some time to comprehend. “I often wonder in what spirit and with what intention the term ‘museum’ was first used in the context of District Six” reflects Peggy Delport, visual artist, educator and a prominent member of the founding curatorial team of the District Six Museum  […].1 She believes that the term ‘museum’ was evoked “as something that suggested a solidity, continuity and permanence that could withstand even the force of the bulldozer and the power of a regime committed to the erasure of place and community. The common impulse in the call was for a place of memory, not a monument but a focus for the recovery and reconstruction of the social and historical existence of District Six.”2 It is clear that learning and thinking about meaning and impact were at the centre of the curatorial work of this museum from the outset. The conceptualisation was seldom about creating a museum to teach others about what they did not know. Rather, it was about making sense of their own life-altering experiences of displacement, by telling their previously silenced stories. Simultaneously, it was about inviting others to immerse themselves into the community’s story and to somehow be affected or changed by such immersion. Such was the intended nature of the learning experience.

1 | P. Delport, Museum or place of working, p. 11. 2 | Ibid.

Education at the Centre of the District Six Museum […] the desire to ‘collect’ in the sense which links it to the notion of the traditional museum – was purposefully absent. Instead, the purpose of ‘collecting’ was to share, to mobilise, to advocate for justice and to bring about recognition of a trauma. In this context, the driving force behind sharing stories (oral and written) was the act of reconnecting with neighbours and keeping the memory of District Six as part of the city’s conscience. 3

I n the beginning Founding members included those who had formerly been resident in the destroyed area of District Six, and there was minimal concern about what would now be called ‘audience development’ because there was a clamouring by many who felt connected, to be involved. There was a frequent blurring of lines between participant, visitor, educator, curator and storyteller with many people shifting between these various roles. Current staff and volunteers have built on that approach, regarding a visit to the Museum as a learning immersion for all involved. Founding narratives are crucial and life-giving: purpose gives shape to method and form. It is my contention that the District Six Museum has been spared some of the worst tensions between curating, exhibition-making and education as separate disciplines because of its clear sense of purpose  – an orientation that we strive to hold onto in the present. In some ways the organizing committee made its own rules because they did not set out to produce a conventional museum. The imperative towards transformation and the attainment of human rights for all was the driving impetus in the context of what was happening in South Africa at the time, rather than adhering to the set conventions of museum practice. Everything undertaken had to answer to the requirement of how the restoration and protection of peoples’ humanity would be effected before the project was implemented. The coalition of people who created the Museum pooled their human resources as artists, activists, academics, religious leaders, researchers, writers – and created a dynamic team which provided a wonderful model, thinking against the grain in an intentional way. A museum space was initiated as a result of this process. There was no collection to drive its interpretive work, but there were always people: their presence, their stories and eventually their objects. Objects were mostly ordinary things, sometimes chipped, rusted or even broken, artefacts that formed part of their lives’ archive. The absence of the material traces of peoples’ lives on the destroyed and re-contoured landscape became powerful

3 | C. Julius, Participative strategies, p. 1.

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framing metaphors  – what Mahmoud Darwish4 refers to as the ‘presence of absence’ – for an embodied methodology. The fragments – the bits and pieces of peoples’ lives – are at the core of our collection, and we have had to question ourselves in the following way: bearing in mind the circumstances under which many people left their homes; that the material traces of their lives, their streets, their homes and other points of reference were destroyed; that many who left with bulldozers hovering over them had to leave behind family albums and other memorabilia in favour of saving possessions which they needed to reconstruct their lives elsewhere; does the absence of things diminish the story that they have to tell the world in the context of a museum? Paul Williams5 refers to a basic difficulty with memorial museums: “orchestrated violence aims to destroy and does so efficiently. The injured, dispossessed and expelled are left object-poor.” In some ways the creation of the District Six Museum responds to that challenge, demonstrating that learning and absence are not mutually exclusive.

Tr ansformative education District Six Museum was literally born at the temporal cusp of South Africa’s transition to democracy. The year of the country’s first democratic elections and the inauguration of the late Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela as president  – 1994 – is also the birth year of the Museum. It was a period characterised by euphoria about transformation, and education was high on the agenda as a site for activating a new way of being a rights-based South Africa. The recent experience of education as a site of struggle still loomed large, and the empowering didactic methodologies flowing out of this period influenced many spheres of work and cultural involvement, including the Museum. ‘Each one teach one’ had been the clarion call of the student movements of the 1980s. This same intention is more systematically codified by the concept of co-intentional education as described by Paulo Freire6 in which he advocates for the interchangeable roles of teachers and learners (students-teachers). He is a key proponent of the concept that each has something to teach; each has something to learn. Nobody comes into a learning situation as an empty vessel to be filled with information by an expert carrier of knowledge. He debunks the ‘banking’ model of education: a conservative model which advocates that students receive ‘knowledge deposits’ from teachers much as anyone would deposit valuable

4 | M. Darwish, In the Presence of Absence, p. 71. 5 | P. Williams, Memorial Museums, p. 25. 6 | P. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 59.

Education at the Centre of the District Six Museum

assets into an empty bank vault or account.7 In such an approach those who are not the authorised teachers are destined to be passive receptacles, not active co-creators of knowledge. ‘Subjects’ under apartheid were relegated to the realm of being acted upon, and to being recipients of restrictive laws, regulations and prohibitions. Resistance was grounded in the assertion of voice and the contestation of passivity. This orientation was propelled through all modalities of the mass democratic movement: the civic, youth, faith-based, labour and education initiatives. A return of agency was high on the agenda of the resistance movement. Freire8 refers to breaking a ‘culture of silence’– an apt way of thinking about this particular barrier to attaining the fullness of a self-expressed humanity.

R eflecting on cur atorship and education Museum Manager of Education, Mandy Sanger, reflects on the Museum’s pedagogical framework at a conference in Bologna, Italy.9 She identifies the following elements as being some of the key features of the education program, which leans heavily on a Freireian theory of education, contextualised for our needs. She emphasises that our education programs are aimed at developing a dialogic or collaborative approach to learning- to counteract the silencing of learners’ knowledge and experience; designing processes that encourage learning by doing and experiential learning; developing the tools of critical enquiry through the youth development programs and projects of the Museum; underpinning the work we do in the Museum with a politics of critical reflection – strengthening the ‘never again’ ethos confronted by post-political trauma experiences; breaking the culture of silence of oppressed people as transmitted through the institutions that support the dominant cultural discourse.

Sharing his perspectives on the shaping of visitor experiences in the Museum, founding trustee Crain Soudien10 categorises the Museum’s pedagogical approaches into two broad streams: “[…] two distinct – there are certainly more – pedagogical approaches can be described in the Museum. The first is what I call the ‘stand-in-my-shoes’ approach and the second is the ‘what are the implications of this’ approach.” The first refers to the empathetic invitation to learn and understand by changing perspective from a disengaged visitor, to try to view 7 | P. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 58. 8 | P. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 30. 9 | M. Sanger & S. Abrahams, Places of Memory. 10 | C.Soudien, Memory and critical education, p. 115.

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the past from the perspective of the testifier. Believing as we do that the aim of education is to effect change, the approach described by Soudien as a second approach then invites the visitor to reflect on what changed attitude or action might result from this new understanding. The framework and approaches outlined above work together to produce a range of immersive encounters which raise awareness about a number of issues. In turn, visitor and participant responses teach the Museum about what works, what doesn’t, and most importantly, what connections are provoked through these encounters. Inevitably those facilitating educational experiences walk away with a strong sense that they too, have been enriched by the encounters which they have led. Such enrichment has been described either as learning new content not previously known from different contexts, as shared by visitors as part of the engagement; learning about how group dynamics impact on interventions, and through this learning adaptive resilience and creativity as a facilitator; and of greatest significance, discovering through observation of how people learn.

Two progr ammatic e x amples A number of programs and projects provide channels of expression for the Museum’s methodologies. I have selected two of these by way of example. One program is youth-focused – the Heritage Ambassador Program (HAP) –, while the other, called Huis Kombuis involves elders from the District and other areas of displacement.11

The Heritage Ambassadors Program: working with youth There have been a number of Heritage Ambassador intakes since the program first started just over ten years ago. Typically, young people between the ages of 15 and 19 are recruited from surrounding high schools, with a small number occasionally consisting of unemployed youth and recent school leavers. Like many of the Museum’s programs, most of the engagements follow a workshopping format combined with fieldwork. There is a core syllabus which focuses on the development of set skills, with each intake having variables shaped by contextual factors, thematic interests, strengths of participants and the overall focus of the Museum at the time. Critical thinking and research methodologies are key components of each semesterised program. Reflecting on the 2010 series, program leader Mandy Sanger12 says the following about the exhibition component which is always one of the outputs: 11 | Huis Kombuis, literally translated from Afrikaans means ‘home kitchen’. 12 | District Six Museum, Reflections, p. 21.

Education at the Centre of the District Six Museum The project stressed the need for constructive leadership, citizen rights and responsibilities for the future. Participants were introduced to all areas of exhibition work and were responsible for the exhibitions at all stages of development. Using collaborative learning activities they researched the content of the exhibitions. They were also responsible for the design and construction. A media campaign run by the participants formed part of the program. Finally, the participants designed and implemented an education program for primary school learners from their communities.

Participants were asked to reflect on their own learning experiences, and the data gathered demonstrated that they attained levels of understanding that went beyond memorising factual and content information. They showed a strong awareness of their own attitudes and personal attentiveness as being important contributors to their learning journeys. They spoke of how they had been inspired by brainstorming, planning and especially by listening to others; they spoke of their own learning strategies including undivided attention and personal documentation; they spoke of the value of mistakes made and of self-correction. They acknowledged the value of participation and engaging with different opinions, and also referenced elements of fun and enjoyment.13

Huis Kombuis: working with the elderly Huis Kombuis is a project of the Museum’s Exhibition Department. The participants are recruited from a body of elderly former residents of District Six, who are keen to be involved in this workshop-based initiative. It is focused on storytelling about rituals of home and homemaking, and memories of food in the old District. It positions the hearth of the home as a central cohering space, and the nostalgic remembering of the comforts of this safe family arena is peppered with the aftermath of displacement. According to Museum Exhibition Manager Tina Smith, who is also the project leader, the design and craft processes which form part of this project are experienced as healing and cathartic by participants. Through the use of a fluid methodological framework, and by prioritising the participants’ storytelling as the key tool for the product development, the Huis Kombuis project was an attempt to present narrativised versions of the participants’ lives in a specific context, particularly time, using a number of reflexive lenses, but ultimately telling a story of loss, memory and symbolic reconstruction.14

13 | District Six Museum, The Heritage Ambassador, p. 31. 14 | T. Smith, Huis Kombuis and the senses of memory, p. 156.

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Narratives emerging from the workshops contribute to a growing repository of living memory and adds to the archival resource. Hand-made products based on reminiscence craft design are produced, as design techniques are learnt, shared and implemented.15

R eflections on the projects The strength of these and other projects of the District Six Museum is that each could have been led by either of the two departments involved: Education and Exhibitions. The differences in the rollout would have been more in the nature of differing emphases rather than differences in content and form. The educational component is very present in the exhibitions-led project and the converse is true of the education-led initiative. The Museum’s staffing structure as reflected in its organogram creates an impression that departments exist as discrete units. However, in reality work happens in a much more organic and integrated way, and departmental division merely demarcates where the main responsibilities lie, acknowledging that not all staff members carry equal responsibility for all things. Alan Brown and Steven Tepper16 describe the changing role of the twenty-first century curator as someone who will be “called upon not only to select and organize arts programs, but to diagnose need in their communities, seek out new and unusual settings for their work, forge partnerships with a wide array of disparate stakeholders, and, in some cases, cede a certain amount of artistic control in order to gain broader impact”. In many ways the District Six Museum has been fortunate that it emerged within a collaborative framework that was the hallmark of non-governmental organisations of the 1970s and 1980s; it did not have to forge new paths, as might have been the case if it had begun by following the conventions of the traditional museum with a singular model of curatorship as its standard. This museum grew out of a diagnosis of need in the community, and even though such diagnosis can never be complete or permanent, sound starting blocks have created a strong foundation. In the Huis Kombuis project, learning takes place between the participants as they interact with each other in a facilitated environment, providing stimuli to each others’ memories and filling the gaps in each others’ stories. Their interaction with the archive – often for the first time – is a wonderfully affirming experience as they work as researchers engaged in triangulation. 15 | Reminiscence craft design refers to a method of creating hand-crafted products based on sensory stimuli evoked from the past which serves to inform and inspire the design process. This includes visual, tactile and auditory stimuli. 16 | A. Brown & S. Tepper, Placing the Arts at the Heart.

Education at the Centre of the District Six Museum

At the same time their project outputs and products – whether recorded oral histories transcribed into written texts, recipes presented in postcard formats, cooking demos, food events or textiles designed in the creative workshops  – provide information and channels for those outside of the process to understand the community ethos of District Six more intimately. Each story provides another little clue to understanding. In the HAP process, young people get to engage with the history and legacies of displacement that go beyond the ‘banking’17 of facts and figures about apartheid. They are challenged to extend their thinking beyond the dates and statistics, utilising these as tools towards understanding, not learning end goals within themselves. Thinking about visuality and creating something innovative to illustrate their learning to the world, forms an important part of their learning journey. Frequent opportunities for reflection built into the program require them to consider their own learning processes.

C hallenges Describing the comfortable intertextual co-existence of the Museum’s educational and curatorial strands might have created the impression that it has been an easy job, confirmed possibly by my use of the term ‘fortunate’ to describe the good foundations laid at the start of this organisation. That would not be an accurate picture! The context has changed substantially. Process work is of necessity slow and human-resource intensive  – two characteristics which are not currently popular. There is pressure to provide instant gratification and automate tasks which were previously human driven. Although this is a generalised inclination which exists outside of the museum world and has become the nature of our consumer driven society, the museum sector has not been immune to it. Slow learning journeys have proven to us that this style of working has wonderful capacity to build ownership and depth of learning, but it is extremely difficult to finance. The impact is incremental and measurable over a period longer than a single financial year which is often required by project funders. Many of the negotiations of project details is done at quarterly curatorial meetings; consisting of staff, trustees, and occasionally others who have specific expertise in the areas under examination. I believe that this routine has been sufficiently entrenched in the organisation to be retained as the dominant mode of institutional operation long into the future. The Museum has developed ways of being true to – and critical of – its organisational past, but some further thought needs to be given to how this continuity might be 17 | P. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 72.

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sustained beyond those who are currently at the helm and are committed to the collective spirit of growing creativity. Which brings me to a final challenge. The inter-disciplinary way of working described above is almost entirely possible because of the specific skills sets contained in the current staff, particularly the curatorial staff. The current team is comfortable working in an inter-disciplinary way, and its members are also skilled in a number of areas which go beyond their formal job designations. Much investment of time has also gone into building the team, and although succession at the same level of expertise is not impossible, it will not be easy.

Figure 1: Interactive table as part of the Displacement exhibition curated by Heritage Ambassador Programme participants, 2013.

Education at the Centre of the District Six Museum

Figure 2: Entrance to the District Six Museum with the permanent exhibition Digging Deeper, launched in 2000.

Figure 3: Curator Tina Smith providing orientation for a site walk with ex-residents through District Six, 2013.

Figure 4: View of the Portrait Gallery of the permanent exhibition Digging Deeper.

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Curating and Museum Education as Social Intervention

Introduction Carmen Mörsch

Disputes around the social role of museums and galleries were not born with the 1970s opposition of the “site of learning versus the temple of muses”1. It is as old as the institutions themselves: should they primarily be concerned with serving the representational interests of bourgeois elites and the “imagined community”2 of a nation; and with the collection, research and conservation of that which this elite views as its cultural heritage and thus as the basis of its identity? Or should it be concerned with establishing and serving markets for art and commercial goods, with the production and education of workers for colonial competition and with the cultivation of taste and discipline amongst the public? Is their function to teach and learn democracy on a broader basis, or even to educate “our workmen into general discontent”3, as the artist and socialist William Morris claimed in a letter to the founder of the Ancoats Museum in Manchester? In the UK at least, right from the beginning, substantial impulses for radical critiques of the museum and their associated utopic visions were generated from the perspective of education work. Related to this was (and remains) the conflict over who the legitimate visitors, users and collaborators of these institutions are. The article by Carmen Mörsch in this chapter takes a contemporary experience of exclusionary behaviour by an art institution as an opportunity to trace the history of this conflict by highlighting key moments within it. These begin in the first third of the eighteenth century, with the emergence of the first art institutions in London. Even at this time, certain visitors were marked as legitimate due to their social status and habitus. Mörsch reads the emergence and persistence of these othered visitors as an intervention in the sense of a temporary and in part long-lasting interruption of the hegemonic logics of cultural institutions. 1 | E. Spickernagel and B. Walbe, Das Museum. 2 | B. Anderson, Die Erfindung der Nation. 3 | N. Kelvin, The Collected Letters of William Morris, p. 17.

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The remaining contributions illustrate on various levels the productivity that the tensions underlying these histories can develop in the present. The professional position of all the authors  – the knowledge and the experiences which they draw on – also oscillates between curation and education. Based on the concept of “post-representative curation”4 (which she was influential in establishing), Nora Sternfeld (co-founder of trafo.K, the Vienna office for art education and critical knowledge production, curator and director of the master’s program in curating, managing and mediating art (CuMMA) at the Aalto University Helsinki) provides the conceptual foundation for a contemporary practice which views curation and education as spheres of action in which interpretations are contested and in which power relations are not reproduced, but rather interrogated and reworked. It is within this conceptual framework that the following practical analyses relate to one another. Janna Graham, former director of the Centre for Possible Studies initiated by the Serpentine Gallery London, and now academic curator at Nottingham Contemporary, subjects this very project to a process of reflection. Her analysis throws light on the conflicting interests, the potentials and limitations in a setting in which a ‘global player’ of the art market runs a production site in alliance with activists against gentrification in the same neighbourhood. Here, the art institution virtually hits the streets, intervenes in the space of the city as a political player, and in the process, becomes almost invisible itself. However it then re-appropriates that which occurs there in a second step, by incorporating it into its exhibition operations, in which the stakeholders from the streets then disappear from the realm of representation. The text from Marcus Syrus Ware, who works as an artist, curator and educator, reflects on an example in which the social intervention proceeds in the opposite direction: the work of the Youth Council of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Here we see a group of youths who intervene in the curatorial practice of a national gallery to represent their own political and artistic agenda. This works to destabilise the traditional relationship between curation and education and outreach work. Existing hierarchies surface, can be named and – with the sluggishness typical of large institutions – sometimes shifted. Both examples depict a curatorial and educational practice which operates in the field of tensions between the transformation and stabilisation of the different cultural institutions. What also becomes clear are both the continuities and differences of the historical debates. While in the period in which the art sector and cultural institutions were taking form controversies around the categorisation and definition of the establishment of universal rules dominated, the contemporary examples are concerned with the production of counter-hegemonic spaces of contestation in which resistance as well as social respon4 | N. Sternfeld/L. Ziaja, What Comes After the Show?, pp. 62–64.

Curating and Museum Education as Social Inter vention – Introduction

sibilities can be carried out. The question is whether and how the symbolic capital of museums and galleries could be deployed in a social struggle for increased equality. Furthermore, it is a question of no less than the struggle for the hegemony in the field of art and museums.5 It is also always a question of who is allowed to say and show what about whom and how, and  – this is particularly important in the examples introduced in this section – with whom, and in what way. Thus, ‘post-representative’ does not refer to – as is always the case when the prefix ‘post’ is involved  – a practice which follows the end of representation. Even where exhibition spaces are conceived as anti-hegemonic spaces, they continue to exhibit, to show something. For example, they might even show the way forward on the path to an emancipatory practice.

5 | O. Marchart, Hegemonie im Kunstfeld.

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Contact Zone (Un)realised ‘Other’ Visitors as Interventions in the Exhibition Space Carmen Mörsch

20151 In a project by the Institute for Art Education (IAE)2 at the Zurich University of the Arts in 2015, around 30 young people had the opportunity to gain knowledge about the art sector through activities such as visiting various exhibitions and theatres in Switzerland together with two employees from the institute, working with artists and sharing their experiences and observations. Most of the young people who took part in this program possess little of that which Swiss society recognises as symbolical capital.3 As in other countries in Western Europe, both everyday racism and structural racism create barriers that prevent these young people from accessing the corresponding cultural resources, which are, in principle, abundantly available in Switzerland. They are faced with forms of everyday racism, for example in the fact that based on their surname, they have less opportunities than others to find an apartment, 1 | See https://www.journal21.ch/because-its-2015 (the date of access for all web­s ites is 13.04.2016). 2 | The research carried out at the IAE takes place at the intersections of current cultural theories, artistic processes and the didactic theorisation of the discipline. It interrogates the relationship between art and education, the relevance of artistic production and procedures as well as the models of thought and methodologies in the context of social change. In doing so, it is concerned both with foundational research and applied research. One of the guiding concepts is the idea of a form of cultural education as critical praxis for social justice (see iae.zhdk.ch). 3 | Symbolic capital, which according to Bourdieu is just as crucial for social and economic success as financial resources, includes aspects such as formal education, certain manners of speaking, of behaving and dressing, aesthetic preferences (“taste”, “cultivation”), interests, social contacts and lifestyles (see P. Bourdieu, The forms of capital, pp. 241–258).

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and at the same time are forced to pay higher rents.4 They are confronted with structural racism in contexts such as the education system.5 They develop their own tactics for asserting themselves in this context; though visiting art institutions is not typically among them.6 One of the aims of the project was – together with the young people  – to open up the rules of the art sector and in doing so, to potentially make it available to them as an option for accruing symbolic capital.7 A week after visiting a contemporary art institution, which at that time was exhibiting a large-scale installation consisting of many individual elements, one of the people working on the project was contacted by a colleague from the institution with the news that a small, commonplace object made of paper, a detail from a set comprising 135 parts, was missing. They were informed that the object had been noticed to be missing on the day after the group’s visit. The room had video surveillance – they hadn’t yet checked the entire eight hours of the recording of the day, only the sequences that documented the presence of the group of teenagers. It could not be ascertained from the video footage that the group had stolen the object; nevertheless the institution was getting in touch with the group “since it was the only available contact”8. At that point, they were seeking to clarify with the artist whether the insurance company should be notified of the incident or whether the artist would be willing to replace the object with a new one. Were the insurance company to be notified, they would also have to file charges against the as-yet unidentified culprit. How exactly the police would then proceed was unclear.

4 | Fachstelle für Rassismusbekämpfung, Rassistische Diskriminierung in der Schweiz, p. 22 ff. 5 | S. Hupka-Brunner et al., Leistung oder soziale Herkunft? 6 | See http://www.babauslender.ch/; http://www.nzz.ch/panorama/menschen/ein-​ schwamendinger-konkurrenziert-mergim-muzzafer-1.18480222; here there are two cul­ tural producers who for a portion of the group mentioned could be considered role mod­e ls. 7 | A section of the teenagers are continuing to work in 2016 and are developing their own formats for the Zurich festival Blickfelder (see http://www.blickfelder.ch/). The project is supported by the Mercator Foundation Switzerland, the city of Zurich and by the Office of Elementary Education of the Canton of Zurich (see https://www.zhdk.ch/ index.php?id=95062). It developed as the outcome of a study that the IAE had carried out for the School and Culture department of the Office of Elementary Education (see https://www.zhdk.ch/index.php?id=96200). 8 | Cited from the memo of the conversation with the employee from the institution. The institution and the people involved shall remain anonymous in this text, since the aim is not to denounce an individual art institution or even individual people. The aim is rather to report on contemporary forms of these historical forms of discrimination.

Contact Zone (Un)realised

This initially triggered worry for the teenagers in the project team  – for some of them, an encounter with the police would have had incalculable consequences. Added to this was the fear for the project – the attempt to build up trust through the project would have been doomed to failure in the case of yet another criminalisation of some members of the group. In addition to this, there was an overwhelming sense of powerlessness and outrage towards the art institution, which had placed the young visitors under collective suspicion, even if it had been in a somewhat uncertain tone. Evidently on that day they had been the only ones who represented what I refer to in this article as ‘visitors as intervention’. They did not fit into the scene in terms of their habitus, even though they had conformed to the behavioural regulations of the exhibition space – something for which they had been carefully prepared as part of the project. After careful consideration, the project team decided on an approach aimed at de-escalation, deciding against explicitly addressing the discriminatory actions of the art institution, since the protection of the project participants was the top priority of the project. A private conversation with the representatives of the institution was sought and a police investigation was averted; they assured the institution that they would speak to the youths about the incident and present them with the opportunity to return the small, commonplace paper object, should one of them have it in their possession. The only responses this provoked from the group were of surprise and polite sympathy.

‘O ther ’ V isitors as I ntervention As the head of the IAE, for a good seven years now I have been observing the diverse characteristics of the overall increasing efforts of cultural institutions – in particular in the German-speaking world – to diversify their audiences.9 For institutions focused on contemporary art, this effort often seems to run into particular difficulties. The exhibition program of the institution used here as an illustrative example exhibits current or future stars of the art scene and its highly developed markets; in some way or another, a significant number of them assume positions that are critical of hegemonic structures. True to one of the central theses set out by Peter Bürger in his Theory of the AvantGarde,10 this critique remains within the system of art and has no effects on the exhibiting institution itself. The exhibitions are directed at an initiated, specialist audience and a financially able class of customers, which in the region in question is so strongly represented that through these groups alone 9 | Institute for Art Education at the Zurich University of the Arts, Zeit für Vermittlung. 10 | P. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde.

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they are probably able to generate sufficient visitor numbers to satisfy the public cultural funding bodies – in this case including the city in which the institution is based.11 When I dropped in on occasion to observe the education programs offered by the institution, which were directed at ‘families’, I encountered homogenous, well-off, white 12 user groups in small numbers. Overall, this scenario leads to the suspicion that an encounter with people who deviate from this profile is unusual for the institution and not necessarily desired. So far so good. In a western-style capitalist democracy there are no grounds for criticising an exhibition venue for choosing its audience, so long as in doing so it fulfils the stipulations of the official bodies that make its existence possible. This is one of the liberties recognised by this form of society. However I am interested in two points of ambivalence in the case that I have described: firstly, the institution in question reacted to the young visitors not with indifference, but rather with aversion, in that they subsequently suspected the group of theft and sabotage, instead of – as with other paying guests who conformed to the house rules – allowing them to enter, spend some time there, and then to continue on their way. And secondly, institutions, with their contemporary art and its audience of prospective buyers, prefer to keep to themselves, even though on their websites and in their brochures they rarely omit formulations such as “diverse visitors”, “different generations”, “promoting dialogue”, “creating new forms of access”, “a site of encounter” etc. So instead of attempting to avoid misunderstandings and the ensuing discomfort by being explicit about whom their program is (not) aimed at, they generate the claim of openness and unspecific, 11 | H. Munder & U. Wuggenig, Das Kunstfeld. The study cited here is based on surveys of 810 visitors to five exhibitions of contemporary art in the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich in 2009 and 2010 on the basis of random samples. It reveals that the overwhelming majority of visitors to contemporary art exhibitions in Zurich have a tertiary education and/or are well off. Therefore, the art exhibitions – as one of the authors is cited as saying in one of the articles on the study – are attached to the “golden umbilical cord” of the elites (P. Jurt, An der ‘goldenen Nabelschnur’ der Eliten). However this does not necessarily represent a problem for art institutions in Switzerland, where in the cities, the proportion of people with a formal education and high incomes is usually high. In the institution which serves as an example here, the offers for school classes are themselves limited, although in many institutions, it is now one of their ‘routine tasks’. A glance at the relevant webpage for education and outreach offers at the time of writing shows a single, six-month-old program for a school workshop, whilst the professional symposia are all up to date. 12 | I have written the concept white as an ascribed identity in italics here in order to hint at the role of historical, conceptual, social and cultural processes of construction which are inherent in this category. In contrast, I capitalise the word Black as a reference to the practice of self-identification of emancipatory movements.

Contact Zone (Un)realised

broad audiences which, however, they fail to deliver, due to the knowledge and non-knowledge which is constitutive for that very institution.13 ‘Knowledge and non-knowledge’ refers to the art-related expertise – both cognitive and in terms of habitus  – which is present in, and cultivated by, such institutions; and a failure to notice their associated exclusionary dimensions. These exclusionary dimensions form the foundation for retaining the institutional status quo. I understand ‘ambivalence’ here in the literal sense deriving from psychology, where the concept designates the simultaneity of repulsion and attraction.14 Referring to Edward Said’s work, Homi Bhaba speaks of the orientalist stereotype as the racialised Other which evokes ambivalent scenes, characterised at once by fear and desire.15 What is productive about Bhaba’s observation is that it complicates the dichotomous narrative of the dominator and the dominated. It is precisely through the ambivalence of repulsion and attraction that the Other ceases to be merely subjugated, but also occupies a powerful position of being able to fulfil this desire; thus, the Other has both a stabilising and a destabilising effect.16 With reference to the youths, whose bodies are read as ‘Balkan’ and belonging to an ‘underclass’, these references can be directly applied to this specific case study: documented by the surveillance camera, their visibility in the exhibition space as an ‘oriental’ group indicates an honoured promise on behalf of the institution about inclusiveness and audiences on the one hand; and on the other hand, it triggered the fantasy that valuable property would be stolen, profaning the venue. In this sense, Other visitors signify an intervention in the original Latin sense – an event-like stepping between, an interruption, which brings to the surface both the hegemonic structures of the gallery and the tensions inscribed within it.17 People who are sceptical about contemporary attempts to open up new audiences for art institutions often point to the neoliberal imperative of quantitative audience expansion. According to this, the attempts lead to a commercialisation and ‘eventisation’, which comes at the cost of challenging and high-calibre content. In this article, I don’t wish to go into the implications of this critique, and only wish to briefly point out that it can be illustrative to take note of the perspectives from which these criticisms are made, as well as what they ultimately hope to achieve, and where their (usually

13 | M. Castro Varela, Verlernen und die Strategie des unsichtbaren Ausbesserns. 14 | E. Bleuler, Die Ambivalenz. 15 | K. Struve, Zur Aktualität von Homi Bhaba, p. 73 ff. 16 | In the case study, the group of adolescents also represent the institutional desire of opening up to new audiences. For this reason, they are not simply exposed to the powerful institution, but also form a potential source of surplus value for that same institution. 17 | Der Taschen Heinichen Lateinisch Deutsch, p. 239.

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undisclosed) alliances lie.18 My aim here is to show that the aforementioned ambivalence towards Other visitors is already inscribed in the early history of art institutions. The debate over who has the right to spend time in these insitutions and under which conditions, who has the right to be represented in them, to use them, and to have a say in them, has been updated in various historical moments, each time under different conditions. Therefore, art institutions do not stand outside of the social relations from which they and the artistic quality which they produce supposedly need to be protected. On the contrary, they, their definitions of quality and of that which constitutes art and an art audience, were, and remain components and motors of these very relations. In the following, I would like to illustrate this using the example of Great Britain, by highlighting four moments in the history of British art institutions.19

1760 In 1754, the painter and social reformer William Shipley founded England’s first public art institution financed by membership fees: The Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (referred to hereafter as the Society for the Arts). The Society for the Arts set itself the task of disseminating the knowledge required for the attainment of taste as broadly as possible throughout the broader public  – knowledge about what was considered good taste, and which was attained via the appreciation of art and artistic exercise. ‘Taste’ was a central criterion in the processes of negotiating the question of who could claim the status of being a fellow citizen in British society, in its new conception of self as a nation and empire. Through the Society for the Arts, knowledge of art transformed from a marker of status into an educational project, set against the backdrop of colonial competition. It ran a drawing school in which the artistic rules of textile ornaments were taught to workers from the workshops, but in which at the same time artists learned and taught painting and sculpture. This cohabitation of ‘applied’ and ‘fine’, of ‘artists’ and ‘amateurs’ was propagated by the representatives of the Society for the Arts 18 | In this context, it would be fruitful to make a comparison of the perspectives and the associated forms of argumentation of W. Ullrich, Stoppt die Banalisierung, and J. Mastai, There Is No Such Thing as a Visitor. 19 | The following sections are based on my larger historical study on the development of artistic education in England with the working title Die Bildung der Anderen durch Kunst (to be published in 2017). In the text here, I limit myself to the institutions which were programmatically aimed at exhibiting ‘art’ and thus leave out other examples which have been heavily discussed in relation to historical museum audiences (such as the British Museum or the London World Exhibition of 1851).

Contact Zone (Un)realised

as the true British way of interacting with the arts, distinguishing it from the aristocratically founded art academies on the Continent, particularly in France. From 1760 onwards, the Society for the Arts organised an annual, public exhibition of contemporary English art, for which entry was free. The first exhibition was well-attended, with an estimated 20,000 visitors in the first two weeks. Some artists complained about “the intrusion of persons whose stations and education disqualified them for judging statuary and painting, and who were made idle and tumultuous by the opportunity of attending a show.”20 Subsequently, staff from the Society for the Arts received orders to regulate the volume and composition of the audience. ‘Improper’ people and behaviour were sanctioned in the exhibition. This included “footsoldiers, livery servants, porters, women with children and forms of disorderly behaviour like smoking and drinking”. The artists demanded that an entry fee be charged for the exhibition to “exclude the lawless and potentially violent mob”.21 However the founder refused to continue to make the premises of the Society for the Arts available for the exhibition if an entry fee were charged. This led to the splintering of a group of artists, who then went on to found the Society of the Artists of Great Britain, from which the Royal Academy of the Arts emerged in 1768. It excluded women from membership, confined the exhibitions to paintings and sculptures and put in place restrictive limits on access. It represented a universalist concept of art, modelled on the aesthetic principles of western antiquity. As such, it made a claim to being the sole representation of a truly British national art; with reference to the fact that it received support from the Crown, and did not rely on financing through subscription. In these first two English art institutions, there were already conflicting yet interdependent articulations of interaction with the Other  – in one instance, they were included due to the desire for democratisation, education and control on the one hand; in the other instance, they were excluded for the benefit of the social distinction of an artist class which was still in the process of establishing itself, and for its privileged audience of connoisseurs and buyers. The leader of the Society for the Arts wanted to reach the broadest possible audience through the exhibition, and it was important to him to mention that for many of the visitors, it constituted their first encounter with art. On the other hand, the audience which the artists of the Royal Academy wanted to address – and within which it positioned itself – was a bourgeois one, which, through taste, was in a position to make supposedly expert judgments on statues and pictures, and was also able buy them. Through their strategies, both institutions made the claim of

20 | B. Allen, The Society of Arts and the first exhibition of contemporary art in 1760, p. 266. 21 | Ibid. p. 265.

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representing a concept of art which was befitting of the British national identity and a correspondingly legitimated interaction with art exhibitions.

1762 In the year 1762, three exhibitions took place in London simultaneously – one organised by the Society for the Arts, one by the Society of the Artists of Great Britain, and a third by the Nonsense Club, in the home of the painter William Hogarth. The Nonsense Club was a group of five writers who published periodicals, composed satirical poetry and who were involved in the political debates of the time. The aesthetics they propagated contained “contradiction, moral and aesthetic relativism, rebellion against established forms”.22 The exhibition showed shop signs from the London urban sphere with burlesque images. In the occupational hierarchy of painters, sign painters possessed the least symbolic capital.23 The initiators of the Sign Painters’ Exhibition promoted the plural visual languages of the signs, which stemmed from the streets and developed without academic rules and standards, as truly English: in his 1753 text Analysis of Beauty, Hogarth had postulated that the strategic incongruence and the grotesqueness of satire corresponded to plurality and tolerance and as such, were for their part characteristic of Britishness in the sense of British liberalism. This occurred at a time in which the urban space of London was becoming increasingly controlled by the state under the catchword of Butification, and was being cleansed and ordered both socially and in terms of public health and hygiene. The exhibition was a response to a petition to the government for a blanket ban on painted signs (after the example of Paris). This was rejected by Hogarth and the Nonsense Club as being un-English: as such, the exhibition of shop signs combined national patriotism with an anti-establishment attitude.24 Additionally, the exhibition made fun of the other two exhibitions’ entry policies and concepts of art through captions commenting on the works and the design of their own exhibition catalogue. For example, they imitated both the gushing style of the work descriptions in the exhibition of the Society of the Artists of Great Britain, with their appeal to the concept of ‘taste’, and the claims of utility and education which were emphasised in the texts accompanying the exhibits of the Society for the Arts. It carnevalised the controversial, exclusive pricing policy of the Society of the Artists of Great 22 | L. Bertelsen, The Nonsense Club: Literature and Popular Culture, p. 119. The members of the Nonsense Club were Charles Churchill, Bonnell Thornton, George Colman, William Cowper and Robert Lloyd. William Hogarth sometimes took part in the activities. 23 | E. Kernbauer, Der Platz des Publikums, p. 229. 24 | B. Taylor, Art for the Nation, p. 15 f.

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Britain by making entry to their exhibition overly complicated in a symbolical and ironic fashion: they gave out entry tickets which consisted of multiple stubs which were assigned to the different rooms, which included the threat that tearing them in the incorrect order and entering the exhibition without the stub carried harsh penalties by royal decree. In the nature of its satire, it was directed first of all at a public which understood the references to the two other exhibitions, because it was able to read the codes. Additionally, those who were excluded from the other exhibitions ended up filling the exhibition spaces. By highlighting the possibility of multiple readings of the exhibition, the initiators of the Sign Painters’ Exhibition asserted an essential fluidity between the initiated and the non-initiated audience position. It is precisely the consciousness of this fluidity, variety and polysemy which for them constituted the truly British attitude.

1838 In 1838, the National Gallery was opened in London.25 The choice of its location in Pall Mall/Trafalgar Square was part of an entanglement of education, discipline and public health in the sphere of urban planning which was forming at that time. In 1832, the first great outbreak of Cholera occurred in England, which brought 50,000 deaths. One of the suspected causes was the increasing air pollution and the sanitary conditions in the urban slums. The construction of the National Gallery building was connected with the implementation of new, symmetrical boulevards, which led to some of the poorest quarters in London being driven out toward the eastern edge of the city. Taylor makes reference to the fact that a wave of inspections commissioned by the state to assess health and hygiene coincided with the professionalization of the figure of the curator in the course of the establishment of the National Gallery. Consequently, one task of these art institutions and their curators was “to redesign the nation’s public as clean and uncontaminated – just like the pictures they beheld”26. The National Gallery was founded as a result of public debates in which it was described as a scandal that Great Britain did not possess a national art collection. At this time, the concept of exclusion was doing the rounds – for the first time in relation to the field of art – to denounce the monopolisation of cultural assets by the upper classes.27 In contrast, a national gallery would 25 | The National Gallery, founded in 1824 and previously housed by the Russian banker Angerstein, moved in 1838 into a purpose-built premises. Thus, it was no longer necessary to enter private property in order to visit it. Additionally, entry was free and there were no formal restrictions on access. 26 | B. Taylor, Art for the Nation, p. 43. 27 | C. Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, p. 44.

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be accessible to all classes of the population, and as such, identify them as co-owners of the riches acquired through colonialism – this made it into a site of reconciliation between the classes, without the need to contest bourgeois privileges.28 These privileges were at the time anything but unquestioned, and had to be correspondingly secured: ten years later, the Communist Manifesto would be published, and in many colonies, insurrections were being carried out by the colonised. Only six years earlier, the right to vote had been expanded to include a larger portion of the male population, and it was evident that further reforms would follow. Against this backdrop, the National Gallery was now concerned above all with the education of ‘public taste’ as a set of bourgeois virtues, which were considered necessary for this form of participation. The exhibition spaces were hung chronologically, which allowed for the production of a national sentiment in the form of a class-transcending, pedagogical statement.29 Through this passage, according to the vision of the initiators, every individual – regardless of their heritage or beliefs – was able to better themselves, in order to become a member of a community of future (voting) citizens that is defined by bourgeois ideals. This was the task of the National Gallery. Accordingly, it must attempt to reach the broadest possible audience. This audience, however, did not always do what it was supposed to inside the National Gallery. Sources from the time depict breastfeeding wet nurses, picnicking families with clothes wet from the rain, claiming they were endangering the exhibition spaces and the art on exhibit. According to this, people who only came to get in from the rain, who used the spaces because they saw them as an appropriate backdrop for carrying out their leisure activities, who amused themselves with the exhibits as in a cabinet of curiosities, missed the point in terms of being educated into a good member of bourgeois society through their encounter with art. In striving for the broadest possible audience on the one hand, and the judgement of the ways in which this audience tended to use the space on the other, a contradiction is rearticulated which had been inherent to the public art institution since its initial foundation. “While the cultural institution needs the concept of the public, given the economic management, social discipline and cultural organisation of the capitalist state, this public can never be realised.”30 This is also illustrated by the fact that the catalogues and accompanying booklets that the National Gallery published, which, though they included forewords which spoke of the promise of advancements in morality, well-being and national identity and refinement for all visitors, otherwise offered simple work lists without further elucida28 | B. Taylor, Art for the Nation, p. 43; C. Klonk, Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000, p. 20. 29 | C. Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, p. 45. 30 | C. Trodd, Culture, Class, City, p. 47.

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tions.31 Thus, the Others in the National Gallery saw themselves interpellated by the bourgeois ideals of education and cultivation, though always also necessarily failing to embody this ideal and being failed by it.

1881 In 1881, the first Easter Loan Exhibition was held (hereafter referred to as the Easter Exhibitions) on the premises of a school administered by a pastoral couple in London’s East End who had become disillusioned with the official church. The East End was at the time a largely impoverished neighbourhood in terms of economics and infrastructure, which was in part produced by the process of displacement in the course of the construction of the National Gallery. The annually organised exhibitions, which ran until the end of the 1890s, were deliberately placed on the most important holidays of the Anglican church, in order to emphasise the connection  – from the perspective of the organisers – between the appreciation of art and the understanding of divine truth.32 Some 300 works were shown each time, loaned from collectors and artists. The initiators portrayed this arrangement as beneficial to all parties: through their loans to the exhibition in the ‘slums’, the owners could supposedly become closer to their spiritual selves, as did the inhabitants of the neighbourhood through the appreciation of the loaned works. Over the twenty-day duration of the exhibitions, up to 73,000 visitors came, causing the property surrounding the school to be cordoned off by the police at times due to the overcrowding of the premises.33 The high audience volumes indicate first of all that visiting exhibitions were part of the practice of consumption for the Victorian working class, but also to the fact that through free entry, extended opening hours and a lack of restrictions regarding clothing, origin and behaviour, the exhibition was accessible. In connection with this, it should be noted that in the Easter Exhibitions, works were exhibited which fetched high prices on the art market, and which were considered just as valuable as the works in the National Gallery. Thus there was no supposedly pragmatic reason to fear for the safety of the art in one space, but not the other. The fact that in the exhibitions the public from the East End mixed with that of the rich West End, together with the recognised quality of the paintings on exhibit, attracted the attention of the press. The press challenged the National Gallery to take a leaf out of the book of the Easter Exhibitions.34 The claim of being an art venue for everyone allowed 31 | B. Taylor, Art for the Nation, p. 43. 32 | S. Koven, The Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions and the Politics of Seeing, p. 34. 33 | L. Matthews-Jones, Lessons in Seeing, p. 388. 34 | Ibid., p. 393.

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the latter to appear more national, as defined by a British understanding of the concept of citizenship. The question of whether the visitors from the East End correctly read the explanatory messages of the exhibition, however, was a hot topic of discussion here as well. Henrietta Barnett, one of the two initiators, told of defensive reactions: “‘Tis all rot and I don’t care!’ was the verdict I got from a boy of nine when I tried to waken his admiration for a flower […], ‘Oh ain’t it beautiful!’ and he mimicked my voice.”35 That the Other visitors didn’t simply develop the correct ‘taste’ (from the perspective of the organisers) was made evident, for example, by the results of the survey Voting for your Favourite Pictures. This was intended to create an additional enticement in the sense of an opportunity for participation, and the results were intended to provide indications of the mental and spiritual development of those surveyed.36 With few exceptions, the audience from the East End selected works which the exhibition organisers adjudged to be comparatively less valuable, both artistically and morally. On this, a monthly review directed at the West End public commented: the selection landed upon works which were characterised by cleverness, action, and a particular fineness of detail.37 The distinction in the aesthetic discussion between an appreciation of abstraction – which, connected with taste, had already been widespread in the eighteenth century – and a love of detail, which was associated with vulgarity and primitiveness, was invoked here once again. Another challenge was that the working class public continually enquired after the monetary value of the works, while the exhibition organisers attempted to play down the material value in favour of the conceptual value, which was much more important in the eyes of bourgeois values.38 This ‘incorrect’ reception lead to the decision to introduce art education personnel in the Easter Exhibitions. The invigilators took on the task of explaining the pictures, thus connecting the mental-cognitive, social and physical control of the exhibition.39 However, these tensions did not just result in measures of control, but also provided the opportunity for the articulation of institutional critique. In his memoirs, for example, the artist Walter Crane, who was active in this context and in the anarchist movement, tells of a dock worker who visited the exhibition during a strike on the docks, and afterwards commented that in hindsight, he would have preferred not to have come, since now his house seemed all the more miserable, filthy and desolate.40 Alongside the well-documented bourgeois disciplinary practices, there are also historical indicators of the organisation of 35 | D. Maltz, British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, p. 209. 36 | L. Matthew-Jones, Lessons in Seeing, p. 398 ff. 37 | S. Koven, The Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions and the Politics of Seeing, p. 36. 38 | D. Maltz, British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, p. 77. 39 | S. Koven, The Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions and the Politics of Seeing, p. 29. 40 | Ibid., p. 39.

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social movements in the milieus surrounding these exhibitions, and of associated transversal coalitions which were made possible through the initiators’ claim of addressing diverse audiences. Six years after the first exhibition, the pastoral couple opened Toynbee Hall, a so-called ‘social settlement’, within which both the aims of the mission and the transversal practices could be articulated more systematically.41 Based there, artists were actively involved in supporting key strikes, which were decisive for the consolidation of the thenevolving trade unions. Among others, William Beveridge, whose suggestions on a social security system and a nationalised education system formed the foundations for the establishment of the welfare state in Great Britain after 1945, was active in this context as a student.

C ontact Z one (un) re alised In his influential study on museums in the Anglophone world of the nineteenth century, Bennett states: Especially art galleries, have often been effectively appropriated by social elites so that, rather than functioning as institutions of homogenisation, as reforming thought had envisaged, they have continued to play a significant role in differentiating elite from popular classes. 42

It is precisely this tension which constitutes the social function of these institutions. The examples discussed here confirm this finding, and yet also point beyond it. For similar to the Sign Painters’ Exhibition, in juxtaposition with the two exhibitions of the Society for the Arts and the Society of the Artists of Great Britain in the mid eighteenth century, the Easter Exhibitions and the institutions which developed from them can be read, juxtaposed with the National Gallery, as counter-hegemonic projects. According to Gramsci, counter-hegemonic means precisely not a counter-movement which positions itself outside of social relations, but rather the emancipatory struggle for the hegemonic – that is, legitimated by the majority  – position. This struggle is carried out through the interrogation of the respective existing relations of domination, and in the attempt to shift them. The Other visitors have always been present as desired and rejected in this contestation of “hegemony in the art sector”43. During the evolutionary process of bourgeois liberal democracy, they exercised a central function in the processes of 41 | D. Maltz, British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes. 42 | T. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, p. 28. 43 | O. Marchart, Hegemonie im Kunstfeld.

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negotiation over what constitutes an English art audience, an English conception of art and a corresponding concept of connoisseurship. Connected with this from the beginning was the fantasy of being able to confront the menace of these Others – marked as poor and from the beginning also as racialised – through their inclusion. This civilising aim, for its part, was thwarted by the Others in that they failed to function reliably as the kind of visitors that had been invoked by the bourgeois institutions, and appropriated the space for their own ends. Against this backdrop, the Easter Loan Exhibitions, like the Sign Painters’ Exhibition, can be read in the history of curation and art education as harbingers of that which is promised by the metaphor of the contact zone for the contemporary exhibition space. Borrowed from the field of ethnography, this concept for describing encounters within colonial relations of violence44 has in recent years been applied to areas such as the museum and history education.45 Its use evokes the potential of using for educational processes the conflicts which develop from the meeting in a shared space of social groups separated by relations of inequality.46 In the two historical exhibition spaces, conflict was able to be used in different ways and for different purposes: in the Sign Painters’ Exhibition, because information was being provided as much on the social relations of the time as on artistic positions, with which cultural producers who were unsatisfied with the situation created a space of representation which could be entered by the different groups and read in diverse ways. In this way, the art sector’s evolving orders of value and hegemonic forms of reading were themselves exhibited and thereby destabilised. As part of the Easter Loan Exhibitions, this was because the organisers were in equal parts well-informed and unsatisfied, and based on this, never ceased attempting to confront the different audiences with each other in the exhibition space. Even if this stemmed from a social critique informed by an aim for reconciliation, moderate socialism and strict Protestantism with a missionary bent, the spheres of agency ensuing from the exhibitions and in the institutions which followed (Toynbee Hall) were open enough to allow improbable alliances to emerge. Over the course of a century, the Whitechapel Art Gallery, which was founded in 1901 in the wake of this context, continually produced learning content and formats which today are considered seminal examples of curation and art education.47 They resulted from the programmatic direction of the insti44 | M. L. Pratt, The Art of the Contactzone. 45 | J. Clifford, Routes; N. Sternfeld, Kontaktzonen der Geschichtsvermittlung. 46 | N. Sternfeld, Kontaktzonen der Geschichtsvermittlung, p. 45 ff. 47 | See C. Mörsch, Die Bildung der Anderen mit Kunst; From Oppositions to Interstices. From the beginning of the 2000s, the Whitechapel Art Gallery began to lose this position to other institutions, such as the Serpentine Gallery, mentioned in the article by Janna Graham.

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tution, to not just reach local audiences as well as the art public, but rather to be of use to them, and equally, to allow themselves to be influenced by the knowledge that these diverse audiences bring with them. This program brought with it the necessity of not eliminating and immobilising the tensions inscribed into the art institutions, but rather to enter into a critical engagement with them that is necessarily conflictual. Considering the opening example, the question arises of how viable art institutions are which, at the sight of the Other visitors, still consider calling the authorities. In the long run, it may be necessary for them to inform themselves about the tensions that are historically inscribed in them, in order to be able to recognise these as the foundations of their work. If we follow this thought, this approach would necessarily also have effects on the composition of their personnel and the subject positions this composition represents, incorporating their knowledge, attitudes, interests and experiences, into their practices of curating and education.

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Inside the Post-Representative Museum Nora Sternfeld The last couple of years have seen a quick succession of ‘turns’ in advanced exhibition theories and curatorial practices, which have expanded the functions of the exhibition space. There was the turn towards education,1 to discourse, to performativity,2 to dance3 and to activism.4 Often they were intertwined. What do all of these developments have in common? They no longer understand exhibitions as sites for the presentation of precious objects and for the representation of objective values. Rather their focus lies on the creation of possibilities, on social as well as bodily experiences,5 unexpected encounters and shifting interrogations in which the unplannable is of more importance than precise hanging designs. Exhibitions thus turn into spaces of action. In this context, curation and education work become inextricably linked. In this text I aim to map out the phenomenon that I describe as “post-representative curation”. To this end I want to first try to understand how it emerged and what the significance of the ‘crisis of representation’ is today, in order to then go on to position it at the heart of neoliberalism. This is not an end in itself, but rather serves to found the proposal of a counter-hegemonic practice. For if we consider (with Gramsci) education and culture to be contested,6 then curation and art education can be understood as forms of action which struggle to create 1 | See P. O’Neill/M. Wilson, Curating and the Educational Turn; I. Rogoff, Education Actualised (http://www.e-flux.com/issues/14-march-2010/ vom 31.05.2015) as well as schnittpunkt: educational turn. 2 | See B. Beöthy, Performativity, see: http://tranzit.org/curatorialdictionary/index.php/ dictionary/performativity/ 3 | See B. Charmatz, Manifesto for a Dancing Museum (http://www.borischarmatz.org/ en/lire/manifesto-dancing-museum). In 2015 Boris Charmatz performed in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, see: http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/borischarmatz-the-dancing-museum. 4 | See F. Malzacher et al., Truth is Concrete. 5 | See L. Reitstätter, Die Ausstellung verhandeln. 6 | See A. Gramsci, Erziehung und Bildung.

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interpretations  – either by reproducing the existing power structures or by interrogating them. If we then put ourselves to the task of searching for forms of curation and education as critical, emancipatory practices, then they have one and the same function when it comes to the theory of hegemony (which happens to be exactly the same as art and philosophy): they are organic intellectual activities7 that challenge hegemony.

The C risis of R epresentation For a long time the fact that museums produce identity, deal with the ‘proper’ and the ‘foreign’, (re-)produce national distinctions, display valuable objects and objective values was never interrogated. And yet it was precisely these factors that tended to remain unaddressed in the museums themselves. The museum was thus an agent which made itself invisible through seemingly neutral ‘white cubes’ or vivid displays. However since the second half of the twentieth century this has not been left uncontested. As such, in the 1990s, the field of cultural studies for instance made a range of critiques of the museum based around the fact that museums do not merely show what exists in the wide world beyond its walls, but rather that they themselves are producers of meaning. With its objects, contexts, texts, and visual representations, they develop “poetics” and “politics”, they construct social convictions.8 Hence, the claim to eternal truths and the universality of the knowledge of the museum crumbled as well: the self-evident premises of the museum – its apparent neutrality and objectivity, its consequential distinctions, the power of its modes of display and its mostly bourgeois, western, patriarchal and national “gestures of showing”9  – were interrogated. And nowadays it is undeniable that museums are entangled in power relations. This loss of trust in the canonising function of the museum and its nationalist functions is certainly an essential aspect of what is often nowadays referred to as the crisis of representation. The phenomenon however is much larger, multi-layered and located on different levels: for in the twentieth century, representation – both in an aesthetic and a political sense – has been subjected to a comprehensive critique in theory (not just in cultural studies, but also in feminist, postcolonial and poststructuralist political theory), in the art world (we can think for instance of the numerous shifts, from Russian constructivism via the ‘happening’ to the critique of the institution) and in activism (in the new 7 | O. Marchart, Die kuratorische Funktion, pp. 172–179, and C. Mouffe, Agonistics, pp. 85–105. 8 | See H. Lidchi, The Poetics and the Politics of Exhibiting Other Cultures, pp. 151–222. 9 | See R. Muttenthaler/R. Wonisch, Gesten des Zeigens.

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social movements since 1968 and, more explicitly, in the wake of the Occupy movement).10 So regimes of representation have been subjected to attacks from many sides. The constant appearance of new ‘turns’ impedes an analysis, in that it reduces the overall situation of crisis to a fad. Instead of chasing down the different trends, I want to bas my analysis on a shift – or rather a tension in the idea of the museum – that has been occurring for decades (or perhaps has even been developing for more than a hundred years). For against the backdrop of these manifold crises of representation, the museum itself is shaken to its foundations. And at the same time, this process activates the museum as a revolutionary space for action and education.

The P rocessualisation of the M useum What happens then after that which used to define the museum is called into question: what happens to its national function, its power to produce truth and value, the permanent validity of its hierarchies and so on? Has this model gone out of date? Catherine Grenier, co-director of the Centre Pompidou, writes against the “end of museums” in her book. She makes a case for museums as contemporary institutions that do not only revolve around themselves, but rather deal with the essential questions of the world and society.11 And it is not just in Grenier’s analysis; in the context of the aforementioned crises, in many other innovative museum approaches and education discourses, social relevance and transformation appear to be on the agenda. Thus today more than ever the museum is referred to as platform, arena, contact zone. However, like so many other concepts in the public fields of museums and education, both social relevance – as a growing criterion of measurability and utility – and the buzzword ‘social change’ are ambivalent expressions. For in neoliberal processes of transformation and new governmental systems of logic, it is precisely stability that is to be abandoned for the sake of insecurity and flexibilisation. The discourses of transformation and processualisation make the museum seem rather old and stiff. Lets say it in the words of the communist manifesto: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.”12 About this Pascal Gielen writes: 10 | See S. Tormey, Occupy Wall Street, p. 133. 11 | “Si le musée veut pénetrer l’espace intellectuel, où il occupe pour l’instant une place mineure, et y devenir un acteur de référence, il ne peut pas se tenir à l’écart des grandes préoccupationns de la société et du monde.” C. Grenier: La Fin des Musées, p. 125. 12 | K. Marx/F. Engels, Manifest der kommunistischen Partei.

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Nora Sternfeld After all, institutions traditionally represent verticality, historic profundity, canons, tradition, values and dignity, ‚grandeur‘, stability and certainty. Within the fluent network society, these qualities too are subjected to being expressed in terms of measurable quantities by measuring output and public outreach and by continuing the number of organised events.13

In the context of increasing dematerialisation and economisation, it actually seems interesting to come back to the stability and durability of the institution of the museum.14 For where everything is supposed to be constantly changing, it has long ceased to be the issue that something has to change, but rather which change of society and its institutions is to be achieved and by which means. But what if the differentiation between the old and the new museum itself is not so easy? Just as theatre was not always (only) dramatic in order to then become post-dramatic, the museum was not always only representative. Thus the history of the post-representative can be told as fundamental component of the history of the museum itself. For beyond representation, the museum has always also been a site of processes of negotiation: it was not only dusty and ossified, but a space of education, a battlefield, a contact zone. Anke te Heesen writes: From the beginning, museums were meeting points and places for discussion, educational instruments for bourgeois parents as well as spaces that made new relations possible. They were – according to Klonk – ‘spaces of experience’, which involved not only the act of seeing but also those of walking and talking.15

And insofar as the modern museum was born out of the French Revolution, it has also from the beginning been the context for re-appropriations. It is known that when, after the French Revolution, the decision was made that the sumptuous objects of the aristocracy and the church would now belong to everyone in the Louvre, a powerful political process of de-contextualisation and re-contextualisation was taking place. With Habermas this can be referred to as a passage from “representative publicness” to the “bourgeois public sphere”.16 Thus the modern museum could potentially always have been as much post-representative as it was representative. And the history of museums has to be

13 | P. Gielen, Introduction, p. 2. 14 | Cf. P. Gielen, Institutional Imagination, p. 11–34. 15 | A. te Heesen, Theorien des Museums zur Einführung, p. 185. 16 | See J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. As is known this development passes by the literary public sphere of the expatiating public, which I have consciously skipped, but which would surely have a function in museum history as well.

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understood also as the history of shifts in meaning and processes in which values were not only inscribed but also shifted.

I nvolved C ur ation and E ducation Is the Museum a Battlefield? 17 asks Hito Steyerl in a Lecture Performance at the Istanbul Biennale in 2013. She views the museum as a combat zone in several ways: on the one hand, since the French Revolution, it has been a site of counter-hegemonic struggles and of protest. On the other hand it is of course primarily an establishment of dominant hegemonies and, as Steyerl shows, also deeply entangled in the economies of a military-industrial complex. Nonetheless, the numerous claims and struggles around representation cannot be fully set aside. As they are at the basis of a post-representative perspective, they are neither to be left behind nor delegitimised. Hence, post-representative should by no means be taken to mean ‘after the struggles around representation’. Quite the opposite, the crisis of representation mentioned above can only be understood as a result of these struggles. They have taken on the powerful knowledge of institutions from a bourgeois, proletarian, feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial perspective. And once they could no longer be kept quiet, they either appropriated them in order to become institutions themselves (as was the case in the French Revolution), or they were institutionally integrated into the dominant discourses. Thus the function of the museum lies both in the maintenance of the dominant hegemony as well as in questioning and challenging. If we want to assume the existence of a socially relevant museum after the crisis of representation, then we have to decide to which side it should tend. Referring to Chantal Mouffe’s theory of hegemony, I want to argue for a radical-democratic museum: According to “the agonistic approach” Mouffe writes, its “critical dimension consists in making visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate in giving a voice to all those who are silenced within the framework of the existing hegemony.”18 What might such a “radical museology” – which conceives of itself as public and intellectual agency – look like?19 It would firstly have to formulate itself in solidarity with existing social struggles. In this sense, involved 20 curation and education results from extra-institutional activist analyses as well as from the museums own potential to re-evaluate itself. 17 | H. Steyerl, Is the Museum a Battlefield, see http://vimeo.com/76011774. 18 | See C. Mouffe, Agonistics, Thinking the World Politically, pp. 92–93. 19 | See C. Bishop, Radical Museology. 20 | I owe the concept of involved curating to many conversations with Katharina Morawek, curatorial director/management of the Shedhalle in Zurich.

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The Par a -M useum In this way, a radical democratic perspective activates the explosive force of the museum’s relation to itself. It interrogates the powerful functions of the museum by means of its emancipatory functions – from the re-evaluation of values to the gathering of the public and critical education. It appropriates the museum as museum using its own means. To the extent that this perspective is related to the museum with its potential for change and to social struggles that counter logics of domination, it is at once entirely a part of the museum, and also part of another order, which might still be in the making. This complicated relationship, which is neither against the museum nor can it be fully defined by it, can be described with the preposition “para”. Because the Greek preposition παρά has temporal and spatial meanings like “issuing from, near, at or to one side of, alongside, side by side, during or along” as well as figurative meanings, such as “in comparison, contrary to, and against”. Whereas in the Greek it revolves around divergence and not contradiction, it is also the prefix which later becomes the Latin “contra”. If we consider the para-museum as an inside which is simultaneously an outside  – a para-sitic relationship with the museum  – then a subversion could come to mind which helps itself to the museum (its interpretive sovereignty and its infrastructures). Hence, for instance, regarding his Musée d’Art Moderne Département des Aigles, Marcel Broodthaers says: “The fictitious museum tries to steal from the official, real museum, in order to give more power and credibility to its lie.”21 And as a matter of fact, numerous forms of subversive appropriation happen not only in art museums but also in the educational innards of the para-museum – namely in the shadows of attention in which educators spend hours with visitors, invigilators and porters, often on the weekends when there are no journalists, curators, and directors present. Certainly in these situations and interstices much is dared, said, taken and used, which does not really comply with the purposes defined by the institution. In their book The Undercommons22 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten define this subversive, criminal relationship to the institution as the resistance of the undercommons, who seek to find a space within the institutions whose future they challenge by being on site even though they have neither been invited nor commissioned. They call these acts that run oblique to the institutions’ normalisations and logics of utility ‘fugitive practices’. To the extent that Harney and Moten’s critique appears to be deeply entangled in neoliberal and (neo)colonial conditions, it is not suitable for a radical democratisation of the institutions. They write: 21 | Marcel Broodthaers in Interview with Johannes Cladders, p. 95. 22 | S. Harney/F. Moten, The Undercommons.

Inside the Post-Representative Museum The undercommons might by contrast be understood as wary of critique, weary of it, and at the same time dedicated to the collectivity of its future, the collectivity that may come to be its future. The undercommons in some ways tries to escape from critique and its degradation as university-consciousness and self-consciousness about university-consciousness, retreating, as Adrian Piper says, into the external world. 23

However what is also sacrificed with this form of refusal is any possibility for durability and stability. As a response, I want to propose a para-institutional position which by not withdrawing from fight for hegemony desires more than such a merely subversive position. What would it mean to take the institution by its word on the part of the Undercommons? It is possible that such a position may appear naïve to theorists of co-optation, and it is surely contradictory. However if we analyse power relations according to Foucault and Gramsci, we find that they are contradictory, but also that they generate different forms of resistance in their contradiction. Hence, the regime of surveillance has not fully substituted the disciplinary regime. And even under the conditions of post-industrial, cognitive capitalism, the massive industrial exploitation of the global workforce continues. As we saw above, the post-representative museum itself is as much guided by neoliberalism as it is by emancipatory forces. What I would like to propose is a para-institutional position that can and must be as contradictory as the institution itself. Thus I argue for a para-museum in which fugitivity and continuity don’t exclude each other, in which it is possible to simultaneously think singularity and collectivity, which insists on criticality and at the same time advances forms of re-appropriation. In order to do justice to this positioning and most of all to situate it within the museum itself, I suggest a para-institutional deconstruction of its traditional functions. From the pillars of collecting, exhibiting, organising, researching and educating, five strategies of a radical-democratic curatorial practice can be deduced: 1) challenging the archive, 2)  appropriating the space, 3)  organising an oppositional public sphere,24 4) producing alternative knowledge, and 5) radicalising education. In my research I collect case studies – examples of para-museum strategies. I consciously do not distinguish between artistic, curatorial, and educational approaches, as I am precisely not looking for ascriptions but am looking into the capacity of these strategies to develop counter-hegemonic functions. And thus it is my aim to clarify here these strands: 23 | Ibid., p. 38. 24 | In this context the political theorist Oliver Marchart refers to exhibitions as “ex-positions” – in terms of a statement and positioning. For him the curatorial function lies in the organisation of the public sphere and it is in this way that it is collective, political and based on solidarity: “a practice which aims for the impossible itself: that which is defined as impossible by the hegemonic discourse” (O. Marchart, Die kuratorische Funktion, p. 174).

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Under the title Challenging the Archive, I refer to situations which “take on the apparatus of the codification of values”25 by means of an interrogation of history and of collections. If we think the archive with Foucault,26 then we are aiming to challenge the horizon of that which can be said, seen and thought. This has been taking place in art, theory, activism, education and curatorial practices for many decades. Here collection categories and understandings of history are upset 27 and questioned anew.28 Alternatives are weaved into the existing narrative.29 Especially in projects around black liberation, history is often written back against racist and violent knowledge production. The African-American cultural theorist bell hooks refers to ‘talking back’.30 This idea was picked up by the research group for black Austrian history during the year of Mozart in 2006 in an exhibition titled Let it be Known,31 which aimed at furthering a reckoning with the lack of self-determined practices of black history writing in Austria. This could not be represented in the exhibition, as it simply didn’t exist. For this reason, by means of a hip-hop song, it carried out a critical confrontation with dominant forms of knowledge, wilful and resistant strategies and processes of negotiation; with how history can be written anew 25 | “You take positions in terms not of the discovery of historical or philosophical grounds, but in terms of reversing, displacing and seizing the apparatus of value-coding” (G. C. Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, p. 63). 26 | M. Foucault, The Historical a priori and the Archive, pp. 126–131 and ibid., Lecture one, pp. 1–22. 27 | For the exhibition and research project Double Bound Economies, curator Doreen Mende took the GDR photo archive as her basis in order to deconstruct binary logics from east and west with artistic works, interviews and discussions. The project is documented online: http://www.doubleboundeconomies.net/ 28 | In The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures the artist Kader Attia shows faces and things destroyed by the war and repaired. He creates a material intervention in habitual ethnographical modes of representation and cuts through binary colonial logics of representation. 29 | See the exhibition and research project Giving Contours To Shadows at SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin 2014, see: http://savvy-contemporary.com/index.php/exhibitions/ giving-contours-to-shadows/ 30 | See b. hooks, Talking Back. 31 | LET IT BE KNOWN! Counter histories of the African diaspora in Austria, Wiener Hauptbücherei am Gürtel, 17th of May until the 31st of August 2007, see: http://trans​ late.eipcp.net/calendar/1178811841#redir. My colleague and co-curator Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur provided me with key curatorial and activist stimulus in the project. She brought to life the research group for black Austrian History. For our joint exploration of bell hooks and her importance for history in exhibitions, I also thank Belinda Kazeem and Claudia Unterweger, who were both part of the research group.

Inside the Post-Representative Museum

and in different ways. In this sense too, the artist Meshac Gaba says for instance the following about his Museum of Contemporary African Art: The Museum of Contemporary African Art [emphasis in original] is not a model […] it’s only a question. It is temporary and mutable, a conceptual space more than a physical one, a provocation to the Western art establishment not only to attend to contemporary African art, but to question why the boundaries existed in the first place. 32

The strands Appropriating Space and Organising a Counter-Public Sphere deal with situations which avail themselves of the exhibition space in order to create a public sphere. In this context one often talks of ‘contact zones’, ‘assembly rooms’ and contested spaces.33 In recent years numerous exhibition and education projects have focused on forms of negotiation34 and action in this sense. Under the title Es ist ein schönes Haus. Man sollte es besetzen (It’s a Beautiful House, it Should be Occupied)35 the art educator Claudia Hummel talks about such situations. Based on concrete examples of educational praxis, she localises such “occupations” right in the centre of large exhibitions such as documenta 12 and the 6th Berlin Biennale. At the same time she reflects critically on the fact that what is taking place is mostly a representation of public space and occupations, rather than the thing itself. Nonetheless she succeeded to generate important moments of activist knowledge transfer in conversations and memories of occupations. Most importantly however Hummel recounts an actual “charge” of the museum on Berlin: On 6 November 2001 a group of 30 people with large format photographs around their necks charged the exhibition in the Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin. The title of the exhibi32 | M. Gaba, Tate Shots. Museum of Contemporary African Art, http://www.tate.org. uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/meschac-gaba-museum-contemporar y-afri​ can-art. 33 | See, for instance, the project Und was hat das mit mir zu tun? Transnationale Geschichtsbilder zur NS-Vergangenheit (What has it to do with me? Transnational Historical Images regarding the National-Socialist past) of the Wiener Büro trafo.K (http:// www.trafo-k.at/projekte/undwashatdasmitmirzutun/), about which I wrote my dissertation entitled Kontaktzonen der Geschichtsvermittlung. Lernen über den Holocaust in der postnazistischen Migrationsgesellschaft, Wien 2013. 34 | See, for instance, the project Taking Time that I curated together with Teemu Mäki in the Gallery Augusta in Helsinki in Winter 2013. A conversation with performance theorist Giulia Palladini about the possibilities and limits of the project can be found here: G. Palladini, Taking Time Together, see: https://cummastudies.files.wordpress. com/2013/08/cumma-papers-61.pdf. 35 | C. Hummel, Es ist ein schönes Haus, pp. 79–116.

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Even if this situation shows a museum bringing in the police in order to respond to disturbances, to Claudia Hummel it represents a fundamental moment in updating the idea of the museum. As a matter of fact this situation represents only one of numerous examples of appropriation of spaces in museums – from Occupy Museum to the occupation of the Akademie der bildenden Künste Vienna in the autumn of 2013 by refugee activists. Thus according to the critical educator Claudia Hummel, it is precisely by means of the possibility to occupy the museum that its intrinsic function as a space of action and experience can be described. Creating alternative knowledge aims to charge the museum aspect of knowl­ edge production and research with critical potential. Radicalising education focuses on those projects presented in this publication as critical educational practices, which in recent years have gained in international significance. To be precise, this deals with “undisciplined knowledge production” at the intersection between the museum, participative action research and militant investigations. Jana Graham refers to a “para-sitic agenda” in the context of art education. [It] does not claim to be entirely independent, rather it demands the active occupation of the territory as a setting for criticism and conflict. Viewed in this way, ‘para-sitic’ 36 | ibid., pp. 105–110.

Inside the Post-Representative Museum operations may profit from the nourishing and deeply problematic field of cultural institutions, however they locate their intentions, spaces and addressees in a ‘here’ that is simultaneously elsewhere. This elsewhere should not be conceived so much as a place, but rather as a map of affinities, links between all of those who fight for emancipation from the violence of exclusion and exploitation. 37

They always respond to their context, acting critically, provocatively, considerately, subversively, affirmatively, productively and disobediently. In their contradictory nature, these five strands are simultaneously institutional and para-institutional. They emerge as much from the centre of the self-understanding of institutions as they organically form part of extra-institutional claims. They assemble situations that challenge the canon and create alternative infrastructures. With this text I aimed to show that this organic intellectual capacity is not just one that can be opposed to the museum but one that is inherent to it. The post-representative museum thus is a neo-liberal transformation model in service of the knowledge economy, but it is  – if we take it seriously in its potential for public revaluations – also a para-musuem.

Figure 1: Frisch zum Kampfe! Frisch zum Streite! (Forward to the fray! Into battle!) (from Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Second Act, Aria No. 13, Pedrillo). A project in the Stuwerviertel, Vienna, about standardisation, rebellion and exclusions. Curated by Ljubomir Bratic, Nora Sternfeld as part of Verborgene Geschichte/n Remapping Mozart (Hidden History/ies Remapping Mozart), a project from the Year of Mozart in Vienna, 2006.

37 | J. Graham, Para-Sites, p. 131.

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Figure 2: Mounir Fatmi, History is not mine, 2014, vintage typewriter, hammers, table, lamp, typed sheets, video and bliboquet game.

Figure 3: It’s a nice house: it should be occupied. Talk by Claudia Hummel as part of the educational turn workshop series by schnittpunkt, 19 September 2010.

Figure 4: Talking Time, Gallery Augusta, Helsinki, March 2013, curated by Nora Sternfeld and Teemu Mäki in collaboration with Giulia Palladini.

The Anatomy of an AND Janna Graham

G allery and M useum E ducation as an “and” Though gallery and museum education have increased in prominence and exposure in recent years especially in the UK, they are still often conceived of as an ‘and’ in many cultural institutions. This ‘and’ functions as either a bridge – a way in which to translate collections and exhibitions to publics and in some cases vice versa – or an add-on, an afterthought in the drive to make bigger and better attended spectacles. It is often narrated as the reason for galleries to exist and yet, it is the first program to go in budget cutting measures. This ‘and’ is nevertheless significant. It sits between objects and audiences, thematics and consequences, concepts and constituencies, the public-ness of cultural experiences and the material and affective conditions that shape them. Frequently the ‘and’ of education in galleries and museums must contend with and compensate for a gap between the promise of emancipatory encounters with culture and what Gayatri Spivak termed the ‘mechanics of staging’ the contradictory modes through which culture is produced; its deep entanglements with bourgeois hierarchies of taste making, colonial and state projects of pacification, and neoliberal managerial logics. This ‘and’ of education is then a constituent aspect of contemporary culturemaking. It is not only a concern for a particular department or profession, but experienced in all aspects of cultural organisation  – from publics to artists, cleaners to curators, educators to accountants. Though these tensions have deep historical foundations they continue to circulate, often un-named and under-exposed in the everyday lives of cultural work.

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Thinking with C onditions : Terms that L ie B ene ath Where questions about curating and education have recently come into greater proximity,1 there is often a focus on the details of who is called what, who is responsible for what and who is qualified for what. These often obscure and distract from the larger conversation that could be had, about the contradictions between the emancipatory educational rhetoric of cultural institutions and their organising practices. This is dangerous in two ways: in distracting educators, curators and others from the way in which their work is used to support processes that run counter to emancipation, in, for example, regressive urban and social policy, where both arts commissioning and education have come to play an increasingly important role; and in leaving under-practiced and under-theorised the affinities that might be aligned beyond job descriptions and based on common commitments to emancipatory social change. What would it be to name and respond to the conflicts and contradictions that surround this AND, conflicts that are washed over in the details of everyday cultural work and the bureaucratic formulation of the relationship between educators and curators? What cultural field would emerge if mapped out around common commitments to emancipatory pedagogy, social use and post-capitalist existence? Who would be aligned and who would not? What tools do histories of emancipatory education lend to us to analyse and act upon these conditions? This paper makes a modest attempt at answering these questions by way of tools derived from radical education practices that I have elsewhere described under the common heading ‘thinking with conditions’. Developed particularly in relation to my own experiences of the dis-continuities between what is shown in the (often utopian), representational aspects of culture-making and what is experienced in its modes of production, thinking with conditions is a call for attention to the relationship between these two terrains.2 Or as the British conceptual art collective Art and Language once suggested, to understand “what historical conditions we are really in, rather than those we want, need, believe or feel intimidated into supporting…”.3 The first of the tools I’ll introduce is offered by the praxes of Institutional Pedagogy. Developed by Jean and Fernand Oury in 1958 4 for understanding the learning that takes place in institutions that goes beyond its intended learning activities  – what another emancipatory educator, Ivan Illich, described as the Hidden Curricu­

1 | P. O’Neill & M. Wilson, Curating and the Educational Turn. 2 | J. Graham, Between a Pedagogical Turn and a Hard Place. 3 | C. Harrison, Conceptual Art and Painting, p. 27. 4 | F. Oury & A. Vasquez, Vers une pédagogie institutionnelle.

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lum5 – Institutional Pedagogy gave school-based and psychiatric practitioners a framework to analyse conditions beyond the explicit architectures or bureaucratic formations of the institutions and their outputs. They invited practitioners to understand institutions as a series of performative pedagogies that take place within and beyond institutional walls. The second tool introduced here draws from the work of Latin American popular educators whose grounding in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed 6 has developed methodologies for ‘naming the conflict’, and exposing and acting upon the contradictions that colonial and capitalist life experience produce. A third tool is offered in the figure of the para-site drawn from the work of philosopher Michel Serres and my own work with contemporary social activists,7 to indicate a kind of institutional inhabition that sits within formations with which it does not agree, re-organising practices of institutionality through being and behaving otherwise. These three modes of thinking with conditions are explored against the backdrop of tensions and conflicts experienced in the first five years of development of the Centre for Possible Studies, an off-site education and curatorial project of Serpentine Gallery,8 in which artists, educators and activists, have generated ‘studies of the possible’ in relation to urban inequalities in London’s Edgware Road neighbourhood. These inequalities are shaped by a number of processes derived from the position of the Road in central London, in the borough of Westminster in an area that is home to some of London’s wealthiest families living on land bequeathed to the Church and local aristocrats in the 16th century but also an area known to be a centre for migrants from many parts of the world. The shisha cafés and migrant-owned businesses on the southern part of the Edgware Road – adjacent to the famed ‘Speaker’s Corner’, incidentally a former site of public torture –, provide a gateway for new migrants in terms of both employment and cultural life, though they are unlikely to be able to afford to live in the area for a long period of time. Nonetheless, these are sites of informal education, political organisation, cultural production and entertainment9. New interests in ‘lifting’ the area amongst the wealthier residents and their Tory representatives in the Westminster Council have explicitly sought for migrant businesses to be brought into line with the vision for the area, and the languages of both plastic surgery and (behind closed doors) ‘hygiene’ are 5 | I. Illich, Deschooling Society, p. 56. 6 | P. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 7 | See M. Serres, The Parasite, and the manifesto by media activist collective CAMP, https://pad.ma/texts/padma:10_Theses_on_the_Archive/10, and interview excerpts with sex worker rights group x:talk quoted in this essay. 8 | J. Graham, et al., On the Edgware Road. 9 | For more information about the history of migrant businesses and their interaction with local policy in the area, see CAMP, A. Khalaf, & J. Graham, Pleasure: A Block Study.

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regularly deployed to describe both the beggars in the area and the appearance and character of local businesses.10 Further along the Edgware Road, an area called ‘Church Street’ is currently experiencing a classic gentrification process. The local area is home to white working class people, new migrants, and particularly refugees, who live in tall blocks of social housing. Many of these are due to be torn down in the name of ‘regeneration’. driven by the local Council and private developers working in partnership. Combined with planned changes to the housing benefit system, this has had the effect of displacing poor residents to other parts of the city and country.11 The Serpentine Gallery and other mainstream arts organizations are seen by the forces of development on both ends of the Road, as an asset to the development process, both in their ability to signpost ‘important’ artists for public commissions, but also for their authoritative interest in the aesthetic dimension of urban planning. And though the Centre for Possible Studies received no direct funding from developers and Council members, gifts in kind such as the empty buildings used as our base linked us to this process, rendering it necessary to both understand the situation and to take sides. The name of the Centre for Possible Studies itself was created as a response to these processes; many local residents who felt the force of impending displacement described the local ‘studies’ undertaken by developers and government as failing to reflect their perspectives on what could be possible for the area. Drawing from my own experiences as the named curator of the Edgware Road Project and recorded speech acts surrounding the project by gallery workers, local officials, young people, self-organised sex workers and participating anti-racism theatre workers, this paper will highlight the affinities, tensions and disconnections that emerge through processes of putting ‘thinking with conditions’ into play in the cultural field.

Towards a P edagogy of I nstitutions What do culture-making practices teach us against the grain of their intention? This is a question with which I have begun seminars with current and prospective cultural workers over a number of years, in which we diagram the anatomy of political art and pedagogical projects from their conceptual underpinnings through the practice of their organisation. They often begin with a good intention, a noble aim, like ‘sharing information about environmental destruction’ or ‘working against border control’, or ‘creating a platform 10 | See official plans and language for the area at: www.edgwareroadpartnership. co.uk/ 11 | https://www.westminster.gov.uk/church-street-neighbourhood-regeneration.

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to challenge neo-liberalism’. As we move through our descriptions of the production cycle, a pattern begins to emerge: a context is created by a director or Board of Trustees, an idea generated in response by a curator or educator, often in collaboration with an artist, and from there it is delivered to a public, by way of programmes, marketing vehicles, front of house staff, fabricators and installers, security guards, caterers, cleaners and publics. Sometimes, constituencies or groups deemed relevant to the thematic at hand are sought out for engagement, usually in the project’s later stages. The time associated with this engagement is often cut short, subject to available resources and the time slot allocated to the project, not exceeding the cultural moment in which the thematic has been deemed to have been of interest. As one moves down the chain, the conditions of work become more precarious, and the process of production less transparent to those involved. The focus of attention and discussion in this anatomy  – even through critical approaches like institutional critique – is on the moment of presentation or delivery, leaving the myriad of other practices that go into the making of culture under-examined and under discussed. Attempting to understand the dynamic between pre-representational, representational and post-representational aspects of institutional life and its more recognizable presentational aspects, is at the heart of what Jean and Fernand Oury described in 1958 in France as Institutional Pedagogy. Working across the ‘big architectures’ of institutional provision such as the psychiatric clinic and the school, practitioners of institutional pedagogy engaged teachers, students, parents, psychiatrists, cleaners, service users, and artists in a process of identification of the way in which institutions are performed, learned and taught, both within their walls and through their relationships in families, communities and their place in social history. They understood institutions as both the bricks and mortar, the bureaucracies and architectures and rules that visibly enforce its structure, but also through the often conflicting narratives and desires that shape them, understanding them rather as ‘life places’ that cut across and beyond what is commonly understood as ‘the institution’. Their commitment was not only to the analysis of the explicit and implicit learning practices that institutions produce, but to intervention, breaking from these practices and substituting alternative forms which would radically re-shape institutions around principles of social justice. Derived from an encounter between primary schools developed in the Ecole Moderne (or Freinet)12 movement in France in the 1940s and 50s – in which students were encouraged to remark upon and alter the organisation of the school through collaborative use of a printing press and school councils, and the adaptation of these techniques to residential psychiatric institutions, Institutional Pedagogy was 12 | A. Vasquez & F. Oury, The Educational Techniques of Freinet.

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equally situated in pedagogical and psychoanalytic terrains. Working across the various constituencies of education, it thus produced what Felix Guattari described as a ‘transversal’ analysis of the unspoken structuring devices,13 those ‘that makes it possible to use a soap without quarrelling’ as well as ‘the whole of the rules allowing to define what “can or cannot be done”.14 Institutional Pedagogy suggests that beyond the monolithic understanding of institution, configurations of us and them and inside and outside, there are instituting practices, ‘micro-groups of interests and micropolitics of affinity and aversion based in desires and eruptive relationships. Understood micropolitically, institutions then, do not only comprise those people on the payroll, those in this or that role, but a much wider constituency of interests, subjectivities and desires. They are social, creative and productive sites. This bears importance in thinking about cultural institutions in three ways: one, in thinking against the notion that the social somehow sits outside of the walls of cultural production and what is presented as art, through marketing surveys or otherwise; two, in countering what are often homogeneous readings of the institutions of culture, which – whether critical or affirmative – tend to take the brand at its word and leave little space for unpacking the conflicting interests that shape such establishments and the learning they ask others to do; and finally in attending to the those aspects of learning that are the least visible, which in cultural institutions often have tremendous power in securing hegemonic structures through cultures of coercion, submission and silence. Methodologically, institutional analysis consists of the use of ‘micro-monographic studies’ undertaken by those working in the expanded field of an institutional entity, by groups of those affected to form the basis for their intervention. Central to this is the notion of working through the texts, or speech acts of those engaged in instituting. As Jacques Pain, in his review of institutional analysis and its relationship to violence suggests, ‘Institutions talk (speak) insofar as there exist places of listening’.15 The practice of listening to how institutions talk, enables their conceptual apparatus to be exposed, transposed and adapted to intervene in the ‘life places’ that they produce. If we understand cultural institutions through this expanded definition – as sites of productive institutional pedagogy – how might such an analysis be carried out?

13 | F. Guattari, The Transference, p. 63. 14 | Fernand Oury quoted in J. Pain, Institutional Pedagogy. 15 | Ibid.

The Anatomy of an AND

S pe aking the I nstitution in its E xpanded F orm : ‘The y will bring a strong C ur atorial V ision to the N eighbourhood ’ In 2008, I was invited by the Serpentine Gallery to develop an arts project in the Edgware Road neighbourhood. The project was instigated out of a long term relationship between the Gallery and people in the neighbourhood – developed both through standard kinds of gallery education like exhibition-related school and community visits, and through special projects, the most recent of which had been a two-year residency involving artists working in a local school. As a result of this, people in the area indicated they would like the relationship to continue.16 It was hoped that it would be able to experiment between models of curatorial public commissioning and gallery education. It also grew out of the Gallery’s interest in the neighbourhood as representative of the ‘Middle East’ and therefore a conduit to international artists and institutions in that part of the world. Later, the project was re-configured to act as an agent and ally in struggles against the gentrification processes in the neighbourhood described in the introduction of this text. These contradictory interests in the project revealed themselves in its early stages. As such, for myself and the artists and activists involved in conceptualizing the project, it was necessary to create informal ‘places [or practices] of listening’ to register the many kinds of institutional talk that were emerging, both from the gallery and in the eyes and minds of others in the neighbourhood. Through these listening approaches a number of rhetorics emerged about the institution in its expanded form: • A democratising rhetoric: that we would ‘change society,’ ‘be of use to those most marginalized,’ ‘focus not on outreach for the gallery, but providing tools for the neighbourhood’, be a ‘temporary autonomous zone’, ‘change perceptions of the area’, ‘change art practice,’ ‘remove divisions between educators and curators’, enable ‘horizontal’ and ‘bottom up’ processes of decision-making against the top down cultures of the gallery and local government; • A bureaucratic rhetoric, suggesting that the project might ‘tick boxes’, provide ‘integration’ for local migrant communities, ‘regenerate’ the area, and provide a ‘strong curatorial vision’ for the neighbourhood; • A vanguard rhetoric, which particularly focused on the commissioned artists who would be ‘up and coming’ and might, through their prominence in the art world ’ bring greater focus to participatory or ‘community’ work; and • A rhetoric surrounding the brand, asking ‘how will people know it is a Serpentine project?’ and how will they know ‘we’ worked on it?

16 | S. Tallant, ‘School of Thought’ in Dis-assembly, p. 9–14.

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The contradictions found in these various rhetorics signalled the strange intersectional terrain such projects occupy in this moment of high neo-liberalism – both democratizing and paternalistic, socially oriented and market produced, full of idealism and concession. They are underwritten by a dualistic archaeology of past collective struggles for social justice and contemporary modes of hegemonic appropriation and privatization. For instance, some of this rhetoric echoes arguments made by gallery educators throughout the 1990s: that we should, as Irish Museum of Modern Art director Declan McGonagle used to say, form “the temple and the forum together”;17 that artists themselves had turned to the participatory, the pedagogical or the ‘relational’ and therefore education was an important site for commissioning these new forms and should also bear the title of curating; that additional state, foundation or corporate funding could be generated by education projects; and that these projects would generate important experiences for people who may consequently become future gallery goers and advocates. They also resonate with elements of urban policy shifts implemented in the transition from the 1970s to the 1980s, during which London politicians described urban emancipatory arts movements as keeping local people’s perspectives focused on the ‘positive aspects’ of development.18 Employing this logic to benefit from the paradoxical status of the arts as that which exists for the ‘public good’, while at the same time affirming class hierarchy and social elitism, governments and developers now frequently enlist artists and arts organizations at all stages of the development process, in what David Harvey describes as a movement from ethics to aesthetics in urban policy of the postmodern era.19 That a local planner’s expectation that the involvement of an art gallery, as cited above, would bring a ‘strong curatorial vision to the neighbourhood’ can be understood in terms of representational aesthetic outcomes, but also reflecting the aesthetics of the organising practices surrounding institutional art commissioning, in which ‘curatorial vision’ is synonymous with dissociation from affected publics. Placed above the ‘riffraff’ of concerns found in democratic process – i. e. the radical reduction of social housing, the sustainability of street market prices for working class people – here the AND of arts pedagogy is a euphemism for the coercive, soft diplomacy approach to development, that produces a mirage of engagement around futures that have already been inscribed and which will be violently secured through the collusion between councils, developers and police. 17 | D. McGonagle, The Temple and the Forum Together, p. 21–24. 18 | See, for instance: GLC: State of the Arts or the Art of the State; LCC: An Arts and Cultural Industries Strategy for Liverpool; URBED, Developing the Cultural Industries Quarter in Sheffield. 19 | D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 6.

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In this cacophony, murmurs of recurring social justice movements – calling for the arts to be of social use, aligning with the interests of the poor, and embedding the accountabilities of art and education to the struggles that they serve – are also audible. However they lay in a tension between what Hansel Hndube Eyoh describes in his work on radical community theatre groups of the 1970s and 80s as the ‘domestication’ of radical cultural movements, who, seeking acceptance of their work, often forget the broader aims of their project: the radical liberation of society from oppression.20 Losing sight of this latter goal keeps practitioners struggling with problems created by bureaucratic organising practices, and not focusing on the ‘impossible’ demands that fall outside of existing logics and call for more fundamental change. This management of demands and desires is a central feature of neoliberal governance strategies.

N aming C onflicts , but N ot in N ame O nly One of the ways in which professionals become alienated from social move­ ments in the way Ndumbe Eyoh describes, is in failing to practice within the spaces where the impossible demands for social justice are made. As an extension of this, those who possess the deepest knowledge and intelligence about social injustice are re-cast as ‘audiences’, ‘participants’, ‘users’, ‘vulnerable communities’ and through this act of naming become ‘other’ to even the most emancipatory aims of institutions, needing therefore to be ‘attracted’, ‘captured’, ‘targeted’, ‘engaged’ etc. If we are to truly understand the institution in its expanded and pedagogical form, by the utterances and micro-circumstances through which it is instituted, it is crucial to listen to those who make institutions from the social spaces deemed to be its outside. Beyond listening to the rhetorics of those with founding stakes in the Edgware Road Project, in 2009 we created the Centre for Possible Studies as an archive and community resource located in abandoned buildings on and off the Edgware Road with a strong commitment to social justice. For the community groups and artists who work as part of this itinerant entity, the study and praxis of popular education has become a central feature. This study has guided us in thinking through how we might make considered and critical interventions into the contradictory forces at play in the shaping of our work. Like Institutional Pedagogy, popular education practices invite groups to analyse and re-frame the terms through which they name the world. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Brazilian educator Pablo Freire outlines a process through which people use collective analyses of their experience of power as the basis for the creation 20 | N. H. Eyoh, Beyond the Theatre.

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of the terms of understanding and intervention. This practice, involving both representational and non-representational methods, which Freire describes as ‘codification’ and ‘de-codification’, seeks to name and act upon contradictory conditions. Freire’s dialectical notion of action and dialogue  – in which action with no dialogue is simply ‘activism’, that is, unthoughtful response, and dialogue without action is seen to be akin to an ‘alienating blah blah blah’21 – underpins this commitment. Though Freire’s own writings are more focused on the process of consciousness-raising and much less so on how groups move from these activities to taking revolutionary action, Freire-inspired radical education workbooks used by the Sandinistas, the anti-NAFTA movements of the late 1980s, and others, suggest that naming (and heightening) conflicts around oppression forms a crucial aspect of popular education. Naming here goes beyond the creation of new terminology and moves into the cultivation of action. It is here where emancipatory popular educators can be understood as different from the many ‘participation’ and ‘engagement’ practitioners who use popular education methods and tools to secure state and corporate power and the global distribution of capital.22 Where for this latter group, popular education provides a set of tools, for emancipatory educators, ‘naming the conflict’ is a commitment to the radical contestation of oppressive structures in alignment with those who experience them the most profoundly. Over the course of the last five years of the Edgware Road Project, we have engaged in the collective practice of ‘naming the conflict’ with migrant and non-migrant people engaged in theatre workshops, which came to be known as Implicated Theatre. As a core and on-going group at the Centre, Implicated has adapted strategies of popular literacy and theatre to create projects that analyse the different and overlapping issues facing the group’s precarious migrant people and cultural workers. The group’s name, “Implicated”, emerged through the use of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed to create images (Boal’s term for body tableaux) in which it became clear that the formulation of oppressed/oppressor did not adequately reflect the ways in which the group experienced their own power, nor that of oppressive forces. Where in Boal’s work there is often an expectation that these entities be distinct, in workshops based on contemporary conditions, the oppressor was often multiple with its many faces, and its life inside of each of member of the group. Translated into the many languages of participants, ‘Implicated’ was the term that the group

21 | P. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, ch. 3. 22 | An astute analysis of the ways in which popular education in Latin America has been co-opted by progressive governments to create tools for engagement without questioning fundamental structures of state power or the global distribution of capital can be found in R. Zibechi, Territories in Resistance, ch. 4.

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used to both describe this condition but also to indicate the group’s desires to be “implicated” in one another’s lives through acts of solidarity. The group has named a number of conflicts related to migrant experience, developing theatre pieces to support London-based campaigns, including the anti-raids network, a migrant-led coalition that develops tools and direct action interventions against state sanctioned immigration raids; Justice for Domestic Workers, a group working for better conditions for migrant domestic labourers; and the Unite Hotel Workers union, a fringe division of the Unite union that works from migrant worker experiences to develop new tools for organising in the hotel sector. Equally significant, the group used naming practices to question its own internal power relations and distribution of resources instigated through its relationship to its “host” organization, the Serpentine Gallery. There are various positions from which these naming practices take place, with some members unfamiliar with the Serpentine and the context of contemporary art in London, and others aware and very critical of its role. This dynamic has manifested in a number of performances involving the various constituencies in the project: cultural workers, gallery staff, middle class audiences, migrant rights organizations in thinking through the conflicting terrain of this relationship. One such performance, titled The Embassy Ball, looks at the dynamic between the bourgeois taste-making apparatus of the Gallery and those who often constitute the cleaners and flexible catering service workers of such places. Parodying the dress, atmosphere and speech-making procedures of these events, guests to the theatre piece (re-positioned as guests of this private party) bear witness to the staging of mini rebellions in the proceedings based on worker experiences, with discussions about the very conflicts that enable such projects to occur. The making of this theatre piece was based on weeks of workshops on our own implications in these enabling contradictions. Questioning the distribution of power and resources, we began to unravel the micro effects of the gallery’s organising principles  – that projects be instigated by curators and artists for participants in the name of ‘training’, that resources be distributed accordingly, that those artists be identified with the project more prominently than ‘participants’ who are often not acknowledged at all, that ‘participants’ supply stories while aesthetic responsibility is held by artists and representatives – which in spite of conscious decisions to collaborate equally, often crept into the working practices of the group. As a result of this process of naming our own conflicts, we began to re-shape these practices. Collective budgeting was undertaken to determine fair compensation and organisation of tasks, ‘participants’ studied to become facilitators and decision-making was collectivised. This was and is not simple, bringing about a number of core debates: whether gallery funds should be

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used to engage in support and solidarity of members i. e. emergency food and housing, whether everyone should be aligned with the political ‘causes’ we worked with (i. e. some in the group had more positive relationships to the police than others). These questions enabled us to confront the framing of the project as ‘education’. Questions of power in broader oppressive contexts came to reflect on the instituting practices of the group and the desires and necessities that hold them in place. For example, most funders of pedagogical projects require that a ‘problem’ be framed for a constituency in advance, and most commissioning projects require that funds be distributed to what is seen to be ‘artistic’ work and not to the re-distribution of wealth, aesthetic responsibility and organising power as was the group’s desire. In order to contravene such requirements, it was essential to build sufficient trust to be very frank in collective conversations. Identifying and acting upon conflicting agendas had some (though minor) broader impacts on the gallery, the most pertinent one being its politicization of staff members (namely within the programming department) who worked to revitalise the gallery’s internal trade union and began to question its hegemonic organising practices more explicitly. This certainly did not instigate revolutionary changes to these practices, but began the process of opening up spaces for collective discussion and action, with much more work to be done in directly engaging the gallery’s core donors in dialogue about conditions for migrant workers. The institution revealed through this process is complex. Its shape can be seen not only in its individual impacts: i. e. “analysing oppression and our relationships as a group”; “learn[ing] a lot about rights and other people’s experiences”, or “finding hope in the very difficult situation of things you cannot do”; but also in the collective experience of being framed by a gallery (the Serpentine) deemed by some to present a “brutal and violent model of cultural production that is utterly de-humanising”.23 It also exposes the fracture in interests between group members with existing experience of the context of the art world, for whom questions of the gallery’s framing were much more pertinent that those who participated in the project with no relationship to the art world at all, for whom the mutual support offered was far more pertinent. The disjuncture in the kinds of critiques, driving factors and basic conditions for those involved in the group is a constituent element of the project and reflects the contradictory terms under which such projects are instituted. It is through a continuous process of reflecting on how dynamics of oppression produce such discontinuities  – rather than trying to rid ourselves of them  – that we have created the ground for affinities and acts of solidarity between cultural workers 23 | Quotations transcribed from a group discussion held in September 2014 by Implicated Theatre members (unpublished).

The Anatomy of an AND

who have experience within the art world and those who are deemed to be its outsiders. These solidarities begin to map (or as one group member suggested ‘rehearse’) the contours of what another model of cultural instituting might look like.

I nstitution as Tr a jectory : Par a - sitic O ccupations In the expanded experience of the cultural institution that I have described, one understood through the contradictions and conflicts it produces for those it deems to be outside, institutional discontinuities operate on a trajectory between total disinterest and total disagreement. This trajectory has been registered by another resident group of the Centre for Possible Studies, the x:talk project, a sex worker-led workers co-operative which provides free English classes to migrant sex workers in the area. x:talk use popular literacy methods to teach English language as an organising tool for sex workers who are increasingly policed as part of the gentrification of urban neighbourhood neighbourhoods. Created by and for migrant sex workers, the project supports critical interventions around issues of migration, race, gender, sexuality and labour, and participates in feminist and anti-racist campaigns. x:talk spent more than five years at the Centre, having primarily used hospitals as their base in the past, one of them located just of the Edgware Road. Historically related to the involvement of sex worker groups in community organising around HIV and harm reduction campaigns in the 1980s, the group joined the centre because it wanted to leave behind the stigma associated with “the medical obsession with the prostitute’s body, which has to be prodded and poked to understand its social deviance”24. Moving to an arts context, says the collective spokesperson Ava Caradonna, “shifted the emphasis off the body of the sex worker, and the idea that sex work is exclusively held within a bodily form”.25 In spite of this x:talk was sceptical of the affiliation with the Serpentine gallery and the art world’s over-emphasis on representation. As Ava stated, “We will not simply perform for the artists, researchers and reporters that want to do their project on sex work […] Our work is in solidarity with the movement.” Comparing the structure of cultural institutions to those of sex worker organizations run from above, Ava suggests, We are familiar with this one-way dynamic also within sex worker organising, which often favours the solo lone spokesperson celebrity over the many who might be working on the 24 | Transcript from an interview with Ava Caradonna. January 2015 (unpublished). 25 | Transcript from an interview with Ava Caradonna. January 2015 (unpublished).

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Rather than engaging directly with the so-called institution of culture as the subject of change, x:talk rather positioned it as a host for a para-sitic operation, providing the context for organizational experimentation, it meant that we were able to secure our first big grants, as we could use the free rent in central London offered by the Centre for Possible Studies as match funding […] Through this we gained enough stability to go on to the next step and open an autonomous space in the East end […] so it was a kind of a mid point and a laboratory, for us.

Laying claim to the figure of the para-site as a non-heroic but critical and resistant agent has been an important re-positioning of the avant-garde political subject for many involved with emancipatory education projects in galleries, who seek to find spaces for their own articulation outside of the spectacularising contexts of both art and heroic politics. Drawn from their own readings of feminist consciousness raising and anti-colonial projects, the para-site is characterised by x:talk as an occupation of an organisation with whom they fundamentally disagree.26 Working in opposition to their host organisation, they refuse its logics, and therefore do not try to reform but rather antagonise, drawing resources to engage in social change of a more radical nature. As Caradonna describes, “this para-sitic strategy is used by many activists who are challenging essentialised identity categories when they engage with bigger institutions”. This assessment of the role of cultural institutions does not exclude the notion of institutional change but intervenes in its discourses by refusing the spectacular terms of involvement set out by cultural organizations, opting rather for their re-distributive capacity. The para-site is not presented as an ideal type in the figure of change but offers a sense of what is possible in cultural environments that are highly compromised. It also offers insight into the para aspect of para-sitic practices as described by Eyoh, of emancipatory cultural practices maintaining a commitment to social justice rather than to their bureaucratic role within cultural or other institutions. This is not an argument for a wholesale evacuation of lobbies for policy changes, fair pay, a fundamental re-organisation of cultural institutions around emancipatory accountabilities, multi-vocal community boards, and against corporate involvement in the arts, but to suggest para-sitic activity as a site of

26 | See for example the issue Care Work and the Commons (The Commoner No. 15 at www.commoner.org.uk/) used by x:talk members to frame aspects of their analysis.

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learning for how re-figured cultural institutions might look, and for affirming what we are fighting for.

F rom the A natomy of an AND to an AND AND AND In his writing on Godard’s television series Sixfois deux many years ago, Gilles Deleuze made the distinction between two kinds of AND. One was the AND that affirms What is on either side of the conjunction, that which affirms naturalized concepts of the inevitable and the status quo. The other is the AND of a “creative stammering”, the “and (… and … and)”, that is a force of becoming multiple, “of living and thinking”, to see the boundaries and surpass them.27 In looking closely at this AND function of pedagogies, expanding our readings – our anatomical understanding – of what the institutions of culture produce, is critical. While much important work has been written about the ways in which cultural establishments collude with power, it is equally important to look to those engaging with them to produce counter-power activities, those outsider agents, those micropolitical forces and conditions of experience that activate gallery pedagogy as a terrain of conflict and struggle. What institutional analysis, naming the conflict and the figure of the para-site provide are precisely other avenues for doing so, for thinking with current conditions in a way that is insistent on another way of instituting the institutions of culture.

27 | G. Deleuze, Trois questions sur ‘Six fois deux’, p. 271.

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Figure 1–4: The Embassy Ball.

Who’s Gallery? #BlankSlates and Geniuses Living Young Syrus Marcus Ware In asking what we can learn from the museum […] the museum in our thinking was the site of possibility, the site of potentiality.1

In 2011, I was invited to speak about my work with the Art Gallery of Ontario, specifically coordinating the AGO Youth Council, at the Master Program Curating and Museum Education at Zurich University of the Arts. At the time of that talk, I had been working with youth at the Art Gallery of Ontario for eight years to develop programming and installations about social issues and politics rooted in communities in Toronto. Toronto is one of the most diverse cities in Canada, with a population of over 2.7 million people. There is a very active cultural sector that spans the city. With a permanent collection of more than 79,000 works of art, the Art Gallery of Ontario is part of this sector, and holds a place as one of the largest and most celebrated art museums in North America. As a part of Toronto communities, the Art Gallery of Ontario has innovated policies, programming and exhibitions that are reflective of the many different people in the city. The AGO Youth Council is one of the most politically engaged initiatives at the gallery, and has a 15 year history of developing programming rooted in social justice activism in the city. After presenting about the Council and their open-ended youth-driven projects at this gathering, I was asked, “But what if they choose collectively to not ‘produce’ a project? Would it still be so ‘open’?”. I have been ruminating on this question ever since. The question highlighted a key issue within the youth arts sector: funding often requires youth to be (endless?) producers of projects and good feelings. These pressures are only heightened within the context of the educational and curatorial turns as youth are now, after over 20 years of youth arts practice in Toronto, expected to 1 | I. Rogoff, Turning.

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produce exhibition quality education-based projects, and, conversely, to provide flavour and perspective in more traditional curatorial initiatives. During my time at the gallery, I have witnessed a deepening connection between curatorial and education divisions; such collaborations have allowed for community voices in exhibition spaces and validation for community-created content in education spaces. In articulating this kind of cross departmental collaboration, Gabrielle Moser2 explains what she describes as the curatorialisation of education: Curating is posited not as a discrete set of tasks, responsibilities or subject positions, but as a series of discursive gestures and presentational strategies in the field of contemporary art, reflecting the editors’ hypothesis that the turn to pedagogy has involved the ‘curatorialisation’ of education whereby the educative process often becomes the object of curatorial production.

If curating is a series of discursive gestures and presentational strategies, do educational and curatorial collaborations always result in educational processes becoming objects to showcase? And are these curatorial productions always already part of a larger neoliberal project? As Janna Graham3 explains: In the face of recent claims for a ‘turn’ to pedagogy in artistic practice and curating, it is necessary to ask how and why such a turn is coined and constituted. Beyond the production of a thematic – which, like those of ‘the political’, ‘the archival’ and ‘the spatial’, enter a whirl of turnings, only to produce value in the form of new specialisms, new careers, new books, new exhibitions and biennial panel discussions – it seems important to situate this ‘pedagogical turn’ in relation to the deeply troubling developments that conjugate creativity and education with the policies and practices of neoliberalism.

It is very important for me to experiment with possibilities of sidestepping the capitalization on youth-led educational exhibition-based projects in ways that interrupt such neoliberalism, and promote systemic change in the institution. To explore this further, this chapter will examine two examples of collaborations; specifically the youth-led projects #BlankSlate and Unified Geniuses Living Young (UGLY). I will consider the process of these projects and their impacts on the participants and the institution. Some of the key questions I will consider are: 1.) How does the increasingly curatorial dimension of education affect “educational knowledge”4 through, for example, its enhanced visibility 2 | G. Moser, Book Review. 3 | J. Graham, Between a pedagogical turn and a hard place, p. 125. 4 | In this context I refer to the development of practices, way of knowing and doing within a pedagogical context.

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in exhibition spaces, or as a result of collaborative curatorial practices? 2.) How do the project participants deal with the tension between cooperation, self-empowerment, and instrumentalisation? This examination will allow reflection on what it means to try and develop truly collaborative projects, and to consider what we5 would need such projects to be in order to help to make structural changes that can lead to a diversification of the institution as a whole: staff, volunteers and visitors alike. This article adds to a much larger chorus, as we see more and more being written about this turn towards education. Carmen Mörsch6 explains: Gallery education is located – also and especially in conjunction with the ‘educational’ or ‘pedagogical’ turn in curating – at the edges of the art field and of the attention of those writing within it.

Thus, we need to write more about our experiences from within gallery education, especially chronicling the activist aspirations and attempts at structural and systemic changes being initiated from within the field, project by project on the ground.

The AGO Youth C ouncil is UGLY The AGO Youth Council is a group of young people aged 14–25 who work collaboratively with guest artists and other community members to develop projects and programming for their peers across the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). The participants take on leadership roles and direct the process and outputs of the group. In 2013, the Council led a brainstorming process that resulted in an idea: create an on-going exhibition-based initiative that would explore the experiences of teenagers in public space. Working with the Manager of Artist in Residence Projects, the Council occupied a space in the AGO’s Community Gallery for 3 months in the fall of 2013. The Council recruited artists Echo Railton7 and Mary Tremonte8 to be the project’s lead artists based on their experiences connecting art and activism, their work with public space projects and their history of developing social interactions within a gallery context. Mary Tremonte brought years of experience working with activist print collective 5 | I will refer to “we” throughout this essay, imagining a cultural community of arts educators, artists, activists, and gallery workers invested in social justice and interested in change-making in museums. 6 | C. Mörsch, Alliances for Unlearning, p. 5. 7 | See: www.echorailton.com. 8 | See: www.marymacktremonte.org.

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Just Seeds9 and Echo Railton had been bringing an activist aesthetic content to art spaces for years with her group Analog Analogue 10. Together, they began a collaborative process of reimagining the gallery space. A cumulative exhibition ‘project’, Unified Geniuses Living Young (UGLY) ran from September 2013 – January 2014. During the run of the exhibition, the team transformed the space on a weekly basis-changing the installation to reflect their discussions about public space each week. For several weeks, the space became a public forum: the walls were lined with brown butcher paper with prompts for visitors to respond to expand the conversation. In other weeks the artists worked with the Council to use the walls to document their process – meeting minutes were taken right on the walls along with tasks and assigned work for each member. The Council experimented in the space: it became an incubator for their ideas. They painted wall murals in a relatively impromptu fashion, they screen printed directly onto the walls, they transformed the space into a discotheque for a few weeks, and they created mirrored labyrinth rooms for visitors to explore. The Council also used the exhibition space to hold public discussions about youth in public space. For this, they worked with urban planning professors at University of Toronto, artists and other youth to develop panel discussions and debates. These events were open to the public and brought young people, high school students, gallery visitors, urban planners and educators together inside the exhibition space. Their interventions in the ‘pristine’ gallery space were not always ‘pretty’ or ‘complete’. They offered a new way to imagine the use of the space – as a lab, perhaps even as a ‘failure lab’.11 They created a space to try out ideas, to experiment, to make great things, to make things that didn’t work or didn’t turn out as expected, maybe even to make things that failed.12 9 | See http://justseeds.org/ 10 | See www.analoganalogue.org/ 11 | To borrow a term from the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver’s youth program. See: http://mcadenver.org/index.php (August 15, 2015) 12 | For example, the Council experimented with creating wallpaper camouflage based on their drawings. They generated large-scale printed images and mounted them on the walls. The designs were universally loved by the Council, and the papers proved to be too heavy to stay up over the course of the week. After falling to the ground several times, and becoming crumpled in the process, the Council decided to move on to a new idea. They reflected on this process and decided to come back to this idea two months later. They reworked their designs and chose to attempt to silk screen the designs directly onto the gallery walls. In this way, we allowed ‘failures’ to happen, and we learned from them. Rather than putting forward a ‘perfect’ tested product, we played in the space and allowed for some of the ideas to NOT work. This allowed a freedom to push our ideas to their furthest point, instead of being caught up with only trying the ideas that would ‘work’ right away.

Who’s Galler y?

As Mörsch13 explains, the space allowed for “disastrous consequences” on the aesthetic glamour of the gallery space. Mörsch states: Another precondition would be to make room in art spaces in the sense of ‘unlearning privilege’, and that the occupation of space should be motivated by activist positions – with all the possibly disastrous consequences this might have for the aesthetic and intellectual glamorousness of the peer groups previously operating in it.

The Council’s project acronym, UGLY, opened up a liminal space to challenge aesthetic expectations and etiquette in the gallery. When finishing the creative work each week, the Council would hold a discussion in the round facilitated by the lead artists, asking “Is this UGLY enough”? The council played with the dichotomy of beauty/ugly throughout their exhibition and during one night of performances took pleasure in crying out “Look at our UGLY sashes and badges”. But the Council was doing more than glorifying the notion of ugly and challenging a dichotomy of beautiful/not beautiful. The Council were using their work as an intervention into a space that prioritizes a design aesthetic and way of engaging with the visitor that is measured and controlled. Instead, these youth offered a more equilateral engagement with visitors, who were invited to participate in the exhibition by commenting on their meeting minutes and project brainstorming. Beyond the notion of a typical audience feedback station in a gallery, these invitations allowed visitors to shape the exhibition project themselves, and it changed weekly to reflect these suggestions. Though we wondered if visitors would fill the walls with unrelated content, instead gallery goers offered thoughtful and carefully crafted insights into our work. Visitors wrote on the walls, giving feedback on the changing nature of the installation and responding to prompts on everything from exhibition content to what the Council would wear to their Halloween-themed costume party. They participated and felt engaged, as illustrated by their many generous content suggestions. In the spring of 2014, on the heels of their UGLY project, the Council began working with National Hockey League star, politician, and academic Ken Dryden and the AGO’s Curator of Canadian Art, Andrew Hunter. Over six months, the Council worked with Hunter and Dryden to consider the following question, “What do we want and need this place/Canada/Turtle Island14 to be over the next 150 years?” The question stemmed out of Dryden’s interest in the upcoming 150 anniversary of the founding of Canada. The Council explored the many implications of this question with Dryden and Hunter, considering 13 | C. Mörsch, Alliances for Unlearning, p. 13. 14 | North America. See “The Creation Story – Turtle Island” at https://gct3.net/wp-​ content/uploads/2008/01/creation_story.pdf.

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Canada’s colonial project on Turtle Island. They spent months exploring and examining what had happened over the past 150 years on the land that many Council members had only recently come to call home. Ultimately, the Council began to articulate a prefigurative political imagining centring around the question: What are we building together, here? They wanted to examine how to plan for communities rooted in social justice in the next millennia. Along with Dryden and Hunter, they developed a short-term exhibition-based social research project that involved interviews with AGO visitors and a public performance at an evening contemporary art festival at the gallery. The project was entitled #BlankSlate, to play with several ideas, namely 1.) the notion that youth are not part of a larger political dialogue, that they are simply ‘blank slates’ waiting to be filled up through education, typically formal educational structures, 2.) challenging the idea that the future is set and not mutable, 3.) the desire to wipe clean our prescribed understandings of Canada, challenging the colonial project and discarding national tropes of what ‘Canada’ means and what being Canadian means. During the live performance, participants were asked questions about what they wanted to keep and what they wanted to discard in thinking about the ‘national project’ of ‘Canada’. Participants’ answers were written on polaroid photos snapped of them during the interview and these were placed on a Peters projection map15 of Canada. The conversation was broadcast nationally via social media, participants tweeted these images using the hashtag #BlankSlate. Andrea Smith16 offers valuable insight into thinking through ideas of nation, important considerations for projects such as #BlankSlate. She states: Thinking outside of the world we now live in requires a critique of current systems of governance which are based on a nation-state model and the belief that the state can rule by means of power, violence, and domination. Here is where I think Indigenous people have a critical role to play – as they have in Latin America especially – in questioning the assumption that nationhood equals the nation-state. We can understand nationhood not as a kind of ethnic cleansing model – ‘we’re in, you’re out, screw the rest of the world’ – but rather as a radical relationality to land, in which land is no longer a commodity held by one group of people but something we must all care for.

15 | The Peters Projection is an area accurate map that illustrates the relative size of continents and countries on Earth. This is in contrast to traditional cartography/ Mercator projections that focuses on the shape of the land map, while sacrificing size/ area. It has been suggested that these more traditional projections place country size in relation to political power, cartographer bias etc. 16 | S. Khan, D. Hugill & T. McCreary, Building unlikely alliances.

Who’s Galler y?

A “radical relationality to land” was something we tried to foster through this project, challenging each other through our process, and challenging the visitors during the performance to think about this place as something that is “no longer a commodity held by one group of people but something we must all care for.” Though contextualized within the 2017 anniversary of the founding of the nation-state of Canada, the project allowed for us to have a much broader consideration of nationhood and of our work and lives on this land, now and into the future. For this project, the Council worked in full collaboration with the Curator of Canadian Art. Hunter did not lead the project direction, rather he used his role to create both a conceptual and literal space in the gallery to explore these ideas under the rubric of a curatorial-educational collaboration. These kind of full collaborations are not commonplace, something that was acknowledged throughout the process. We worked in an equal way with our curatorial partner, challenging the traditional hierarchy of curatorial decision making within a gallery setting. Our curatorial partner was committed to this process of collaboration and co-creation. Working with other stakeholders in the gallery, however, often resulted in a deference to the curatorial voice. Despite being a full collaborator, our curatorial partner was not able to bend time and space or to re-write existing hierarchies and social structures within the gallery, at least not in the long term. It is important to note that while he was able to share the relative power of his position with the youth participants during our project collaboration, this power didn’t necessarily remain with the Council in a lasting way. When the project was completed, we all still returned to our relative positions in the gallery machine.

U nified G eniuses To return to my guiding questions, I want to consider the way that these two very different project examples illustrate what is at play in the increasingly curatorial dimension of education, the impact on collaborations within in the museum space, and the ways that participants deal with the tensions between cooperation, self-empowerment, and instrumentalisation. Both projects had a curatorial element. #BlankSlate involved extensive collaboration with curatorial, in a way that felt reciprocal, perhaps because it felt like it was taking place on education’s ‘home turf’. Because #BlankSlate was launched in a gallery space during an event that was led through the education division, the collaborative element continued from process to implementation. Yet there was still a perception that we had ‘made it’ because we were working with curatorial, and in this way the hierarchy was repeatedly re-enforced. Our collaboration would be seen from the outside as one where curatorial was setting the terms, and we

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were invited to play, regardless of the actual processes at work. Put differently, ageism and relative marginality partly precluded recognizing the youth participants as innovators or project leaders. UGLY challenged the function of the gallery environment, fostering an arts incubator that was somehow just outside of a curatorial purview, while at the same time positioning the Council as curators of the space. Our work was rooted in an activist practice  – the Council and guest artists were interested in systemic change within the museum and without. In this way, we tried to maintain that “the occupation of space should be motivated by activist positions”17. This stance was challenged by the need to balance experimentation and challenges to the institution while still making a safe and supportive opportunity for the participants to explore and create. The youth participants had a desire for change that echoed ours, but they were also more vulnerable and concerned about the real possibility of ‘getting in trouble’. Our role as facilitators and guest artists was to encourage innovation, while buffering the response to the more innovative elements of their projects from the institution for the Council members. For example, when we received some negative feedback about the open process work on the walls looking ‘messy’ or ‘incomplete’ we modulated how we shared this feedback with the Council. We used this moment to discuss the expectations of museums around presentation of materials, and used the space created in this discussion to question the root of these presentation practices. We considered the meaning of needing everything to be considered ‘presentable’, and from which framework the idea of ‘presentability’ was being assessed. We then brainstormed how to meet our goals while still working with the gallery context; and thought about how to make sure that we were creating a space that was accessible to visitors, our ultimate goal. When the project was completed, we were invited to re-present the work at Eksperimenta!, a youth art triennial in Tallinn, Estonia. The work was presented as part of the Canadian pavilion, and in this way our work became literal ‘products’ of the nation, positioned in the national pavilion. The Council felt very excited about having their work recognized on an international scale, and they were happy to participate in the festival, but it was not without discussion about what it meant to have our work shown in this context. We discussed what Ahmed18 describes, a phenomenology of institutions might be concerned with how these ends are agreed on, such that an individual accomplishment becomes an institutional accomplishment.

17 | C. Mörsch, Alliances for Unlearning, p. 13. 18 | S. Ahmed, On being included, p. 24.

Who’s Galler y? And institution is given when there is an agreement on what should be accomplished, or what it means to be accomplished.

The artists and Youth Council typically have an exhibition at the end of their collaboration – in a way, there ‘must’ be a showcase at the end that accounts for the time they spent together, an illustration of what has come out of their time together. A product, something that is not simply feeling or thoughts. This becomes an unwritten lesson taught to the youth participants: that there always has to be some sort of tangibility to the outcome. We have worked to challenge this notion, and the very nature of the UGLY project pushed back against this idea. Yet, at the end of the process, we still ended up repackaging our project and showcasing it abroad. To balance this compromise, we chose to create a ‘product’ that was as open and free as we could create. We created a chooseyour-own-adventure style video game re-enactment of the project that allowed for the viewer/player to have virtually unlimited choices, with consequences to each choice, to replicate our process and desire to reimagine the gallery space as one of possibility. I have reflected on these two particular projects because they offer examples of educational challenges to traditional curatorial processes. As cultural workers and educators, we can tackle projects such as these in ways that upset the foundations upon which museum power structures are built, breaking through the divide across departments, perhaps even, as Audre Lorde19 suggests, “relating across difference”. However, we are still bound within a structure, an environment heavy with codes and signifiers that are never benign and always already at play before we begin. The capitalization on youth-led educational exhibition-based projects by gallery and museum marketing, development and curatorial processes seems inevitable in such settings. For the Council, however, they are learning the inner workings of these spaces and planning how to make the best use of these resources for their communities. As a collective team, they truly are unified: unified geniuses who are strategizing for long-term change. For the Council, addressing the curatorial/educational divide is part of a larger move to wipe the slate clean, #BlankSlate style, to build new ways of bringing people together around ideas of creativity, activism and community.

19 | A. Lorde, Age, Race, Class, and Sex, p. 6.

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Figure 1: #BlankSlate.

Figure 2: #BlankSlate.

Figure 3: USPN Badges: Eksperimenta, Estonia, 2014.

Figure 4: USPN Badges: Eksperimenta, Estonia, 2014.

Curation and Education as a Decolonisation of the Museum

Introduction Nora Landkammer The colonial world is a world divided into compartments. Yet, if we examine closely this system of compartments, we will at least be able to reveal the lines of force it implies. This approach to the colonial world, its ordering and its geographical layout will allow us to mark out the lines on which a decolonized society will be reorganized.1

Museums are one of those institutions in which the categorisation, partitioning and classification of the world took place, and remain deeply marked by this fact. This is especially and undeniably evident in ethnographic museums and their successors. Even when read from a distance of more than 50 years, The Wretched of the Earth, by the anti-colonial theorist and doctor Franz Fanon, reminds us that a decolonised society can and must be our goal. Setting a decolonised society as a goal offers up a different set of possibilities for the positioning of ethnographic museums within contemporary debates and changes that are taking place, compared with those offered by either the logic of reform required to adequately respond to postcolonial critique; or by the logic of defence, as expressed for example in the Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums (2002). The declaration, signed by institutions such as the British Museum and the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (National Museums in Berlin), already reveals one of the divides of the post-colonial world discussed by Fanon: between those for whom the ‘universal’ character of the preservation of cultural assets from all over the world in Western museums actually applies, and those who are obviously not a part of this ‘universal’, because they can’t afford airfares or lack visas.2 1 | F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 37 f. 2 | S. O. Ogbechie, Who Owns Africa’s Cultural Patrimony?, http://dx.doi.org/10.108 0/19301944.2010.10781383 (accessed 13.04.2016). In the context of the question of ownership over, and access to, African art and cultural assets, Ogbechie explains,

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In a variety of differing ways, the texts gathered in this section all depart from the assumption that the development of contemporary curation and education work as a transformation and extension of the museum and as a social intervention cannot be thought independently of decolonisation. They offer an insight into a number of different realms in which colonial regimes, divisions and distinctions in museums need to be subjected to a precise analysis, as described by Fanon. How does the system of compartments take effect in museums, and what vectors for decolonisation does it reveal? The first realm discussed here is the organisation of collections. Ethnographic collections mirror systems of classification for objects and people, systems that today’s museums have to interrogate, and that have already demonstrated their impact beyond the museum, at the social level. A rigorous critical confrontation with the organisation of collections reveals the knowledge that they omit, and which has the potential to disrupt colonial regimes, as Adriana Muñoz demonstrates in her discussion of the Niño Korín Collection and its re-interpretation. Combined with this is the powerful regime which determines who speaks and who is spoken about in the museum. Juana Paillalef, Director of the Mapuche Museum Ruka Kimvn taiñ Volil-Juan Cayupi Huechicura in Cañete, Chile, writes about the possibilities and conflicts that emerge when those represented by a museum, those who it ‘honours’, appropriate it for themselves. The colonial regimes in which the museum is implicated don’t cease to operate when we leave the museum. In the work of Mediación Comunitaria in the museums in Quito, Equador, described by Alejandro N. Cevallos and Valeria R. Galarza, it is clear that the utilisation of the city and the role of the museums in the city are themselves products of colonial history; with museums and cultural institutions concentrated in areas of the city whose indigenous population they have historically failed to acknowledge. “African artworks in Western museums also do not circulate to Africa and exhibitions of African art usually circulate only among other Western museums and cultural institutions. Through this process, Africans are denied an opportunity for significant interaction with the cultural products of their ancestors, and the discourse of African art largely proceeds as if the intentions and cultural concerns of the African producers of these artworks do not matter to an understanding of their forms, symbolism and meanings. To compound this already injurious situation, Western countries also routinely deny Africans access to these artworks through enforced localization and denial of international access: Africans require transit visas merely to pass through all Western metropolitan airline hubs (which means essentially paying for the privilege of embarking on a plane in a European international airport) and no Western country will grant an African a visa merely to visit any museum in Europe or America, which invalidates their claim of housing the artworks in universal museums.”

Curation and Education as a Decolonisation of the Museum – Introduction

Revisiting Collections and approaches based on collaborative museology disrupt the paradigms that shape ethnographic museums. While those whose cultural heritage is housed in museums as well as local population groups are increasingly having their rights to representation and to the use of museums recognised, it is also worthwhile to interrogate regimes that are grounded in collaboration and inclusion. If, as Bernadette Lynch asserts through her research into the state of museums in England, collaboration and participatory projects can actually lead to a renewed process of classifying various stakeholders  – while nonetheless leaving the structure of the museum caught in a logic of centre and periphery – it becomes clear that decolonisation is also a question of institutional regimes. An article by Nora Landkammer on the blind spots between collaborative strategies in museology and education and outreach work complements this critical confrontation with those institutional and discursive regimes that stand in the way of the prospect of the decolonisation of the museum.

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Wiphala Identity and Conflict Adriana Muñoz

I ntroduction During the last few decades, at the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg we have been trying to implement a post-colonial practice as a theoretical frame; in the exhibitions, we have experimented with implementing this practice several times, in some cases with good results. In other areas of the museum we have had varying results; for instance in the area of collection management, the process was slow in the beginning, probably because of the lack of experience of curators and conservators. The overall processes have not been so easy for many reasons, but probably the most important is that the museum is a national institution and there are a lot of issues related to national politics. The museum was created by the Swedish government almost 20 years ago, and it has been open to the public for 11 years. The collections date back mostly to the beginning of the twentieth century and they were initially part of the city museum, later incorporated into the Ethnographic museum, and became a national asset in 1996. In founding the new Museum of World Culture, many problems and dilemmas came up. One of the first issues was the decision to create a Museum for World Culture with non-European collections. The Swedish government combined the national museums with non-European collections and the provincial Ethnographic Museum of Gothenburg. This resulted in world culture being signified by non-European objects – creating an ‘othering’ effect. Another problem with this political decision was that world culture was exclusively represented by historical objects, and contemporary issues were not part of the collections. As Jette Sandahl, the first director of the museum pointed out “this is the dilemma, when an institution is not grass root based” [sic],1 meaning that 1 | J. Sandahl, Fluid Boundaries and False Dichotomies, p. 7.

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one of the major quandaries facing European ethnographic museum collections emerges when they do not have pressure from communities demanding a better handling of the objects. In the case of Gothenburg, the immigrant community could force these kinds of institutions to change; however some of them do not have yet the political and economic power to create pressure and opinion. Other communities have not been especially interested, or there has been a lack knowledge about the collections. Changing the methods of exhibiting collections was a long process of changing mentalities and ways of working. For instance in one of the first exhibitions called Horizons: Voices from a Global Africa, the negotiations between the institution, curators, communities and the general staff were difficult.2 Quoting Laurella Rinçon, who was one of the curators in charge of the exhibition, “the lack of relationships between people with different backgrounds outside the museum was reproduced identically inside”3. I completely share Rinçon’s opinion: the museum showed that the staff had no experience of coexistence with people from other backgrounds, ethnically, socially, or outside gender norms. As with many other projects, this exhibition reproduced hierarchical museum relationships in which some people are described as ‘staff’, ‘consultants, collaborators, community’ – designations which in many ways, as Moraña4 has pointed out, represent hierarchical (colonial) relationships which often reproduce intellectual arrogance, paternalism or colonial guilt. The exhibition was deeply appreciated by the public and different people. Probably one of the most interesting lessons of those first years was that “the institution must allow conflict and permit itself to lose control”5. Working with collections was a different matter. Collections have usually been in the hands of conservators and curators, and the handling of collections has with time become a traditional element in the production of knowledge (produced by curators trained in European traditions), where the dominant racial history, formed by western and white curators,6 has created an aura of neutrality and normativity. Also, we must consider the effect of the training of conservators in natural sciences in creating ideas of neutral handling of objects.7

2 | C. Lagerkvist, Empowerment and Anger; L. Rinçon, My voice in a glass box; L. Rinçon, Visiteurs d’origine immigrée; H. Thörn, Har du förståelse för att andra. 3 | L. Rinçon, My voice in a glass box, p. 4. 4 | M. Moraña, et al., Coloniality at Large, p. 16. 5 | J. Sandahl, personal communication with author. 6 | M. Berger, Sight Unseen; P. McIntosh, Unpacking the knapsack of white privilege. 7 | M. Clavir, The Social and Historic Construction of Professional Values; M. Clavir, Preserving what is valued.

Wiphala

In different projects I have been revising how categories were historically created around the collections, and how the western paradigm became synonymous with neutrality 8 . In this article, I want to discuss one project that started in 2007 and finished in 2010 with an exhibition. I want to demonstrate how a project with many ideas – which attempts to implement decolonization models – can still succumb to the typical flaws of a hegemonic paradigm.

R e vie wing a collection The case I will present is the history of the Bolivian collections stored in Gothenburg, in particular the so-called Niño Korin collection (1970.19). The first time we started to talk about exhibiting this collection was in 2005, when Jette Sandahl started a project under the name Tinku, to display the South American collections stored in Gothenburg. Tinku was an on-going project running over 16 months. During that time a working group was formed with scholars from different countries in South America, members from different national groups in Bolivia and other countries, as well as the Latin-American community in Gothenburg. The idea with Tinku was to start discussing and displaying material culture from other paradigms, cosmologies and languages. However, Jette Sandahl left her position as director of the museum, and with her departure the exhibition project failed. From the initiation of the Museum of World Culture until Sandahl’s departure, the ideological tension between the political project and the political establishment was palpable. Jan Molin wrote in the city newspaper Göteborgs-Posten in 1996 of the new museum’s creation that it was “about vision vs reaction”9. After Sandahl’s tenure, the tensions were polished out and the exhibitions became less controversial. Instead of the Tinku project, an exhibition about the so-called Paracas textiles was organized under the name A Stolen World. The idea of the Tinku project had been to explore other epistemological approaches, change the conversation and display the objects within an Andean cosmological approach. On the contrary, in the exhibition A Stolen World, the objects were presented following a traditional archaeolo­ gical approach, but with additional emphasis on the problem of looting and colonial guilt. However interesting, this exhibition closed with the Peruvian government requesting the repatriation of the textiles – showing that colonial tensions are impossible to escape today.

8 | A. Muñoz, From Curiosa to World Culture. 9 | J. Molin, Trist döma ut museiflytt, Göteborgs-Posten, 4.11.1996.

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Since the opening of the Museum of World Culture, the Latin American collections have never been in the spotlight, despite representing 75 % of the museum objects. Instead the so-called Paracas textiles have been exhibited often and are considered the museum’s masterpieces. During the short life of the Tinku project, the urgent necessity of updating and re-interpreting the Bolivian (and other) collections became evident. Many of the Bolivian objects arrived in Gothenburg from 1915 to 1979; the largest number of objects came in the 1940s. Most of the collections are the product of scientific investigations made by Swedish scholars, especially by Stig Rydén; other collections have an obscure origin. Some of the objects were collected at a time when the purpose of the museum was to show exotic people from remote places; American (or South American) Indians were the typical theme in the public expectations of the museum’s exhibitions during the ethnographic museum period. When they arrived in Gothenburg there was almost no Bolivian population living in the city; today there are around 3000 people from Bolivia or of Bolivian ancestry (Statistics Sweden10).11 In 2007, during Evo Morales’ first term as president, the Bolivian government submitted a claim for the restitution of all Bolivian objects in Swedish national museums. In the case of Gothenburg, this means 17 % of the collections.12 At that moment, the Swedish government was in the hands of the liberal, right-wing Moderat party, and the dialogue was not successful. The question of repatriation was seen as inappropriate. The Swedish government and the management of the national museums of world culture could not understand that “reclaiming the past by a newly independent people is a necessary element for regaining political sovereignty”13. The repatriation question failed the year after, however the Bolivian government’s request provided us with the possibility to organize research around the Niño Korin Collection (1970.19). Niño Korin was bought in 1970 by the former director of the Etnografiska museet, Henry Wassén. The collection was a product of plundering commissioned by Wassén himself after a visit to Bolivia.14 In 2006, facing a possible repatriation, we were able to acquire resources to study the collection again. Previously, it had been studied by Wassén15 and we 10 | www.scb.se/ 11 | A. Muñoz, When the Other become a Neighbour. 12 | A. Muñoz, The Power of Labelling; A. Muñoz, Bolivians in Gothenburg. 13 | K. Mulcahy, Combating Coloniality, p. 2. 14 | A. Muñoz, The Power of Labelling; A. Muñoz, Bolivians in Gothenburg. 15 | S. H. Wassén, A Medicine-man’s Implements.

Wiphala

‘knew’, for instance, that the objects derived from the Tiwanaku.16 This is why, in the context of this new possibility of studying the collection, we decided to concentrate on how knowledge had been constructed around the objects. For this purpose we invited Walter Alvarez Quispe (doctor and Kallawaya), Carmen Beatriz Loza (PhD in History) and Walter Mignolo from Duke University; during two weeks we worked together on the objects. There were also a couple of presentations to the public, and a ceremony in the Hammarkullen neighbourhood in Gothenburg.17 This project was called The Power of Labelling, and it was driven by the desire to explore categories and reflect on how classifications have been constructed in the history of the museum. The most important part of this process was a change of paradigm in the construction of knowledge around the objects. Those artefacts  – created around 1000 years ago and found in a tomb in Tiwanaku – were interpreted during the 1970s as paraphernalia for a shaman by Wassén.18 Alvarez Quispe changed this explanation to tools for a medicinal doctor, probably for a gynecologist.19 The difference between the two interpretations is profound. They originate from two different ways of seeing; the one by Wassén, with paraphernalia, shamanism and drugs, putting the objects in a context of otherness and exoticism. The frame given by Alvarez Quispe put the objects in the context of medicine; with Kallawayas being seen as doctors. Given this new frame, we gradually tried  – using Walter Mignolo’s ideas about “delinking”20 – to change the terms and not just the content of the conversation. The next step, to prepare an exhibition, was another enterprise. This took three years. At the Museum of World Culture, the process of making an exhibition is a practice of incorporating many voices. From the beginning, curators, educators, the program area and designers worked together. However, in this case it took three years to achieve a political understanding of the situation. The Museum of World Culture was created by the Swedish social democrats; however in 2006 the government changed to a right-wing alliance and the goals of the museum also changed. To open the Wiphala exhibition in this frame required some negotiations. 16 | Period for the Andean Area, from 500–1000 AD, based on the traditional periodisation of the Andean past. A further discussion can be found in Mamani Condori C. (1989). History and Prehistory in Bolivia: what about the Indians? Conflict in the archaeology of living traditions, pp. 46–59. 17 | https://vimeo.com/10319288 (a film made by Sergio Joselovsky around the project). 18 | S. H. Wassén, A Medicine-man’s Implements. 19 | B. C. Loza & W. Quispe Alvarez, Report on the Niño Korin Collection at the Museum of World Culture. 20 | W. D. Mignolo, DELINKING.

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P l anning the e xhibition Exhibiting can divide institutions between different ideological arenas: those who are for preservation and display, and those for educating the public.21 Exhibitions are always a long process of negotiations between different actors and departments. In the case of the Museum of World Culture, contrary to other institutions, the curators do not have the power of deciding the narrative of the exhibition; often it is the director of the museum who creates the narrative, sometimes also in collaboration with the political director. More often it is a group composed of educators and the program and marketing departments which decide the final content of an exhibition. In the case of the Wiphala exhibition, a complication was that the people who best knew the content were not in Gothenburg but in Bolivia. Furthermore, making an exhibition about only one collection was a new way of working for the museum. The previous exhibitions had always been focused on particular topics and included examples from different parts of the world. In the case of the exhibition about Wiphala, we started from one collection and expanded the problem to questions about Identity and Conflict. Two difficult words were included in the title of the exhibition, and this probably was the last time that conflict could be presented and discussed. Accepting the roots of colonialism in the collections has been a long process. The question of a colonial dependency in external and economic subjects can be easily discussed as questions of cultural and asymmetrical relationships between institutions, people and countries.22 The process of ‘trying’ to decolonise the content of objects and collections has been present for a long time at the museum and in many cases painful.23 In the case of the museums of world culture, difficulties in establishing a de-colonial practice have been complex. Firstly, to be a national institution means that when the government changed in 2006, we could not continue with a practice established by Jette Sandahl in the opening of the institution. Instead of continuing to be a site of conflict and discussion as she tried to create, an emphasis on ‘feeling good’ and the ‘things we share’ has been evident. Secondly, the budget for inviting people from outside Europe and collaborating with artists, scholars, and the like has been severely reduced. Thirdly, as museum practitioners, we could in a sense come back to a more comfortable zone of working. The de-colonisation of knowledge is a process of losing power and control, and this is painful and expensive (in terms of time and resources) development for management and staff. 21 | A. Blackwood & D. Purcell, Curating Inequality, p. 240. 22 | K. Mulcahy, Combating coloniality. 23 | L. Rinçon, My voice in a glass box; L. Rinçon, Visiteurs d’origine immigrée.

Wiphala

Doing an exhibition about the Wiphala brought several specific problems into focus: firstly, that there is no consensus about the Wiphala in Bolivia; secondly, the relationship between the museum and the Bolivian community in Gothenburg is not homogenous; and thirdly, the internal discussion about how the narrative should be told, and how to present our ideas to the public. At that moment, the Swedish Democratic Party (SD, Sverigedemokraterna, a nationalist right-wing party with a harsh anti-immigration policy), became an important factor in the national political sphere. One of the most important cultural policies that they presented was to return to a genuine Swedish national identity (meaning to a romantic view of the nation created in the 19th century). One of the first things that SD criticized was the existence of a museum of world culture. So when we discussed the presentation of this collection in this frame, the decision of discussing identity (local, national, global) was taken. The idea to make the Wiphala the centre of the exhibition came up because during work with the collection, Walter Alvarez Quispe noticed that one little object classified as a bag for holding coca had the colours and pattern of the Wiphala. This small bag, an insignificant object in its history at the museum, became a Wiphala,24 a symbol of many things for many people. In South America, the Wiphala has become a symbol of unity in indigenous movements. In some big cities like Buenos Aires, it can be seen in political demonstrations. In Ecuador, it can be used as a symbol for lesbians (instead of the rainbow). For some groups of migrants and especially Latin-Americans living in in Gothenburg, the flag is a symbol of identity and anti-globalisation.

The e xhibition , tasks and misapprehensions The narrative of the exhibition was decided by the curatorial group, educators and the program department. One of the first tasks was to discuss and reflect on the concept of ‘ethnography’ and how we could use an object classified under this category, re-discovered by Walter Alvarez Quispe as a Wiphala, and how we could potentially change its ‘classification’. In the exhibition, we wanted to reflect on our praxis and try to approach a de-colonialist interpretation. Another task was to examine the concept of cultural heritage and heritage use: who are the owners of heritage, and who decides how it may be used? In this case, starting from the Wiphala’s emergence at Tiwanaku, a UNESCO cultural heritage site (and therefore also humankind’s cultural heritage) we wanted to determine how the symbol represented the rights of people living today. One discussion was that in the abstract idea of ‘humankind’ we can lose the real people who use, practice, and construct their daily identity based in that heritage. 24 | A. Muñoz, From Curiosa to World Culture, pp. 136–37.

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We also presented how the Wiphala went from an ‘indigenous’ symbol to being part of the national symbols of the pluri-national state of Bolivia. However, we extended this metaphor to discuss the current state of Gothenburg, not only to non-Swedish cultural heritage, but also the idea of pluri instead of multi. Also we suggested that the ‘community’ for this exhibition was not the Andean, Bolivian, Latin-American community, but primarily people with transnational identities and backgrounds, opening it up to a global/local (glocal) discussion and perspective. We took the problem of identity and conflict to create the possibility  – through an ‘archaeological’ object  – to show that cultural heritage is always in a critical position. We wanted to show that heritage is not national, and that many symbols have the power to be transnational. One of the basic ideas was to use this symbol to challenge hegemonic assumptions of Western cultural values (paraphrasing Mulcahy25) and, in the midst of growing, extremist white Swedish nationalism, show that there is no true national identity. For the purpose of the exhibition I was working actively with the people in Gothenburg with relationships to the Wiphala. One of my first plans was to disintegrate the idea of ‘ethnic communities’ so often used in our field, and to try to show that ‘community’ is about sharing interests, experiences, traumas and dreams. Also, one idea was to illustrate that inside those ‘communities’ there are multiple voices, conflicts and dilemmas. In the case of the so-called Bolivian community of the city, we have today three generations, where only the elders have been born in Bolivia, and sometimes the idea of being ‘Bolivian’ differs hugely between generations. Especially in Gothenburg, the ‘Bolivians’ are involved in the carnival of the city, however in some groups the best dancers of ‘traditional Bolivian dances’ are from Rumania, Nigeria, Sweden and so on, so the idea was also to include those voices. For the exhibition, five interviews with different people were carried out, two with people from the first generation; one pro Wiphala and the project of Evo Morales, and the second one from the lowlands with no historical relationship to the Wiphala. In addition, we spoke to a Swedish person who was working in Bolivia for many years and came back to Sweden with a strong relationship to the Wiphala and an understanding of coca. For the young person from the second generation that identified strongly with the Wiphala yet who has never been to Bolivia, the Wiphala signifies anti-globalization and the possibility of another way of life. The last person was the Bolivian ambassador in Sweden, providing the official voice. We also made an introduction with a short film of the carnival, at which the Wiphala can be seen everywhere.

25 | K. Mulcahy, Combating coloniality, p. 3.

Wiphala

In the exhibition, the entire collection was presented, which in my opinion created one of the first problems. It was of primary importance to present the collection without the narrative of drugs and shamanistic paraphernalia. Instead the idea was to have a design that accompanied the interpretation that these items in this collection are the tools of a medicinal doctor. So we decided to make a white, sterile design, like a Swedish hospital. In this white, clean and sterile room we placed the objects in a small protected room together with the film that was made during the research project. Before the visitor enters this room, there is a white room with a huge wall that is the Wiphala (the only colours in the room). After one year, I was wondering if the white colour, the idea of sterility, was correct. In some way it was a good decision, allowing the Swedish visitors to link the idea of medicine to something that they know. However, to enforce the idea of whiteness as ‘sterile’ or the ‘correct environment’ is a hegemonic western value. The choices of the staff tended to reproduce, unconsciously, the dominant cultural narrative of whiteness and white privilege.26 This unconscious choice may have occurred because we are educated within that system and the majority of the staff have no other social or ethnic background. As Blackwood and Purcell has pointed out 27 the fact that the staff, board members, patrons, politicians belong to the same group (in class, ethnicity and often gender) makes changing cultural narratives more difficult, and even if we try to change, we are part of a white narrative. My question with these white walls was if we were in fact reproducing for visitors the social reality in which they grew up, which constitutes what the public recognizes as normal and legitimate. White is healthy, white is clean, white is normal; and those who are not part of the white discourse can be subtly marginalized. It is probable that in many of our commentaries we gave excessive explanations because everything that is not considered ‘neutral’ needs an adjective (alternative medicine, oral history, emotional knowledge) so we fell into the trap of using ‘neutral’. Another problem was the economic impossibility of including more educators with an emotional relationship to the Wiphala during the exhibition. Jette Sandahl showed that having staff with not only ‘academic’ knowledge, but also with personal experience and an emotional relationship to the topics in the exhibition was the best medium to establish a conversation with visitors. Only one educator has a personal relationship to the exhibition. In the future we will need to incorporate pluri-versal28 approaches, not only in the thematic but also in the daily practice of the museum, which will include carefully choosing the staff. 26 | A. Blackwood & D. Purcell, Curating Inequality, p. 240. 27 | A. Blackwood & D. Purcell, Curating Inequality. 28 | W. D. Mignolo, DELINKING.

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The exhibition opened in 2012 and is still on display. The public was interested in the beginning, nevertheless the economic situation meant that the program could not include activities around the exhibition. Working with communities is an on-going process, and it is difficult to budget for long-term collaboration. Additionally, a lesson in the process of working with the ‘community’ around the Wiphala was that paternalism is difficult to avoid from the institutional side. Collaboration is often seen as communities ‘working for the institution’. In this case, some people pointed out that it was difficult to continue a dialogue and work with the collections afterward. We were limited by a lack of time, staff resources and staff involvement in coming projects. Until 2005 the Museum of World Culture had a liaison officer, however that position does not exist anymore, and nobody has the resources or time to keep relationships at the level of the institution.

F inal words During the Power of Labelling project and the exhibition of the Wiphala, it was manifest that the social space, the symbolic power, race and exclusion is embodied unconsciously in our practice; that we choose narratives, colours and design based on our personal experiences – which are by necessity indicative of cultural bias. By means of a following project we started to explore the construction of those daily, indisputable, ‘neutral’ practices in a project called The State of Things. As I mentioned at the outset, one of the dilemmas that Jette Sandahl pointed out was that the institution was not grass-roots based, and therefore it was likely to enable the reproduction of old practices without being forced to change. Also we could see that though we thought in de-colonialist terms, when we are working we reproduce old canons that we trust as neutral. As Walter Mignolo has pointed out, the struggle of epistemic de-colonisation lies in that next step; after analysing the consequences of colonial practices to work in a grammar of de-colonialism, rethinking the ethical, political, and aesthetic consequences of our curatorial choices; avoiding the temptations of the good and best “uni-versal”, moving towards a pluri-versal practice.29 Finally, paraphrasing Eduardo Galeano,30 ultimately the objects on display embody the “nobodies”, those who have not culture but folklore, not religions but superstitions – and our job is to change the historic dismissal of non-Western cultures implied in this perspective.

29 | W. D. Mignolo, DELINKING. 30 | E.Galeano, El libro de los abrazos, p. 59.

Wiphala

Figure 1: Exhibition entrance area.

Figure 2: Wiphala.

Figure 3: Wiphala Display.

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The Decolonisation of the Mapuche Museum in Cañete Juana C. Paillalef

To deconstruct the narrative of a museum so that it comes to reflect the present state of a population that has refused to disappear  – that has disappeared neither physically, nor through the decrees of a state that in spite of historical agreements still fails to recognise it – this is the central historical motive for beginning this multi-disciplinary project. It is a matter of bringing this reality, which until now has been hidden from view, into the light.

The museum The Museo Mapuche de Cañete (Cañete Mapuche Museum) is run by the Dirección de Bibliotecas Archivos y Museos (Libraries, Archives and Museums Administration, DIBAM) and is located around 700 kilometres south of Santia­ go, in Chile, South America. Founded in 1969, the museum was dedicated to a former president of Chile born in Cañete. But at the same time its permanent exhibition was dedicated to the Mapuche, the inhabitants of the region since before the period of colonisation. The permanent exhibition continued until 2009, at which time the museum closed for a year in order to expand and reinvent the exhibition and its concept. In 2001, in recognition that the museums it administered and funded required improvements, DIBAM set up a renewal program. The program was built around a multidisciplinary team, which in the case of Cañete comprised not only representatives of the various disciplines pertaining to museums, but also members of the Mapuche community from the surrounding Arauco province. As part of the renewal project, the conditions of the museum’s collection were improved. Up until this time (2006), neither preventative conservation measures nor an inventory of the state of the collection had been undertaken. The collection further expanded due to new archaeological digs in Mapuche areas in the region. In addition, a system for the packing and storage of objects

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in the collection was established and the inventory system was substantially improved. The collection comprises 2000 archaeological, ethnographic, historical and contemporary objects. It also includes notable photography collections. The remit of the museum is to work together with the communities in Arauco to promote and pass on Mapuche culture in order to strengthen and sustain it. The formulation of this objective was a part of a strategic process between museum staff and external stakeholders focused on supporting the museum. In this case it was crucial to invite representatives of Mapuche organisations in the region, and many accepted the invitation and came to express their opinions. Their presence was crucial, since until this time they had never received an invitation to make their views on these issues known. “Why do we need a museum when we Mapuche are still alive?” a young man asked, as reported by Lienlaf, a Mapuche poet, writer and scriptwriter who accompanied us throughout the proceedings: Even if it seems trivial, this question makes sense as soon as we reflect on what we mean by museum; whether we accept the classical image of the museum or resolve to take it in a new direction. And so it struck me, that we might hark back to none other than the legendary story of how the horse was incorporated into the world of the Mapuche, and so I responded to the peñi by asking ‘why don’t we use the museum, removing from it the burden that comes with the concept ‘museum’, just like we did with the horse? Let’s take the saddle off and ride bareback.

It was necessary, then, to reflect on our ideal model, in order to approximate, step by step, a decolonisation of thought and to generate a reflexive, up-to-date and participatory exhibition narrative.1 I would like to define decolonisation as a discourse of cultural reform that aims to overcome the powerful complexes of superiority and inferiority that continue to pervade our society and which have their roots in colonial history. It’s a matter of leaving behind us an underdeveloped form of knowledge production and a discourse of social domestication and proclaiming a cultural reform in which the people are involved in determining the themes of a museum’s exhibitions, in its operation and its underlying objectives.2 In order to achieve this, it was indispensable to work together with the heirs of the entire symbolic, social and cultural capital that the museum has preserved, and which it still houses today. Representatives of various lofs 3 accepted the invi1 | R. Bautista, Bolivia, p. 2. 2 | See S. R. Cusicanqui, Interview, 2012. 3 | A lof is a grassroots organisation of Mapuche families living in a particular territory. The foundations of a lof are the reñma (families). A lof can be made up of many families. In this territory there are up to 30 families.

The Decolonisation of the Mapuche Museum in Cañete

tation to take part in organising the work that lay before us as active and effective stakeholders, both during the positive moments and the setbacks we had to overcome. For its part, the DIBAM responded to the museum’s challenges by involving Mapuche representatives. Members of the Mapuche community who wanted to participate did so in a horizontal way. So on the one hand the museum was dependent on a new narrative based on the collection, on the other, the lofs represented the immaterial element in which the collection is embedded: descriptions, interpretations, memories and histories of the objects and the land. Mapuche elders considered it a moral duty to entrust some of their knowledge to a place dedicated to its validation and dissemination, and which would also contribute to their descendants being able to recognise their identity, being informed about their ancestors and the society to which they belong. The collective participation of wise elders and Mapuche youth is reminiscent of a community mapping its territory anew and winning back the memory of histories that have been lost, that are no longer told – histories that have been suppressed, silenced or made invisible. A few commentaries on the topic were: “Now we feel like we’re involved […] In the processes underway in the museum, we get to speak our minds and contribute ideas. This has never before been the case.” Or “participation mustn’t be confused with consultation or the approval of something pre-prepared, supposed to be pre-existing; that is exactly how the institutions have acted up until now […]” In essence, we ‘rode the museum bareback’, which caused some unease both in the region, where people observed what was going on in the museum with increasing anticipation, and also in some government departments, where people were unable to understand this important work of cooperation and networking. I mention this last point because the Chilean police intervened twice in this work: once my home was raided by the police, who took with them all of the results of our work; and the same thing happened to Lienlaf, who was unlawfully detained after a meeting with our exhibition designers in Santiago. Important materials for the catalogue text and the permanent exhibition were confiscated. This all took place under the pretence of pursuing the ideologues of the Mapuche movement. These were people who, being crucial sources for understanding contemporary Mapuche thought, I had wanted to involve in the project. This thought is practised by youths and adults who for various reasons refuse to accept a state that negates them and that is ultimately repressive. We had to deal with expectations as well as with the requirement that certain themes be excluded from the exhibition. We were required to remove ceremonial or sacred symbols and objects. For example, chemamvj and rewe could not be placed inside, because their function consists in being linked to the earth, from which forces emanate that are transferred to the living beings who invoke them. They had to be placed outside, in areas specified by the lofs or

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machi. Imagine the look on the face of the collection’s curator when she heard this requirement! The architecture of the museum is inspired by a simple row of Mapuche dwellings (ruka), but three stories high. The museum is located on a nine-hectare site, which also includes a park with indigenous trees, pathways, a Mapuche dwelling, a gillatuwe (an open space in which the Mapuche community carries out ceremonies on certain dates) as well as a palin field (a Mapuche ritual sport). Every year a variety of different ritual, religious, political and cultural events take place. Various Mapuche communities and institutions, having integrated programs for indigenous groups into their policies, organise activities that are advised upon and led by Mapuche elders. Organisations and/or Mapuche communities meet up to coordinate the preparation for these rituals several months in advance, for they are not simply performances. The necessary structures are set up and preparations are carried out, such as the cleaning of the area, the setting up of a rewe (a circle for the meeting) and kvni (branches), which serve as shelter for the guests and organisers, and the organising of firewood for preparing the food that will be shared among the guests and participating families. A lot of work is required to ensure that the occasion takes place according to plan, and the activities last the length of a rotation of the Earth on its axis, that is, 24 hours without a break. This also requires organisational work in the museum, so that basic facilities are available to a large audience of elderly people, adults, adolescents and children outside of the museum’s normal opening hours. Such is the museum’s vitality and relevance. The exhibition program is likewise directed by the museum’s mission. Guided by this, a number of temporary and travelling exhibitions have taken place and have been well-received. They have contributed to the museum’s standing, as much through the quality of the objects as through their presentation and interpretation. Due to the general lack of available spaces for thematic and multifaceted exhibitions in the region, the museum’s significance for curators should not be underestimated. As an extension of the permanent exhibition, the educational program is intimately linked to the museum’s activities. It gathers parts of the permanent exhibition and distributes them in a variety of packages, such as in programs on the sounds and tones of the surrounding natural environment, on pottery or on the art of silversmithing. Lately there has also been Mapuche karaoke, singing songs in Mapudungun to help learn the language. Additional educational materials are also made available.4

4 | Users can download this from http://www.zonadidacticamuseos.cl, accessed 13.04.2016.

The Decolonisation of the Mapuche Museum in Cañete

The museum shop also forms a part of the tour of the museum. It is run by expert artisans working with a variety of materials who exhibit their products there, inspired by historical and contemporary aspects of Mapuche culture. Also on offer are natural medicines. These have proven very popular with visitors, especially since a lot of natural products in the region are disappearing due to environmental degradation caused by the pine and eucalyptus monocultures that increasingly dominate the countryside. The museum is one of 26 institutions administered by DIBAM across Chile, forming a part of the national, regional and local network of museums linking it to other museums and exhibitions in the most distant places. A total of 22 museums are spread throughout the Bío-Bío region,5 all of which have diverse histories, themes and exhibitions. A range of festivals are celebrated in the museum, including Wiñol Xipantv, the Mapuche new year, which is celebrated in June each year, more precisely on the winter solstice, a festivity that all indigenous peoples of Latin America celebrate. This celebration is anchored to both Mapuche and non-Mapuche institutions in the various regions of Mapuche territory. Other occasions have also been introduced by the museum. An example is the celebration of the International Day of Indigenous Women on September 5, which the museum provided the initial impulse for in the region. The day is now observed across the country, offering opportunities for meetings on topics that concern us as indigenous and non-indigenous women, and as women in general. The museum has a permanent staff of seven employees with various roles. Three highly qualified employees are responsible for particular areas, such as the conservation of the collection. This includes the permanent exhibition and the temporary exhibitions in the multi-function room as well as the touring exhibitions with which the museum engages audiences off-site. Education work is likewise carried out by a qualified professional, whose role is focused on audience liaison, with an emphasis on schoolchildren, students and various other visiting groups, or those who make a special request to come to the museum. Education focusing on specific and oft-requested topic areas is split into a number of programs, in order to respond to the demands of those who want to get to know Mapuche culture, such as we present it and share it with the public, more intensively. However this does not mean that this work stops with what is presented in the museum. We often have to invite a representative of one of the Mapuche organisations who can, if required, go into detail about topics only they can speak about.

5 | Translator’s note: One of Chile’s 15 administrative regions, whose capital is Concepción, and which Cañete is also located in.

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O pening the vitrines to broaden our vision As an archaeological and ethnographic museum we work with diverse approaches and techniques so that we can accommodate the different perspectives of the various parties who participate in our promotional work, education activities and further development. We worked for example on a part of the collection with young people who wanted to draw or paint some of the objects in the exhibition. Ilustración Viajante (Illustration on the Road) took the archaeological pipes from the museum’s cultural heritage collection as a point of departure for working with young people. They not only became familiar with drawing techniques and materials, they were also given archaeological, historical and ethnographic information about the corresponding collection. The workshop was booked out and the results were outstanding; the drawings were exhibited in the museum, after which the participants took them home with them as souvenirs. The teacher leading the group gave the workshop a positive evaluation and noted that the students viewed the objects not just from an aesthetic point of view, but were also concerned with the object’s meaning and its connection to the present day. The participants were young boys and girls aged between 10 and 18. The curation of objects is a step that can always be taken again and enriched with new information and perspectives, allowing the visitors to breathe new life into the objects used in the activities described above, thanks to an understanding of the significance of the way of life which once gave the objects their original life and meaning. Exhibitions linked to the broader cultural context have also been held, initiated by an artist from Cañete who has been running a school competition with cooperating schools for three years now. Each year around 150 works in any medium are produced, and the level of participation grows each year. Guidelines regarding content were developed by the museum along with the artists in the jury, who prepared a shortlist from the works submitted. In its first year the competition was dedicated to different facets of Mapuche women’s lives. Preparatory materials were distributed to the instructors. The majority of the participants concentrated on the spiritual aspect of the topic, because Mapuche women usually play the leading role in spiritual affairs. The following year the theme was Importancia del Agua en el Pueblo Mapuche (The meaning of water for the Mapuche). As before, a written dossier was prepared, with information on water in the stories that the Mapuche have continued to hand down until the present day. There are many of these stories, and in various regions in Chile and Argentina today they are associated with spiritual sites and survival. The results and the level of parti­cipation were impressive, since the theme is linked to present-day issues at the national level. A number of works had to be rejected because they only arrived once the deadline had passed. The artistic submissions incorporated elements of the permanent collection, and as a result

The Decolonisation of the Mapuche Museum in Cañete

we observed a surge in visitors in connection with the competition. The competition also required us to supplement the information in the education program with further details on the parts of the exhibition featuring the topic of water. The project made it clear to us that water is an inspiring element for life in all of its forms – right up to the rain that characterises our regions, reaching from the coastal mountain range (that the Mapuche call Nahuelbuta) to the ocean in Arauco province. This artistic approach showcases the contents of the museum’s exhibition in another way and gives us as employees of the museum and as bearers of an ancient culture the chance to conduct research and expand our knowledge. This is also to the advantage of students and those teachers who are interested in opening up the eyes of their students to what lies beyond what the school as educational institution allows them to learn and acquire. We also make use of our different skills to improve our presentations, putting the artists in charge of curating the competition exhibition from the point of view of the visual arts, while the museum contributes fundamental knowledge to the competition’s theme. Even students doing internships at the museum have organised activities as part of their training. Students from a technical school in Cañete organised an event focused on Mapuche singing, known in Mapudungun as VL (ül). The initiative took place in summer, a time when it is particularly difficult to invite children, because they’re on holidays and hard to reach. This lead to a concentrated promotional campaign to reach the target number of registrations for the event. Among other things, the competition required contestants to sing a song of their own choosing half in Mapudungun. The songs could be freely chosen or also adapted. The participating children were accompanied by their families, who became very enthusiastically involved in the dynamic of the event, resulting in a high level of participation. Such an event, incorporating as it did a significant fraction of the immaterial cultural heritage of the Mapuche, had not previously taken place in the museum. Some of the children knew songs that they’d been taught in school, and a few of them appeared in traditional Mapuche costume. And it wasn’t just songs that were sung: some took the opportunity to recite poetry in Mapudungun, as Mapuche poetry is sung. A three member jury was invited to evaluate the performances: a vlkantufe (Mapuche singer) and speaker of Mapudungun, an educator, and the director of the museum. The students and museum staff inferred from the experience that events that were about immaterial cultural heritage would also be well received by children, parents, guardians and the public. The curatorial process and its educational aspect showed that events such as this one are an opportunity to use, disseminate and appreciate the language and its forms of expression. Moreover, song is one of the most significant ways in which children learn. One of the winners noted:

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Juana C. Paillalef I really enjoyed taking part in a greeting-song for the Mapuche brothers and sisters. I also received a lot of gifts to help me learn more, and I got a kulxun and a flag that I really like, and I also got a CD so I can learn more songs and how to pronounce words. Now I want to learn another song and take part again. Marichiweu! (Laura González, 7 years old).

L e arning processes and ne t works Such activities expand the scope of the museum beyond the limits of the permanent exhibition. They lead to a situation in which specific interests can coalesce in the connections made between all those directly and indirectly involved, and these interests become public through the programs we run. This creates networks that facilitate the growth of knowledge in common topics and areas of interest. Such networks can be strengthened in a site of reflection and interaction such as the museum. It is probably apparent that we make a concerted effort to address children and adolescents. Many of them have already made significant advances in their knowledge and attitudes. Their existing attitudes, essentially influenced by the media as much as by the ‘education’ they receive in the classroom, are often negatively prejudiced regarding Mapuche issues. I would like to emphasise that in regard to this we find ourselves in an on-going process that has already led to alliances with a variety of education institutions and particularly with staff in the Department of Education. Our goal is for the museum and its various activities to create stimuli in which art, cultural heritage, a deeper historical understanding and immaterial heritage can combine to foster education, new encounters and reflection. This perspective is so pertinent because the foundation of the state, which is linked to an on-going practice of expropriation, has led to a colonial configuration of political, economic and/or symbolic power, which is grounded in the conquest and theft of land and property that first made it possible, and that continues to drive it forward. As a result of this, a specific socio-political and cultural construction developed that demanded the dispossession and colonisation of bodies and subjectivities through disciplinary practices of work, religion and schooling, which were framed as civilising measures. This colonisation process led to a situation in which inferiority complexes have been internalised across a number of generations. This last point is one of the central and most harrowing characteristics of colonialism.6 Certainly many questions remain open when it comes to reflecting on our methods, processes and possible partners who share our interest in conveying 6 | H. N. Moreno, Formación colonial del estado y desposesión en Ngulumapu, p. 126.

The Decolonisation of the Mapuche Museum in Cañete

another view on events in the region. In the education system, which we interact with in the museum, the teaching of all aspects of indigenous societies in Chile and Latin America is suffused with negative images. The colonisation of Chileans (including the Mapuche themselves, who have assimilated into Chilean society and abnegated their Mapuche being) means that our education facilitators require a lot of preparation in order to respond respectfully but also forcefully to the pre-existing views and attitudes of visitors. It succeeds up to a certain point, however it is difficult when the will for a respectful inter-cultural dialogue is lacking. Taken together, our current and past activities demonstrate a close connection with the museum’s goals and mission. But not every story of a living people has a place in a museum – such a space must strive to give room not only to history, but also to contemporary issues and future expectations. To get a colonising institution to accept a contemporary narrative is a big responsibility, especially when it pertains to a living, extant people. We have therefore tried to represent the culture of a present, living people, a people that refuses to disappear in spite of the many and various death sentences pronounced upon it, particularly in places like museums. Running a museum a long way from any major city is certainly a tough challenge, but we still decided to do it and we have been able to record some relatively significant achievements. These achievements are also always dependent on the specific conditions that make the activities possible, like the weather, the right forms of promotion, and so on. The programs I’ve discussed are what in our case have worked up until now. However resources are tight, and our needs are growing, as more people and institutions make use of the space and realise that they need to network and connect with the existing cultural heritage in order to establish a foundation for their own projects. As such, the pressure is mounting, and it isn’t possible for us to offer further support in different forms. The museum has now become a stage and a display for the region, giving an identity to the fabric of Mapuche communities in the area around where the museum has stood for almost 50 years. The competitions described above have a special significance for me, because it is in these settings that children contribute to the fact that we perceive our own history and culture in our surroundings – the wonders of our culture become tangible through simply looking, listening and feeling. Through them I’ve seen how prepared younger generations are to learn and explore, without fear of showing their feelings, and how they affiliate themselves with Mapuche culture, incorporate it into themselves, even if they don’t belong to it directly.

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Figure 1: Performance by a group of Mapuche youth at an event to support families of Mapuche political prisoners.

Figure 2: View of the museum with a Mapuche flag, a gift to the museum from Mapuche women on the International Indigenous Women’s Day, 5 September 2007.

Figure 3: Panorama of the museum.

The Decolonisation of the Mapuche Museum in Cañete

Figure 4: Discussion and presentation of suggestions for a new name for the museum.

Figure 5: Presentation of the new proposed exhibition format for the museum, presented on-site by the designers for the Mapuche community, 2008.

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Education in Museums, Community Mediation and the Right to the City in the Historic Centre of Quito Alejandro N. Cevallos, Valeria R. Galarza

M ediación C omunitaria Mediación Comunitaria1 is a transversal field of work in the management of five museums2 in Quito which comprise the Fundación Museos de la Ciudad (FMC, City Museum Foundation).3 Since our mission is to connect the museums with their social environment, we have set ourselves the goal of establishing the basic framework within the museums necessary for processes of social organisation and participation to influence the decision-making structures in the museum’s practices and policies, and for the development of appropriate spaces 1 | Translator’s note: the designation of ‘mediación comunitaria’ refers both to exchange with communities and to community-based approaches to education. Though the closest common English equivalent in the field of art education might be ‘community outreach and liaison’, in this text, ‘mediación comunitaria’ will be translated as ‘community mediation’. This is in order to distinguish it from traditional forms of ‘outreach’ work. ‘Community mediation’ work, as the authors employ the term here, is not aimed at audience development or ‘bringing culture’ to communities, but rather at working together with communities in a relationship of mutual exchange. 2 | Museo Interactivo de Ciencia (Interactive Science Museum); Museo del Carmen Alto (Museum Carmen Alto); Parque Museo del Agua YAKU (YAKU Water Museum); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Quito (Contemporary Art Centre Quito); Museo de la Ciudad (City Museum); Mediación Comunitaria. For further information see http://www.media​ cioncomunitaria.gob.ec/ and http://www.fundacionmuseosquito.gob.ec/ (Spanish), ac­c essed 13.04.2016. 3 | Our thanks to María Dolores Parreño, researcher in mediación comunitaria, to Javier Rodrigo and the exhibition and community outreach officers at the Fundación Museos de la Ciudad, whose discussions with us provided the foundations for the reflections presented in this publication.

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of negotiation. We are interested in collaboration as a principle in the work between museums and communities. Collaboration implies that the objectives and results of joint activity only become meaningful when they come about through a dialogue between the different forms of knowledge and through collective production processes situated in the specific local contexts, enabling ideas for the construction and maintenance of the commons.4 Operationally, this means that each community mediator (mediadora comunitaria) is located in one of the five museums of the FMC and is tasked with addressing the debates that take place in the neighbourhood surrounding the museum in order to initiate dialogue and negotiations with the different groups. This task also includes an internal negotiation of institutional program planning and activities with the museum staff (such as the educators, the curators, or the security staff responsible for the building). The community mediators are supported by a team of eight members, which takes on the role of a ‘toolkit’. So for instance, there is a consultant for urban horticulture, a person responsible for DIY construction and participatory architecture, a person responsible for the overall planning, a graphic designer, an administrative assistant for bookkeeping and, since last year, two researchers in the field of education, who work on pedagogical methodologies and issues in the collaborative processes, and then develop professional training programs that respond to these processes.5 In the organisational structure, the coordination of community mediation is on the same level as the coordination of a museum. The annual budget is managed independently. The community mediation staff have permanent positions which are protected by the relevant labour laws – which, given the typical precarity of museum education work and the trend towards the outsourcing of work with communities in cultural institutions across the world, is deserving of special emphasis. The conditions and work structures of community mediation are not a consolidated model. Rather, they correspond to a specific institutional situation. They are the result of three years of continuous negotiations, in which the work area has expanded and contracted depending on the current situation of 4 | See M. Garcés: Un mundo común. By the “construction and maintenance of the common good” we mean a collective discussion about the fact that we are all interwoven in a shared world; a recognition and reformulation of our mutual dependence on each other. This ought to be done in a way that opts for social justice as the defining principle by which we, with our differences and varied interests, can imagine the management and distribution of those resources and goods that cannot be monopolised or privatised by anyone. Education, public cultural infrastructure and the cultural practices of the communities are part of that common good. 5 | See http://www.mediacioncomunitaria.gob.ec/assets/infografia_mediacion_comu​ ni​t aria.pdf (Spanish), accessed 13.04.2016.

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the fragile cultural policy in the city and the Fundación, as well as a process of trial and error. Nevertheless, the formation of this field of work is, institutionally, a big step that can become a counterweight to community programs that define themselves as ‘social responsibility’ or ‘audience development’, two concepts that level out the conflicts in the social sphere and that are blind to the power dynamics in the so-called ‘democratisation of cultural programs’.6

B e t ween the tr ansformation and reproduction of the museum In a self-critical manner, we have established that the activities of community mediation in the past three years have occurred for the most part  – despite being part of the museum  – without the awareness of the curators and the interest of the educators. Our commitment to local problems meant that we understood our work from a marginal position. We distanced ourselves from the exhibition themes and refused to use the curatorial concepts as a leitmotif for the dialogue between institutions and communities, which deprived us of the opportunity to regard the centre of the museum itself as a public space, both in the design of displays and in the exhibition education programs. It is not always correct to associate work outside the museum with collaborative approaches, critique and experimentalism; and the activities inside of the museum with the constraints of visitor services and an affirmation of curatorial and museum discourse. But this dichotomy has emerged from a particular policy on the part of cultural institutions. Their policy of flexibility on the one hand allows cultural institutions to regain legitimacy in critical and academic discourses, and on the other hand, to take on commitments and roles that fulfil their function in urban development, the creative industries, cultural tourism and other new forms of capitalism. This dichotomy is also influenced by factors such as the inequality in the working conditions in cultural institutions that has developed over long periods of time, and a budget policy that allocates resources for cultural initiatives unequally, depending on the field in which they are positioned (museum education/art and curation). 6 | In Quito’s context, ‘social responsibility’ is usually connected directly or indirectly with the interests and ideologies of the private companies and organisations that initiate such programs. For example, a series of training courses in tourist services offered to collectives in the districts or street vendors is presented as favourable for the common good. In the case of the cultural institutions, out-of-house audience management is focused mainly on the production of cultural events, paradoxically precisely there where the gentrification processes haves dissipated the social participation and the everyday uses of public space.

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The scenario described above raises a series of questions for us: what is the reach and the impact of working with communities within the structures of the institution itself? If so far we have implemented the work with communities as a specialised task that takes place outside of regular operations, how can we avoid this position of exceptionality and intervention in order to develop more regular and more sustainable processes? The goal would be to understand the collaboration with communities as a form of simultaneous reflection/ action and as a collective learning space, which can lead to a redefinition of the concerns and pedagogies of the museum. Our initial attitude of self-marginalisation was actually an elitist one: we are the only department that can spend a lot of time on research and ethnography without having to prove the utility of this research to the museum. The community mediators have a more varied, specialised training and better working conditions than the educators. The invitation to bring together the fields of community mediation and exhibition education as well as a joint discussion about collaborative practices prompted an internal debate about the required working conditions, hierarchies, logics and working rhythms. This brings us to the question that concerns us here, in response to the aforementioned composition of our department and our remit within the institution: when do collaborative projects serve to legitimise existing power relations, and when do they lead to concrete changes? The idea that cultural institutions could in some way be of value to the community and contribute to debates around critical education that could address social issues does not only originate from theoretical considerations or from the crisis of representation and of the museum as a modern institution: on the contrary, this concept is the result of the situated and local developments that have shaped the thinking about public institutions in the region.7 It is the conflicts, the forms of social organisation and their capacity to formulate demands which have opened cracks in the institutions that had previously seemed monolithic. This is an important point, for it is precisely the recognition of these struggles and their current relevance – looking back on their experiences and the picking up on their demands on the public administration – which prevents a simple instrumentalisation of critical work in the institutions. 7 | Here we would like to make reference to the museological tradition in Latin America: the mesa de Santiago de Chile, 1972; the experience of community administration in some archaeological museums as a response to demands for the recognition of indigenous identities in Ecuador in the 1970s and 1980s; the museo del barro in Uruguay (http://www.museodelbarro.org/, accessed 13.04.2016), the Museo Mapuche de Cañete in Chile (http://www.museomapuchecanete.cl/641/w3-channel. html, accessed 13.04.2016) or the public community Museo del Puerto de Ingeniero de White in Argentina (http://museodelpuerto.blogspot.com, accessed 13.04.2016).

Education in Museums, Community Mediation and the Right to the City

M ercado S an R oque : the right to the cit y We want to address the central question of this article by way of an experience that is located between work with communities and museum education: the establishment of a collaboration between the museums and the San Roque market in Quito. It is an area that has had to fight for its rightful place in the city of Quito for over 20 years, amidst policies of displacement, urban regeneration, tourism and cultural heritage.8 In 1978, persuaded by the splendour of its colonial architecture, UNESCO declared Quito a World Heritage Site. This status was used as an argument to invest in tourism and real estate speculation in the 1990s, which led to an increase in the city’s debt and in private investment in the restoration of historical buildings. Private and public organisations were formed to regulate the use of public space and the design of the streetscape. In the year 2000, in response to the Inter-American Development Bank’s (IDB) recommendation that the city should have institutions aimed at the promotion of culture and the appreciation of cultural heritage, the Fundación Museos (FMC) was created. Although the postcard image of the city focuses on its Spanish heritage, Quito is permeated by indigenous populations. Some 22 per cent of the inhabitants of the city centre (San Roque axis) identify as indigenous, and a large portion of this population is involved in the markets.9 Historically, the Mercado San Roque grew out of a program to systematically force informal trade off the streets and squares of the city centre, and to relocate them to other areas.10 With approximately 3000 jobs and an (unquantified) network of informal trade and street vending, the market serves about 204,000 customers a week; San Roque covers 17 per cent of Quito’s basic food needs, it supplies to smaller markets and ensures the food sovereignty of the city. In addition to the traders, the market includes crafts and everyday practices such as naturopathy and 8 | When the right to the city is mentioned here in the context of Quito, it implies a debate on the permeability between urban and rural areas and the indigenous presence in the cities. In the context of Quito, terms like citizenship, public space or environment are reconfigured by the complexity of the struggles of historically repressed identities, the popular trading networks – which disrupt the concept of urbanity – and a whole series of concepts and social and cultural practices which, within the city, struggle to have their difference from ‘urbanity’ recognised. 9 | The San Roque axis consists of eight districts in the vicinity of the San Roque market. This is the same area in which the three most visited museums of the FMC are located: Parque Museo del Agua YAKU, Museo de la Ciudad and Museo del Carmen Alto. 10 | See E. Kingman, Los trajines callejeros; Coord. San Roque. For more information http://www.mediacioncomunitaria.gob.ec/documentos.html, accessed 13.04.2016.

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indigenous medicine. It is estimated that 31 per cent of the market employees live in the historic centre.11 It is also worth focusing on the self-administered, intercultural and bilingual school, operated by an organisation of Kichwa-speaking market traders. It was founded with the aim of preserving the language, to allow the market traders’ children to have an education which conveyed rural-indigenous values, and, especially, to prevent the discrimination of these children in the Spanish-speaking schools. In Ecuador there are 2,305 intercultural and bilingual government schools. These evolved out of the struggles of the socio-political indigenous movement, which was consolidated in the late 1980s by demanding state recognition of autonomous indigenous education, and which attributed a central social role to education in the debates about identity.12 Despite the strong indigenous presence there are only 17 schools of this type in Quito, and only two of them in urban areas. San Roque is one of these two schools, with 210 students.

M ercado S an R oque /communit y mediation /museum education : e xperiences and possibilities We have outlined the development of the community mediation department and our complex dealings with the institutional structure, and explained why it is necessary to engage in controversial dialogues with the field of exhibition education about our areas of work in the context of the cultural economy and the production of knowledge. We have also sketched out the conflictual scenario in which our work takes place, amidst the struggles of the market traders in the city centre. Now we would like to explain the key points of the negotiation processes with communities and educators that contribute to a long-term collaboration and sustainability in day-to-day museum operations.

11 | See Gesculturas, Cuentan los vecinos. 12 | See A.Conejo, Educación intercultural bilingüe. The recognition of a linguistically and culturally appropriate form of education has been enshrined in Ecuador’s Constitution since 1924. Nevertheless, it was not until the 1940s that education assumed a greater role in social organisation as a means of political and social awareness. In 1988 the Dirección Nacional de Educación Indígena Intercultural Bilingüe (DINEIB, National Agency of Intercultural Bilingual Indigenous Education) was established, which in 1992 received technical, administrative and budgetary autonomy under the national education act. This status was ratified in the 1998 Constitution with the recognition of the state as pluri-national and pluri-cultural.

Education in Museums, Community Mediation and the Right to the City

The exhibition space: reaction and communication strateg y Over the past five years, the city administration was not transparent regarding the government’s plans in the area of urban development. The relocation and downsizing of the market had been discussed in different forms, but the information was only circulated informally among market traders, rather than via an official announcement. In early 2013 the uncertainty and apprehension grew to such an extent that the market traders denied public administration staff access to the market building. The resistance was in response to the fact that the results from the market management surveys were not publicly disseminated, and when they were, the technical, specialised language made them difficult to understand. The market traders did not know whom the information had been collected for, and whose interests it served. The Instituto Metropolitano de Patrimonio (Urban Institute of Cultural Heritage) was given the task of designing the transformation of the market building. The institute invited the community mediation department to form and lead a research team that was to carry out various workshops with the traders at the market. The implicit aim of this invitation was to legitimise the building’s redesign through a “participatory” development of the proposal.13 In meetings with 15 organisations of market traders, these targets were subjected to a joint re-definition and two conditions were set: the results of the study were to be made available to the public, and the final report was to be proofread by the market organisation before being given to the authorities that commissioned it. In theory, the concept of citizen participation is present in many processes of urban planning. In practice, however, it was necessary to discuss some problematic issues: who invites whom to participate, and under what conditions? To what extent is participation in setting the themes, goals and scope of such processes possible? Since the reflections upon participation were included in the survey, the market organisations and their political leadership (whose primary interest was to highlight the commercial aspects of the market and its service infrastructure) were prepared to integrate minority voices into the debate, like those of the students from the intercultural bilingual school, the teachers, the mothers, or those of precarious, unorganised worker groups like the street vendors and attendants. The commissioning authorities had to accept 13 | For more information, see http://www.mediacioncomunitaria.gob.ec/assets/in​ forme-consultoria-del-mercado-san-roque.pdf, accessed 13.04.2016. The advisory group was headed by Mediación Comunitaria (Alejandro Cevallos, Lennin Santa Cruz, Paulina Vega and Andres Rueda). Also involved were the advisors to the FMC Henar Diez, two local artists, Gary Vera and Tania Lombeida, the anthropologists Wendy Morán and Casandra Herrera, and the Transductores collective (collective pedagogies).

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that in addition to the architectural dimension, the study would also have to address possible administrative models for the market in relation to the city. The study also examined the relationship between the market and its immediate surroundings. It analysed the media stigmatisation of the market and its role in urban planning, and was thus able to show that other markets in the region were shrinking. It also made it clear that the cultural infrastructure, which is actually abundantly present in the area, had practically no impact on the district and the communities. The information that emerged from the study was collectively translated into maps, graphs, metaphorical images and timelines, in which the groups involved could recognise themselves and the diversity of their concerns. The market was put up for discussion, but not as the core of the problem, but rather as part of a complex social and urban ecosystem. This material was used to produce an exhibition. The exhibition made the collected information publicly available and was also a site of strategic negotiation among the participants concerning representation and visibility, and about what should be reserved for the internal discussions and remain private. The exhibition was a strategic step in dealing with the municipal administration and sought neither the appearance of objectivity nor the harmonic aesthetics of collaborative projects. However, the hope that it would have a direct impact on the decision-making of the authorities was not fulfilled. These limitations initially led to frustration, but they ultimately motivated a diversification of the strategies of the community mediators, which now acted not out of ‘duty’ but out of a commitment to the groups in the market. Thus, posters for food sovereignty were created, as well as magazines about the market’s invisible stories, a video scripted in cooperation with the organisations of the market, and infographics.14 We progressed from the exceptional situation of the exhibition to the team in the museums advocating for an expanded discussion about the situation of the market, but how could this concern and this work influence the museum’s internal operations?

Steps towards a shared program with the educators A first step towards this was the identification of common objectives (looking beyond the individual museums and the two departments of exhibition education and community mediation) and the debate about the conditions necessary 14 | Documentary “Mercado San Roque: una casa para todos” (San Roque market: A Home for Everyone, Spanish), see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvjAjftCehE, accessed 04.13.2016, additional documents and materials under http://www.media​ cioncomunitaria.gob.ec (Spanish), accessed 13.04.2016.

Education in Museums, Community Mediation and the Right to the City

for collaboration: the revision of wage levels and working hours, focus groups that determine the need for forms of professional development and self-education, and the establishment of spaces for autonomous and regular dialogue. This process proved that a common concern was the work on intercultural bilingualism in the educational setting, and in relation to internal migration from rural areas to the city. How do the museums develop intercultural education activities in the context of debates such as the one about San Roque? Many of the educators were already in contact with groups in the district, mainly at the level of invitations to tours or specific events in the museums. This showed that there were experiences and concerns that so far had not been drawn upon for the task of creating a less sporadic educational program. On this basis, two activities were set in motion at once. On the one side, thematic professional development sessions were planned, and on the other, the mediation and education departments got in contact with the broader education communities around the market to enable the exchange of knowledge. To date, we have invited external educators and academics to take part in workshops with topics like: educational theories and models, planning in informal education, critical pedagogy, education in multilingual contexts, education strategies in non-directed settings, and inclusion and diversity in education. This process has been going on for eleven months and has led to various projects, some of which are already underway or in the planning stage. It led to the development of an educational and recreational program for the school holidays which is carried out by a network of 17 exhibition and community mediators in three museums, transforming the usual and conventional format of the holiday program into an activity that takes a stance on local issues. There are also plans for a travelling exhibition and learning activities about the information and educational materials that were generated in the study on the market, in order to discuss them with the market traders at their workplace and with visitors to the museums. Although spectacular major events continue to take up a lot of time and institutional resources, we believe that the collaboration between educators and community mediators – with a common commitment to the debates about the surrounding social environment – transforms conventional education and mediation strategies into political spaces, and opens up the discussion about the distribution of power in the decision-making regarding priorities in the institution. In this way, we hope to implement collaborative community mediation as a collective process, learning to make demands and to take responsibility for the regular operations of public cultural institutions.

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Figure 1: Infographic on the social spaces and the network of actors in the market.

Figure 2: Community mediation workshop with the Frente de defensa del Mercado San Roque (Front for the Defence of San Roque Market).

Education in Museums, Community Mediation and the Right to the City

Figure 3 + 4: Infographic on food sovereignty: sale of potatoes at the San Roque Market.

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“Good for You, But I Don’t Care!” Critical Museum Pedagogy in Educational and Curatorial Practice Bernadette Lynch

I ntroduction This text considers kindness and generosity at the heart of the cultural sector in its dealings with the public, and the problem with it. There are a number of moments in the Somalian author, Nuruddin Farah’s wonderful book, Gifts1 when Duniya, a single mother, a nurse working at the hospital in Mogadishu, has cause to question the generosity of others. Duniya distrusts ‘givers’. And a culture of ‘giving’, doing ‘for’, ‘on behalf of’, still, I maintain, runs throughout the cultural sector, infecting both curatorial and educational practices alike. For, as has been noted, at their core museums retain two basic competencies left over from colonial times – they collect and they exhibit.2 As Boast also importantly reminds us, they educate  – a further leftover from colonial times, and for the past decades a core goal of the new museology (Boast 2011).3 As philosopher, Jonathan Ralston Saul (2014) wrote in a Canadian newspaper: “The actual problem is [that people] have ‘rights’, and they’ve been removed [or never allowed],” he says. “If they had their rights  […] in the full sense of the word, you wouldn’t have to feel sympathy. Sympathy is a way of not dealing with the central issues of [social inequality]”. Such sentiment at the heart of public engagement and participation results in undermining those on the receiving end because it regards them as passive victims and erodes their dignity, active agency and self-determination. Frequently the effect is anger or indifference by those whom we wish to persuade to be on the receiving end of the museums’ projects and programmes. As one young

1 | N. Farah, Gifts. 2 | S. Ashley, First Nations on View, p. 31. 3 | R. B. Boast, Neocolonial Collaboration.

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participant put it, the result of all our efforts at inclusion and recognition are more likely to be, “Good for you, but I don’t care.”4 The extensive action research I have undertaken around the UK over the past four years includes, Whose Cake is it Anyway?, a report for the Paul Hamlyn Foundation looking at the impact of engagement and participation in UK museums.5 The overwhelming experience of museum participants has been one of ‘empowerment-lite’.6 Co-creation or co-curation is thus often unmasked as a shallow political gesture. What we find are too often tokenistic consultations without authentic decision-making power, operating through relationships that disempower and control people. Meanwhile, the rhetoric of ‘service’, continues to place the subject in the role of ‘supplicant’, ‘beneficiary’ or ‘learner’ and the provider (the museum and its staff) in the role of ‘teacher/carer’, perpetrating a ‘deficit’ model which assumes that people (‘learners’) have ‘gaps’ which need filling or fixing through museum intervention, rather than a concept of change that places people at the centre, as active agents in their own right. It is therefore unsurprising that the museums’ community partners and participants frequently convey frustration and dissatisfaction, finding themselves on the receiving end of museum practices that demonstrate a profoundly disabling view of the individual as existing in an almost permanent state of vulnerability. Community participants soon come to realize a few hard lessons, which they may or may not have suspected at the outset. Being included in what Fraser memorably calls ‘invited spaces’7 is no guarantee of participation. Similarly Cornwall reminds us that simply having a seat at the table is a necessary but not sufficient condition for exercising voice. Nor is presence at the table [on the part of institutions] the same as a willingness to listen and respond. 8

The problem in this continuing situation is that the notion of centre/periphery, ‘us’ and ‘them’ is still alive and well, and it continues to undermine the learning and participatory efforts of these well-meaning museums and their staff members. By placing people in the position of ‘beneficiaries’, the museum exercises invisible power, and thereby robs people of their active agency and the 4 | This negative response to being in the position of the museum’s ‘beneficiaries’ is amply supported in my extensive recent research into engagement and participation across the museum sector (Lynch, Whose Cake is it Anyway?). 5 | B. Lynch, Whose Cake is it Anyway? 6 | A. Cornwall & V. S. P. Coelho, Spaces for change? 7 | N. Fraser, Rethinking the public sphere. 8 | A. Cornwall, Democratising Engagement, p. 13.

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necessary possibility of resistance. Thus museums continue to be stuck within what Mark O’Neill coined a “welfare model”.9

A welfare model of museum educational and e xhibition pr actice Over recent decades, there has been much discussion of the perceived conflict between education and curatorship in museums with curatorship posed as a conservative force in terms of opening the museum to public engagement. More recently there has been a deliberate blurring of the boundaries of curatorship and education as the ‘educational turn’ took hold within the new museology. In the UK, since the 1990s, museums found themselves part of a public sector that was increasingly committed to, and actively engaged in, soliciting public input on public services: in health, education, housing, social services, for example, through engagement boards, or representation on project boards. Involving communities in more direct collaborations has increased in museums in the light of expectations for a greater degree of public participation and deliberation in civil society in the UK, and globally, as exemplified by the massive growth of social media. Under pressure from the UK government funding bodies and local authorities, the engagement process in museums expanded, with expectations from government funding bodies that museums include large-scale consultation on their capital development projects as well as public input on redisplays of collections and the co-development of policies and strategies for practice. Involving communities in the active role of the museum within the regeneration and development of its local area also became a key factor in the funding of museums in recent years. Sustainable community strategies included proposing more embedded partnerships. Thus, depending upon the individual museum response to such demands, the perception of the relationship with the public quickly or gradually, enthusiastically, or extremely reluctantly, began to shift from “users and choosers to makers and shapers”10. Ever since, museums in the UK have been increasingly under pressure to deliver on opportunities for public participation. But, as we shall see, there has always been a degree of institutional resistance; in many cases tensions and contradictions that ran throughout these collaborative processes. Largely influenced also by James Clifford’s work on the museum-as-contactzone,11 a postcolonial museum practice has been consciously pursued by many 9 | M. O’Neill, From the Margins to the Core? 10 | A. Cornwall & J. Gaventa, From users and choosers, p. 127. 11 | J. Clifford, Routes. It was James Clifford (1997) who applied anthropologist Mary Louise Pratt’s (1992) notion of “contact zones” to a museum context in order to propose

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museums in the UK, and anywhere there are large indigenous or diasporic communities. A decade ago, Ruth Phillips noted that the “new models of partnership and collaboration […] are creating ever more opportunities for Aboriginal intervention into the traditional orientation of the Western museum”12 . The participatory turn in museums is best understood from within the context of a focus on museum ethics,13 and preceding that, the larger movement to make museums more socially inclusive and responsible as well as engaged civil institutions.14 For the past few decades, through a widespread move towards establishing a ‘collaborative museology’, museums have been attempting to open up knowledge and the participatory interpretation of their ethnographic collections through developing and maintaining relationships with communities near and far.15 Yet much participatory practice has been criticised as essentially flawed, providing an illusion of participation while in reality, consensual decisions tend to be coercive, or rushed through on the basis of the institution’s control of knowledge production and its dissemination or on the basis of its institutional agenda or strategic plan; thereby manipulating a group consensus on what is inevitable, usual or expected.16 Recent debates have questioned the effectiveness of participatory practice in museums, in particular, its failures to overcome institutional power17. Despite well-meaning intentions, participation is not always the democratic process it sets out to be; rather, museums as places of contentious and collaborative relations and interactions. This became very influential and has been extensively debated over the past decade. On the one hand, this conceptual vision has been critiqued as being merely a reconstruction of the reformist agenda of the state (Bennett, 1998). Other research has shown that a museum can function as a site where a complex web of demands and articulations is expressed, negotiated and contested (Macdonald, 2002, McCarthy, 2007, Witcomb, 2003). Yet other perspectives have also critiqued the content and form of contact zone museum collaborations (Boast, 2011), and the relationship between process and product (Lynch and Alberti, 2010) within the context of the museum. 12 | R. B. Phillips, Community collaboration in exhibits, pp. 96–97. 13 | J. Marstine, The Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics. 14 | R. Sandell & E. Nightingale, Museums, Equality and Social Justice; R. Sandell, Social inclusion. 15 | J. Marstine, The Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics; C. Kreps, Liberating Culture; N. Simon, The Participatory Museum. 16 | H. Graham, R. Mason & N. Nayling, The Personal is Still Political; B. Lynch, & S. J. M. M. Alberti, Legacies of prejudice; B. Lynch, Collaboration, Contestation, and Creative Conflict; J. Marstine, The Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics; R. Sandell, Museums and the combating of social inequality; ; R. Sandell, Social inclusion. 17 | E. Crooke, Museums and Community; B. Lynch, & S. J. M. M. Alberti, Legacies of prejudice; L. Peers & A. Brown (Eds.), Museums and source communities.

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it more frequently reflects the agendas of the institution where the processes, such as the final right to edit content, are tightly controlled by the museum.18 Thus the imagined museum-as-contact-zone was always, according to Boast, “an asymmetric space where the periphery comes to gain some small, momentary and strategic advantage, but where the centre ultimately gains […]”19. Throughout the ‘participatory turn’ in the new ethical, democratic, dialogical museology, museum education has been on the front line of delivering these participatory practices. It has been seen to be at the forefront of an emancipatory, decolonising practice, often in conflict with curatorial practice in this regard, particularly in the area of the interpretation of ethnographic collections. But it turns out museum education is not necessarily as representative of popular emancipation as it might like to think. Here I would like to consider not the difference, but the similarity between those working in education and curatorship in terms of perpetuating a situation of disempowerment.

E x amples of engagement/disengagement Two relatively recent experiences in the UK – the 2012 Olympics Stories of the World project, and the Engaging Curators project significantly support this view. Stories of the World was the largest ever youth project in UK museums.20 It focused on multiple partner museums working with young people in interpreting and exhibiting world collections. Despite the emphasis on collections, the work was led not by ethnography curators but by museum outreach and education staff. Pursuing a ‘contact zone’ agenda, museums participating in Stories of the World actively attempted to link their local participatory work with their curatorial research (and partnerships) with both Diaspora and originating cultures from around the world. At the same time, the museums involved in Stories of the World tried to create space for young people to make choices and have the freedom to conduct their own research and curate their own exhibitions with access to the world collections from their respective museums. Thus, these museums attempted to bring these three ‘communities’ together into a dialogue mediated by the museum: local diaspora and overseas originating communities, with young people attempting to act in a curatorial role.

18 | K. Fouseki, Community voices, curatorial choices, pp. 180–192; B. Lynch, Whose Cake is it Anyway? 19 | R. B. Boast, Neocolonial Collaboration, p. 66. 20 | See www.artscouncil.org.uk/what-we-do/our-priorities-2011-15/london-2012/sto​ ries-world/ (accessed 29.06.2015).

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Thus a three-legged stool was created, and a rather unsteady one at that.21 It quickly became evident that the museums themselves were unclear about the ethics and efficacy of any one of these particular practices, making it very difficult to mentor and support the young people in taking the responsibility for the consequences of such a complex and sensitive interchange.22 As one staff member (involved in delivering the project in one part of the UK) reported, there was “a power problem, so that those involved felt ill-equipped and powerless to challenge the existing museum hegemony, and the young people involved were sometimes left somewhat adrift.” (Anonymous staff member). At the end of the project (following the development of the ‘co-produced’ Stories of the World exhibitions – a requirement of the funding), in some areas of the country, the young people engaged in the project expressed that they always felt the museum’s presence in their decision-making.23 There was evidence throughout the process of what Gaventa called ‘false consensus’,24 the museum’s sense of pedagogical responsibility causing it to subtly lead the young people towards what Giroux calls ‘correct thinking’, thus following the dictates of institutional authority.25

C ur ators dis - engaged Shortly after the Stories of the World programme ended, the connected experience of MEG’s Engaging Curators project showed that both curators and education staff are too often equally confused in terms of participatory, decolonizing practice. Reacting negatively to the Stories of the World project, the UK’s professional association of museum ethnography curators, the Museum Ethnographers Group (MEG), re-stated the ‘importance’ of curatorial expertise. MEG 21 | The three-legged stool: 1) indigenous & diaspora communities; 2) the ‘institutions’ staff members (education and curatorial – as we shall see, not that disparate); and 3) the young people. Can you credit the original idea or concept? 22 | See evaluation by Bernadette Lynch of the Stories of the World project in the northeast region of the UK, entitled Journey of Discovery, and involving Tyne and Wear Museums in Newcastle and a group of regional museums working with the region’s young people: www.twmuseums.org.uk/geisha/assets/files/Journeys%20of%20Discov​ ery%20evaluation.pdf (accessed 29.06.2015). 23 | For an impressive and deeply reflective analysis by those directly involved in delivering Stories of the World in the Northeast of the UK, see Morse, Macpherson, and Robinson, Developing dialogue in coproduced exhibitions. 24 | J. Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness, p. 3. 25 | H. Giroux, Paulo Freire and the Politics of Postcolonialism, p. 4.

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challenged the authority that had been given to ‘Learning’ and ‘Community Outreach’ colleagues in museums around the country to lead on such a high-profile, national project that was focused on ethnographic collections. MEG countered by creating a national project to discuss and re-state the role of curators in evolving participatory practice in museums, calling it the Engaging Curators project.26 Yet this project inadvertently unearthed as many uncertainties in ‘decolonizing’ practice as those of their colleagues in ‘Learning’ and ‘Community Outreach’ had done with Stories of the World.27 Engaging Curators sought to promote personal and institutional reflection upon the abstract and actual nature of collaborative practice, particularly in regard to curatorial involvement with community work. Two challenging workshops (at the Horniman Museum, London and at the Great North Museum: Hancock in Newcastle) were held during 2013. The aim was to think through and document how ethnographic collections are used in community engagement, and the role of curators within that. The workshops included international invited speakers to discuss current issues around community engagement in museums worldwide, as well as initiate face-to-face contact between non-specialists, experts and MEG. Within the two national workshops, it was evident how much the language of the commitment to collaboration in museums still situates the institution at the centre, conferring suitability, or ‘legitimacy’ on ‘informants’ or ‘learners’ when working, in ‘partnership’ for example, with originating or diaspora/local communities on the so-called ‘shared’ interpretation of collections. Once again the institution evidently continued to be operating within a centre/periphery model, and, as one workshop participant put it, found itself “tied up in knots”28. Throughout the MEG project, one was struck by how the museum curators continued to define the rules of engagement. As Boast puts it: “No matter how much museum studies have argued for a pluralistic approach […] the intellectual control has largely remained in the hands of the museum”29. In spite of itself, from the comforting perspective of the colonizing gaze, the museum’s

26 | See Engaging Curators project’s original intentions here: www.museumethnographersgroup.org.uk/en/projects/329-engaging-curators.html (accessed 29.06.2015). See the project’s international case-studies of participatory practice here: www.museumethnographersgroup.org.uk/en/resources/400-engaging-curators-case-studies. html (accessed 29.06.2015). 27 | The title ‘outreach’ itself of course reveals a centre-periphery model. ‘Public Engage­m ent and Participation’ has replaced this in many museums. 28 | Anonymous Engaging Curators workshop participant, 2013. 29 | R. B. Boast, Neocolonial Collaboration, p. 60.

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perspective remains largely “panoptic and thus dominating”30. Perhaps we in museums must, borrowing from Borsa, take leave of the cultural, theoretical, and ideological borders that enclose us within the safety of “those places and spaces we inherit and occupy, which frame our lives in very specific and concrete ways”31. Some of the museum professionals participating in the two, well-attended Engaging Curators workshops (held in two well-known museums with strong ethnographic collections at either end of the country  – see above) suggested that the problem is that the notion of ‘us’ and ‘them’ still exists within many institutions, and it continues to undermine the collaborative and participatory efforts of these well-meaning museums. A participant posed the following questions: “Who are ‘we’? – individuals? – institutions? What about thinking of the museum as part of community, or an emanation of community – not as needing to connect to ‘it’?”. Both the Stories of the World and the Engaging Curators projects showed that attempts at collaborating with people outside of the museum do not always prove to be an effective challenge to institutional habits of mind. In fact, such well-meaning efforts by museums more often demonstrate a situation where the museum is committed to social change but as an institution has difficulty in changing itself.32

Why can’t museums decolonise their practice? Why is it so difficult to develop a clearer understanding of the evolving mission of museums? And why were there were so many questions left unanswered at the conclusion of the Stories of the World and the Engaging Curators projects? What is at the heart of the museum’s uncertainties in relation to this work? Robert Young argues that the educational practices which run throughout all the museum’s work 30 | A. R. JanMohamed, Worldliness-Without-World, Homelessness-as-Home, p. 10. 31 | J. Borsa, Towards a Politics of Location, p. 36. 32 | It should be stated here that there are notable exceptions where some museums, particularly among the Engaging Curators case-studies, are consciously trying to change the culture of their institution, and are admirably open about the difficulties: www.museumethnographersgroup.org.uk/en/resources/400-engaging-cura ​ t orscase-studies.html (accessed 2nd July 2015). A particularly interesting example is the National Museums of World Culture, Gothenburg, Sweden: The State of Things  www. varldskulturmuseerna.se (see the film from this project). See more on the project: www.humanas.unal.edu.co/colantropos/baukara/la-crea​c ion-del-museo-de-lacul​ tura-del-mundo-gotemburgo-suecia-tentativas-de-cam​b io-de-paradigma-ypracti​ cas-museales (accessed 2nd July 2015).

“Good for You, But I Don’t Care!” have themselves been implicated in the long history of European colonialism and […] continue to determine both the institutional conditions of knowledge as well as the terms of contemporary institutional practices. 33

What has become clear is that both museum education and curatorial practice continue to be similarly implicated in the politics of colonialism in Western museums, as revealed in the continued processes of recognition, representation and outreach, all still entrenched in practices of social inclusion that continue to place the museum at the centre, engaged in the European enlightenment project. Contemporary museum education practices and systems remain saturated with colonial and neo-colonial ideologies.34 The museum has not moved beyond the safety of ‘social inclusion’ practices. As one museum educator put it, “We’re stuck!”

So where does this leave critical pedagog y in the museum-as-contact-zone? In past decades, the UK’s museum education took much of its inspiration from ‘critical pedagogy’, inspired by the progressive education theories of the 1970s, most notably, Paulo Freire.35 The problem is that, like James Clifford’s ‘contact zone’,36 when applied to museums, Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy37 was misunderstood and misapplied in terms of the entirety of its decolonizing, democratic and ‘activist’ message. This is hardly surprising if we consider the traditional role of the museum in relation to the state. As Young reminds us – Freire’s work is often appropriated and taught without any consideration of imperialism and its cultural representation. This lacuna itself suggests the continuing ideological dissimulation of imperialism today. 38

What appears to be lost to memory within critical pedagogical practice in museums is that it was never only a theory and a philosophy of education but 33 | R. J. C. Young, White Mythologies, p. viii. 34 | A. R. Hickling-Hudson, J. Matthews, A. F. Woods (Eds.), Disrupting preconceptions; see also J. Willinsky, Learning to Divide the World. 35 | P. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Later taken up by educational theorists such as Henry Giroux (1988, 2001, 2009, 2011a, b; Giroux and Witkowski 2011c, 2012) and museum education theorists, most notably Eilean Hooper-Greenhill (1992). 36 | J. Clifford, Routes. 37 | P. Freire & A. Faundez, Learning to Question; P. Freire & D. Macedo, Literacy. Reading the Word and the World. 38 | R. J. C. Young, White Mythologies, p. 158.

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was also a ‘praxis-oriented social movement’ (emphasis added).39 Based in Marxist theory, critical pedagogy draws on radical democracy, anarchism, feminism, and other movements that strive for what they describe as social justice. Critical Pedagogy faces today a very strange situation. While being positioned in a seemingly comfortable position and warmly received by so many liberals, post-colonialists, multi-culturalists, postmodernists, and feminists […] it is being domesticated, appeased, or even castrated by the present order of things […] 40

Critical Pedagogy, for all its importance and it is so important in so many ways, can now unfortunately, as Gur-Ze’ev puts it, “be considered much more as part of normalising education and less as part of worthy counter-education” 41.

R e visiting critical pedagogy as permanent struggle I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is vertical, so it’s humiliating. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person and learns from the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people. E duardo G aleano 42

Decolonisation cannot be divorced from a politics that looks to bring about global social justice based on solidarity with others. It is about mutual empowerment rather than exploitation, through sustainable social change developed from local knowledge systems and resources.43 It is about solidarity, activism and struggle. We may need to re-envisage the role of both educators and curators to mobilise a revived form of critical pedagogy, using the museum, to borrow from Mouffe, as a vibrant sphere of contestation where different views can be usefully confronted,44 based on the notion of creative struggle through which new identities as active agents may be forged. Thus, the prime task of a ‘return-to-the-political’ approach to critical pedagogy in the museum is not to eliminate conflict, or, as Mouffe puts it, ‘passion and partisanship’, but rather, 39 | I. Shor, Empowering Education, 129. 40 | I. Gur-Ze’ev, (Ed.), Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy Today, p. 6. 41 | I. Gur-Ze’ev, (Ed.), Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy Today, p. 8. 42 | E. Galeano, Interview with David Barsmian, p. 146. 43 | Robert Young’s conception of the postcolonial is as an aspirational politics with both activist and theoretical elements. (Young, Postcolonialism). 44 | C. Mouffe, On the Political, p. 5.

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to mobilise them for democratic ends, museum professionals and community partners working together to create collective forms of identification around democratic objectives.45 In museums, there is thus a need for a more emancipatory rather than conciliatory process of decolonisation and, in this troubled world which we in museums find ourselves, it is our responsibility to come together as curators and educators, in collaboration with others from inside and outside the museum, and organise with critical pedagogy as a praxis-oriented social movement.46 Robert Janes, eminent Canadian museum professional, wrote a book called Museums in a Troubled World: Renewal, Irrelevance or Collapse.47 Janes reminds us that a failure to clearly understand their public mission in such troubled times will soon leave museums out in the cold and irrelevant to those with whom they are trying to collaborate. There is therefore an urgent need for a thorough review of what a decolonising, social justice practice actually means in the museum, and with it, the critical pedagogy required to develop the critical skills necessary to begin to put it into action. This new trend is reflected strongly within museums that are adopting a more reflective practice48 and a much more overt social responsibility, or ‘social justice’ approach that includes a focus on the necessity for the museum to change its own culture so as to be fit-for-purpose in taking up this responsibility.49 The only way to ensure engagement can both be embedded and effective in museums is through this constant cycle of  reflective practice.50 Reflective practice in museums is about deepening individual and collective self-awareness in terms of how our socially derived knowledge and values shape the quality of our relationships with others and the power relations that underlie these. It is not navel gazing. It’s about facing up to hard talk between museum staff and community partners – building trust and building bridges to de-stabilise the concept of an ‘us and them’ relationship, and the museum becomes less of a separate entity and more of an emanation of communities. Preparation for such collaborative reflexivity must include the development of new tools of 45 | Mouffe notes that Carl Schmitt attacked the ‘liberal-neutralist’ and ‘utopian’ notions that politics can be removed of all agonistic energy, arguing conflict is embedded in existence itself (Mouffe, The Challenge of Carl Schmitt). 46 | B. Lynch, Generally Dissatisfied. 47 | R. R. Janes, Museums in a Troubled World. 48 | B. Lynch, Custom-made. 49 | See Museum Social Justice Alliance http://sjam.org/ (accessed 2nd July 2015). 50 | Reflective practice is “the capacity to reflect on action so as to engage in a process of continuous learning”, which, according to Schön, the originator of the term, is “one of the defining characteristics of professional practice”, (Schön, The Reflective Practitioner) but not as an end in itself – always so as to inform further planning and action. It is widely practised, for example, by health and education professionals.

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analysis in such areas as social justice, participation and conflict, as well as new forms of participatory communication (dialogue and debate) drawn from a wider range of academic specialties, professions and social agencies. Closer attention must be paid to the discourses of which the language we use in relation to participation forms a part.51 Such new skills, as Tuhiwai Smith52 reminds us, must include learning to look and listen (and maybe speak) finding a place from which to speak. This means, as Spivak points out, “listening seriously, not with [a] kind of benevolent imperialism”53. With the museum as participatory institution at the heart of civil society, community participants are no longer seen as ‘beneficiaries’, but rather as ‘critical friends’. Thus the museum becomes a sphere of contestation, in line with Amartya Sen’s call to help people find their voice and develop their ‘capabilities’.54 Cornwall and Coelho note the necessity of understanding the complex set of interactions required in order to stimulate participation in this way from below, so that collaborations are much more than rubber-stamping exercises.55 A substantive form of democratic engagement experienced through participation in museums becomes instead one in which people might begin to exercise their political agency as citizens, and might include processes of mobilisation and local cultural and social activism. In terms of radically addressing such change in the culture of museums, the Our Museum programme56, (currently funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation), is a large-scale experiment in this regard – a cultural change programme over four years working across nine museums in the UK (among them large national museums) that aims to embed this new focus on participation and reflective practice within and across museums.57 Thus, the Our Museum programme is not ‘just’ about participation and engagement – it aims also to address museum sustainability through significantly raising museum self-awareness about public participation and social responsibility. Such a renewed focus on the politics of the museum, its values and practices, paves the way for a critical pedagogy that, as philosopher John Searle characterizes it in another context, aims 51 | M. A. Hajer, Discourse coalitions and the institutionalisation of practice, p. 45. 52 | L. Tuhiwai Smith, On tricky ground. 53 | G. Chakravorty Spivak, Questions of Multiculturalism, p. 60. 54 | A. Sen, Annual DEMOS Lecture, p. 151. 55 | A. Cornwall & V. S. P. Coelho, Spaces for change? 56 | Our Museum: http://ourmuseum.ning.com/, http://ourmuseum.org.uk, (accessed 1st July 2015). 57 | B. Lynch, Our Museum. A Five Year Perspective. The four Our Museum evaluation criteria (derived from the Whose Cake is it Anyway? Report by the author, noted earlier) are outlined in detail and are available to download as a pdf from the Our Museum website here: http://ourmuseum.ning.com/page/evaluation-1 (accessed 1st July 2015).

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“to create political radicals”, thus highlighting what we can begin to understand as the contestable and antagonistic, moral and political grounds of museum education as a social force.58 Such a process requires working collaboratively to examine, as Our Museum is now doing, what critical pedagogue Ira Shor defines as habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse. 59

Such a process of organisational self-examination and change, may actually enable museum education and curatorship to work together with their community partners in developing exhibitions and education programmes that draw attention to and overtly question who has control over the production of knowledge, values, and skills.60 This collaborative critical analysis may then begin to illuminate how knowledge, identities, and authority are constructed within particular sets of social relations, including those of the museum itself. It means that it is our responsibility to consciously work together, museum curators and education staff alike, dissolving those artificial professional boundaries to create a space in which dominant social relations, ideologies, and practices that make us immune to the sometimes resistant voice of the other might finally be effectively challenged and overcome. It means revisiting what such empowerment might look like for all of us, museum staff and their collaborators, in collectively addressing the future. It is urgent that we develop such an honest, reflective, collaborative practice, in order that we can more effectively deliver on our social responsibilities, making use of our global, public institutions – and to accomplish this as colleagues, working together.

58 | J. Searle, The Storm Over the University. 59 | I. Shor, Empowering Education, 129. 60 | H. Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy.

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Figure 1: Project Our Museum: Communities and Museums as active partners: Reflecting with stakeholders.

Figure 2: From the report Our Museum. A five-year perspective form a critical friend.

Visitors or Community? Collaborative Museology and the Role of Education and Outreach in Ethnographic Museums Nora Landkammer

At a 2015 conference about the future prospects of ethnographic curation, I asked one of the presenters who had spoken extensively about the collaborative process of producing an exhibition in an ethnographic museum with local and international communities what effect this collaborative approach had on the education and outreach program for that exhibition. What does this collaborative approach mean for education? Her answer was that they had conducted different programs for each target group. There didn’t seem to be any obvious connection drawn between the demand for horizontal collaboration in the production of the exhibition and the educational work. In the English speaking context, through the critical engagement with the consequences of the British Empire, as Robin Boast describes it, “[t]here are few museums with anthropological, or even archaeological, collections that would consider an exhibition that did not include some form of consultation”1. Though it can hardly be said that in Germany, Switzerland and Austria there is a comparable degree of postcolonial reflexivity, and many exhibitions continue to represent non-European ‘cultures’ without seeming to acknowledge any issue, the paradigm of collaborative museology in ethnographic museums has gained a great deal of traction in the German speaking context. But consultation and collaboration are also relevant outside the field of museum ethnology. The critique of the homogeneous voice of the institution has also been articulated by advocates of critical museum education. The field of learning and outreach work is also experiencing a shift towards horizontal collaborations and cooperative knowledge production with different audiences

1 | R. Boast, Neocolonial Collaboration, p. 56.

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which are relevant to the museum.2 Education and outreach programs which establish long-term networks and replace a one-sided transfer of knowledge with cooperation  – as shown in the essays in this volume  – challenge the borders between what is inside and outside the museum, as well as between the traditional activities and responsibilities of curation and education. Still, the practice and debate around collaborative learning and outreach projects have as yet rarely affected ethnographic museums. Conversely, in Germany, Austria and Switzerland there are hardly any contributions regarding education in the discussion around the possibilities of transformation and/or decolonisation of ethnographic museums,3 while at the same time education and teaching that critiques colonialism is happening outside of the museums.4 In this context it seems worthwhile to provide a more precise account of the intersections between education and collaborative museology. For this purpose, I will refer to key texts on the collaborative paradigm in ethnographic museums, which was initially developed through the debates around indigenous rights and demands in North America, Australia and New Zealand, and which has also provided the reference point for the discourse around ethno-museology in the German-speaking world.5 I would like to interrogate these texts, as well as a number of contributions on the topic from the UK, as to the role 2 | Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Kunstvereine (ADKV), Collaboration; Schnittpunkt et al.: educational turn; N. Landkammer, Vermittlung als kollaborative Wissensproduktion; M. Guarino-Huet, O. Desvoignes & microsillons, Autonomy within the Institution. 3 | A current exception to this is shown in S. Endter & C. Rothmund, Irgendwas zu Afrika: Herausforderungen der Vermittlung am Weltkulturen Museum, compiled by the education and outreach team of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt. 4 | Examples include the Weiße Flecken der Erinnerung project, from the Eidelstedt district school and cultural agents for creative schools in Hamburg (see http://www. afrika-hamburg.de/eidelstedt.html, accessed 19.08.2015), projects from Berlin Postkolonial, such as Freedom Roads (see http://www.freedom-roads.de/frrd/willkom. htm, accessed 19.08.2015) or Far, far away? Kolonialrassismus im Unterricht/ Globales Geschichtslernen vor Ort, Berlin Postkolonial/Institut für diskriminierungsfreie Bildung/Entwicklungspolitisches Informationszentrum EPIZ Berlin (see http:// www.berlinpostkolonial.de/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1, accessed 19.08.2015), the theater project Vergessene Biografien, by Judith Raner (see www.vergessene-biografien.de, accessed 19.08.2015) or Kolonialismus: Macht: Gegenwart, Bildungsstätte Anne Frank, Frankfurt (see http://www.bs-anne-frank.de/ workshops/kolonialismus-macht-gegenwart/, accessed 19.08.2015). 5 | R. B. Phillips, Community Collaboration in Exhibitions; L. Chandler, Journey without maps; I. Karp, C. Mullen Kraemer & S. D. Lavine, Museums and communities; L. Kelly & P. Gordon, Developing a Community of Practice; L. Peers & A. Brown, Introduction; J. Clifford, Routes.

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‘education’ plays in collaborative museology. Through this cross-reading and a survey of contemporary critiques and debates,6 I would like to argue that it is necessary to reflect upon and to jointly critique the various traditions of collaborative projects if collaborative museology is not only to increase the legitimacy of the museums, but is also to lead to a decolonisation 7 and democratisation, as well as more justice regarding the different groups with claims to the museum spaces and the collections.8 So how is the role of education and learning portrayed in the literature about collaborative projects?

E ducation and outre ach for groups whose material culture is collected in the museum An initial meaning of ‘education’ as a part of collaborative practice is of making the collections accessible for the communities with which the museum is collaborating over the long term. In the context of ‘source community collaboration’, Peers and Brown speak of educational materials and activities as one of the possible results of the collaboration: Educational materials designed by community members which utilise museum and archival resources, for instance, have become a means through which people can learn about the diversity of materials available to them and about how the histories related to these resources are relevant today. 9

6 | This text builds upon the work of Bernadette Lynch in (Generally Dissatisfied; Whose Cake is it Anyway?; and with Alberti, Legacies of Prejudice). She also formulates some of the central theses in the article included in this volume (p. 255 ff.). 7 | Decolonisation as a term has been developed since the anticolonial liberation movements and still incites controversy, for instance, between approaches influenced by postcolonial theory and decolonialism. They share a demand for decolonisation, which unlike other emancipatory theories, is based on the notion that the present political, economic and epistemological situation in the global south and north is strongly shaped by colonialism, and that action to counter this colonial continuity is demanded. 8 | Claiming a stake in the museum can take various forms, including claiming ownership of objects in the collection, expertise on the exhibition themes, the status as a tax-payer who co-finances a public institution, the right to self-representation, the right not to be exposed to racist or exoticising displays, or the right to education. 9 | L. Peers & A. Brown, Introduction, p. 6. Another interesting work in this field is the collaboration of education departments with indigenous museums for the elaboration of programs. (J. R. Baird, Landed Wisdoms).

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C oll abor ation as education Ruth Phillips, former director of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (MOA), which is a pioneer of collaborative museology, describes the transformation in ethnographic museums, among other characteristics, as a shift from product to process orientation: the focus is no longer exclusively on the exhibition, but rather, the production of the exhibition is expanded into a project (including a wide range of activities) that allows for research, education and innovation.10 Phillips emphasises the pedagogical aspect of collaborative work: she describes it as a double-sided learning process as it is defined by the theory of critical pedagogy, as a “bilateral version of the radical pedagogy advocated by Paulo Freire”11. Successful collaborative processes provide both the institution and the collaborators with new insights and understanding. Phillips’ perspective is thus advocating for an approach in which the curatorial work of collaborating with communities from which the objects originate is simultaneously education work guided by the model of critical pedagogy.12 However, in this model, which has been so influential in the development of collaborative museology, the educators working at the museum are not presented as stakeholders, as is the case with many texts that address the processes of ‘community consultation’ or on-going collaborative work in ethnographic museums. In the introduction to their much-cited Museums and Source Communities, Peers and Brown also emphasise how collaboration is a process of “learning and unlearning”13. Yet the museum’s education staff only appear in the text as one more category of museum staff who will also come into contact with collaborative projects, alongside employees such as the salesperson in the museum shop. Here one could perhaps speak of a ‘present absence’ of the educational component: on the one hand, the museum is depicted as inherently ‘educational’ and learning is emphasised; on the other hand, education as a function and education staff as a specific stakeholder group are absent in the text.

10 | R. B. Phillips, Community Collaboration in Exhibitions, p. 160 f. 11 | ibid., p. 162. 12 | See Kelly & P. Gordon, Developing a Community of Practice, p. 153; on the museum as ‘educational’ institution, see K. Message, Multiplying Sites of Sovereignty through Community and Constituent Services at the National Museum of the American Indian?; R. Mason, Culture Theory and Museum Studies. 13 | L. Peers & A.Brown, Introduction, p. 8.

Visitors or Community?

The ‘ gener al public ’ and education Education takes on another meaning in relation to a general public: in several texts that address a new conception of the ethnographic museum, ‘education’ seems to be understood as instructive teaching, and is taken to mean the imparting of information and values. Robert Sullivan, who is in charge of public programs at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution, which also contains an anthropology department, defines museums as “moral educators”,14 which have the responsibility  – as traditionally sexist and racist institutions themselves, as Sullivan makes clear – to transform the knowledge, beliefs and feelings of their visitors.15 Amy Lonetree clearly formulates this educational mission in her discussion of community-produced exhibitions at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D. C. The critique is directed at the legibility of the exhibition in terms of it having an educational function for the nation: Abstraction isn’t a correct choice for a museum hoping to educate a nation with a willed ignorance of its treatment of Indigenous peoples and the policies and practices that led to genocide in the Americas.16

This concept reinstates for the museum precisely that authority of knowledge that has been put into question by the new museology: but this time of marginalised, unspoken knowledge. Tony Bennett has formulated a fundamental critique of the museum’s educational mission, which re-emerges here. He presents this function as part of the museum’s tradition of being an instrument of civilisation: “[Are] museums not still concerned to beam their improving messages of cultural tolerance and diversity into civil society as far as they can reach?”17 The museum as ‘contact zone’ is, in his view, a continuation of its governmental function, but this time for the sake of what he calls an ideology of multiculturalism. Notwithstanding the obvious difference between a hegemonic educational project and the idea of teaching counter-narratives, the point is that there is a dichotomy between the learning processes envisaged with communities, and the education of a seemingly homogeneous public. Schultz argues that the debate in museology is limited to the relations between the museum and the collaborators, and therefore pays too little attention to the participation of the public: 14 | R. Sullivan, Evaluating the Ethics and Consciences of Museums, p. 257. 15 | ibid. 16 | A. Lonetree, Missed Opportunities, p. 640 f. 17 | T. Bennett, Culture, p. 213.

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Nora Landkammer Importantly, in pledging themselves to collaboration museums indicate their on-going commitment to it as a form of social activism, reflecting their belief that its relevance extends beyond those immediately participating in the process. Such a belief, however, implies the need for the visiting public to be a part of the process, a group that is frequently overlooked in discussions of collaboration.18

This unnuanced perspective of the ‘public’, which Schultz also critiques, is most prominent in the contributions from USA/Canada/Australia that work with a clear concept of ‘source communities,’ which in the most radical cases has resulted in an actual shift in the balance of power. The concept of ‘source communities’ can be broadly criticised in that it suggests an instrumental relationship between museums and groups. The community is therefore portrayed as the ‘source’ of the collections. However the double negotiation of mutual learning in collaborative projects on the one hand, and instructive education for the public on the other, becomes particularly problematic when the collaborative approach is applied to the former imperial centres and European migration societies. Collaborative museology is understood in the ‘centres’ both as the cooperation with stakeholders in the countries from which the collections originated, as well as the cooperation with the diaspora in Europe. According to Wayne Modest and Helen Mears, the concept of the source community is linked with a sense of identity fixated on origins, and runs the risk of reinforcing the historical classification of people that is contained in the collections. For Modest and Mears, the model of the ‘source’ replicates simplistic approaches based on what are seen as fixed cultural markers for historically unchanging, visibly ‘different’ homogeneous groups; the kinds of groups curators can find historically ‘described’ by groups of material culture and their documentation in museum collections.19

Therefore, the source community concept does not take into account a contemporary understanding of identity (as composite and influenced by multiple forms of belonging) nor can it describe the diversity of claims people can have in a migra18 | L. Schultz, Collaborative Museology and the Visitor, p. 2. With respect to the emergence of an educational dimension in texts on museology, a series of essays that address the reception of collaborative exhibitions and visitor reactions is of particular interest. See C. Krmpotich & D. Anderson, Collaborative Exhibitions and Visitor Reactions; L. Schultz, Collaborative Museology and the Visitor; K. Message, Multiplying sites of sovereignty through Community and Constituent Services at the National Museum of the American Indian? 19 | W. Modest & H. Mears, Museums, African Collections and Social Justice, p. 300.

Visitors or Community?

tion society to having a say in an anthropology museum: is the legitimacy of the interests and right to participation only defined by the ‘origin’ of the collection? I would like to shift my focus now to the debate in England, in order to further unpack the question of the collaboration with different communities20 and to illustrate some other relationships between education and collaborative museology in projects implemented by education and outreach departments.

C oll abor ative educational projects Viv Golding has theorised such an approach to learning in ethnographic museums, based on her practice at the Horniman Museum in London. The collaboration with the Caribbean Women Writers Alliance (CWWA) at the Horniman Museum in the 1990s offers an early example.21 Under the title re-writing the museum and working with both young and established writers, the workshops conducted in this project focused not only the collection’s objects, but also on the institution and on the museum’s existing displays and the racism and exoticism to be observed in them. Thus the group critically engaged in writing with a panel that still showed the ‘races of man’. Golding describes education as work on the ‘museum frontiers’ that makes a re-writing possible: “the museum frontier marks a boundary that is also a space of transformation”.22 Golding speaks of the ‘frontier’ and not of the ‘contact zone’, since for her, the term emphasises the necessity of actively working towards a transformation. Speaking in terms of a frontier makes it clear that there are risks, dangers and fear involved. She therefore re-emphasises the aspects of Pratt’s ‘contact zone’ that are so often omitted in the museum debate.23 Long-term collaboration, according to Golding, leads to many different results, be it school projects (working on poetic texts with students, involving the writers as educators), a publication (Anim-Addo 2004), or the establishment of an annual event commemorating Emancipation Day at the Horniman (in remembrance of the anniversary of the British Slavery Abolition Act). In her description of the project, Golding does build a bridge to the collaborative paradigm in museology, as formulated by Phillips from the work done in Canada, though she also strongly refers to literature from the fields of pedagogy and education. She takes different paths than the ones prescribed by the 20 | ibid.; W. Modest, Co-Curating with Teenagers at the Horniman Museum. 21 | The Caribbean Women Writers Association is an international organisation. For the project at the Horniman Museum, the participants were made up primarily of teachers and lecturers in England who are members of the CWWA. 22 | V. Golding, Learning at the museum frontiers, p. 49. 23 | R. Boast, Neocolonial Collaboration.

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concept of source communities: this collaboration engages an organisation of writers, both because of their work, and because of their positioning as Black women and their political project.24 The project emerges from the tradition of museums seeking to address groups whose voices are excluded from the museum’s dominant narrative. The educational and community work advanced in particular by the New Labour government in the UK has contributed to the broader establishment of education and outreach work not only in exhibitions, but also in long-standing cooperation and community involvement projects in museums, as well as an intensive discourse around its theorisation and critical development.25 Modest describes this development in England: At first, many of these initiatives were delivered by peripheral elements [sic] of the museum: by the education and then freshly-formed outreach teams, but increasingly they have moved closer to the core of museum business and used collections in achieving those outcomes. 26

In a text about his role as curator at the Horniman Museum, Anthony Shelton refers to the permeability between the areas of activity: the effects of contingency of these processes, he writes, “today are as likely to be mediated by a museum or exhibitions manager, or an educationalist, as a curator”.27

C oll abor ative projects be t ween e xhibitions and educational work  – a ple a for joint refle xivit y In collaborative practice, particularly in Great Britain, two different concepts and practices coincide. Firstly, the idea of building collaborations with the erstwhile ‘objects of research’, which emerged from indigenous demands as well 24 | On the capitalisation of the term ‘Black’ here: “Black (as placed in opposition to the construction of whiteness) does not refer here to biological indicators, but rather to the self-conception of a group of people who, as a response to the denigration of their African heritage within racist power structures which constructs the dichotomy of ‘white’ and ‘black’, derive their consciousness from precisely this context, reinterpreting blackness as positive, and reflecting this through the capitalisation of the word. (Autor_innenkollektiv rassismuskritischer Leitfaden 2015, p. 5). 25 | R. Sandell & E. Nightingale, Museums, equality and social justice; B. Lynch, Whose Cake is it Anyway?; A. Dewdney, D. Dibosa & V. Walsh, Post Critical Museology; E. Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Vulture. 26 | W. Modest & H. Mears, Museums, African Collections and Social Justice, p. 296. 27 | A. Shelton, Curating African Worlds, p. 5.

Visitors or Community?

as the internal critique of curatorial work and is informed by the concept of ‘source communities’; and secondly, the demand for participation and collaboration of groups regarded as excluded by the cultural sector, with the aim of advancing the democratic utilisation of cultural institutions, which is key to the work of learning and community engagement departments. It is important to separate the two discourses, because their respective contexts determine how the collaborators are addressed and invited, and which roles they are assigned in the projects. Although Shelton had already pointed out the permeability of the different roles in this community work 15 years ago, the debate today still reproduces these two discourses and the gaps between them. Wayne Modest writes about the requirement as curator to collaborate with young people, and poses a rhetorical question in his text about one of the most discussed recent collaborative projects at ethnographic museums (The Stories of the World initiative run during the London Olympics): I was especially interested in what yield could be gained by working with a group of people based around age categories as opposed to a source. Were they also a source or even a community?28

This question implies a discourse of collaborative projects, shaped by the connection to people over the history of the collections, which differs from the educational discourse on the involvement of audience groups. In a reflection on the same major project (also discussed by Bernadette Lynch29 in this publication), Morse, Macpherson and Robinson problematise, conversely, that the project layout of Stories of the World remained within a logic of youth participation, not taking sufficiently into account the political questions of ‘source community collaboration’. This led to tensions in producing an exhibition from a collaboration between the museum’s education and outreach team, youth co-curators and people with a historical connection to the origin of the objects: The main tension in the rhetoric here is around the language of youth empowerment and creativity and the use of world cultures collections, without a direct acknowledgement of the politics of working with originating communities, or reference to museum practice in this area. 30

I assume that the confluence of both collaborative approaches – the restructuring of the relationship with source communities from the curatorial discourse, and 28 | W. Modest, Co-Curating with Teenagers at the Horniman Museum, p. 100. 29 | See p. 255 ff. 30 | N. Morse, M. Macpherson & S. Robinson, Developing dialogue in co-produced exhibitions, p. 95.

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the collaboration with diverse audiences from the educational discourse  – is productive if they mutually interrogate one another, for both traditions involve complex problems. The focus on the collections and on the right to co-determine the institutions that characterises collaborative museology can contribute to a questioning of the often paternalistic understanding of participation in education. The tradition of “social inclusion” and “participation” are the legacy against which collaborative education must still fight to this day. In Stories of the World, Modest describes the educators’ concern that the young participants might become frustrated when confronted with tasks that are too challenging.31 He criticises the assumptions about the interests and behaviour of young people that is so widespread in museums. The danger of paternalism, when the educators think they know in advance how and why the participants should be empowered, is one of the biggest tensions inherent in collaborations which come out of the outreach tradition of including groups in the museum. For the discourse of collaborative education, it is necessary to replace the notion of ‘inviting groups to participate’ with a conception of collaborators as experts in a knowledge not present in the museum, and with a notion of the right to co-determination, as proposed in collaborative museology. Another problematic issue in collaborative education projects is their traditional positioning at the margins of the institution. Golding writes about the aforementioned collaboration with the CWWA: “[the] CWWA collaboration occurs at the margins of the main museum discourse, which left the centre of the museum unchanged”32 . The project participants’ ‘rewriting’ of the museum left intact the exhibitions’ central power of definition, the museum’s self-determination and its structures. Even when efforts exist to engage with the different audiences “from the margins to the core”,33 as Richard Sandell demands, the educational tradition of ‘community engagement’ continues to operate with a structure of centre and periphery, in which the museum integrates the communities into its projects as an ‘outside element’. As Lynch points out, within the centre/periphery structure, the museum remains in its position of power, whereas the different communities are forced into the role of “beneficiaries” who receive individual “pieces of the cake” through different projects, instead of posing the question: “whose cake is it anyway?”34 Decolonisation should concentrate on organisational development and on understanding community engagement as an all-encompassing practice for institutions.35 Thinking 31 | W. Modest, Co-Curating with Teenagers at the Horniman Museum, p. 106. 32 | V. Golding, Learning at the museum frontiers, p. 60. 33 | R. Sandell & E. Nightingale, Museums, equality and social justice. 34 | B. Lynch, Whose Cake is it Anyway?, p. 16 f. 35 | ibid., p. 22 f.

Visitors or Community?

the participatory aims coming from education together with a collaborative practice that directly affects the collections and the power to define them, and which implies a long-term transformation of the responsibilities for objects (as sometimes occurs in indigenous appropriations of museums), can be generally helpful for the development of ‘community engagement’. Conversely, the attention paid to the process at the expense of the product, and the expertise in ascertaining interests in group settings in education can interrogate the focus on objects that often characterises curatorial collaborative projects. The risk of the museums’ interests regarding the collection objects prevailing over the (diverse, not solely object-focused) interests of the communities, is inherent to the concept of the ‘source community’: the concept of a source is not only related to an understanding of identity which is fixated on origins, as explained above, but rather its definition also ensues from the objects in the collection. This suggests that collaboration is fundamental for the museum’s need to deal with the collection and tends to make the collaborators into ‘informants’ from whom information is obtained in a setting which retains a colonial character. Thus, Fouseki quotes one of the participants of the consultation process: “People at the museum just had a fascination about all the objects they got, ‘oh look at this object’, you know, and not thinking so much about the people who were talking in the museum.”36 The joint scrutiny of both collaborative traditions is necessary  – and this is my main point – in order to reflect upon the concept of community. Neither an exclusive understanding of the communities as stakeholder groups with regard to the collection objects (as in the concept of the source community) nor addressing groups from the point of view of actual or imagined exclusion from cultural institutions (which shapes many educational projects) suit the complexity of the rights, potential interests, expertise and demands for having a say in transforming the ethnographic museum, particularly in migration societies. If the transformation of the museum is not intended to be pure “transformism”,37 in that the collaborative projects provide the harmonising evidence of participation, and instead ethnographic museums wish to become spaces of critical research, exhibitions and learning, the museum must enter into the complexity of possible communities – in relation to racism, interests, geography, occupational and social positions. It must engage the many, some36 | K. Fouseki, Community voices, curatorial choices, p. 186 f. The example refers to community consultation in the context of the exhibitions in London in 2007 in commemoration of the Prohibition of Slave Trade of 1807. It does not address projects in ethnological museums, but since it focuses on critically confronting the colonial past and on cooperating with the African and Caribbean diaspora organisations in England, it can be used to illustrate the issue at hand. 37 | N. Sternfeld, Erinnerung als Entledigung.

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times overlapping and conflicting, self-defined communities in processes of learning and unlearning, both in collaborative projects and in the daily work of the educators with school classes and other groups of visitors. The Spanish educator and theorist Javier Rodrigo Montero has described this kind of work: “The museum would not be a centralising focal point of culture, not even a catalyst, but rather one more mediator within a network of diverse, different and even antagonising social agents.”38 Then it will perhaps be possible to transform the museum into a political space and into a post-museum, as envisioned by Eilean Hooper Greenhill, “where diverse groups and subgroups, cultures and subcultures may push against and permeate the allegedly unproblematic and homogeneous borders of hegemonial cultural practices”39.

38 | J. R. Montero, Experiencias de mediación crítica y trabajo en red en museos, p. 78. 39 | E. Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the interpretation of visual culture, p. 140.

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Bonita Bennett, director of District Six Museum, Cape Town, South Africa. Was appointed as director of the District Six Museum in 2008 having been its Collections and Research manager since 2005. Her professional training is as an educator with a background as an anti-apartheid activist. A BA degree at the University of Cape Town (1982) was followed by a Higher Diploma in Education (1984). A M.Phil in applied sociolinguistics (2005), focused on narratives of trauma of people who had been forcibly removed from various areas in the Western Cape. Alejandro N. Cevallos, co-ordinator of Research and Community Outreach at Foundation Museum of the City of Quito, Ecuador. Studied art at the Universidad Central del Ecuador and visual anthropology at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales. He taught art at secondary school, was a member of the art and research collective El Bloque (2007–2010), and a researcher at the Instituto de la Ciudad (2011). Before starting his current position, he created the department for Mediación Comunitaria at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Quito. He is part of the research network Another Roapmap School and works with the platform Gescultura-Chawpi. Barbara Coutinho, founding director and programmer of MUDE – Museu do Design e da Moda, Colecção Francisco Capelo, Lisbon, Portugal (since 2006)/ Guest Assistant Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, where she teaches architecture theory and history. Master degree in Contemporary Art History and Post-graduate degree in Art History Education. Currently, conducting her PhD on the Exhibition Space in the 21st Century Museums. Her work is divided between research, teaching, curatorship and writing. Between 1998 and 2006, was head of the Educational Department at the Exhibition Centre of Centro Cultural de Belem.

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Valeria R. Galarza, staff member Education, Mediación Comunitaria, Foundation Museum of the City of Quito, Ecuador. Studied education and sociology and is currently pursuing a post-graduate degree in pedagogics. She currently applies her first-hand experiences from working with children and young adults in schools at the education department of the Foundation Museum of the City of Quito. She is most interested in the advanced training of mediators; intercultural, bi-lingual education; and education policy. Jan Gerchow, director of the Historical Museum Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Studied history, German philology, and philosophy before completing his PhD in medieval history (Universität Freiburg i. Br.). He was a research assistant at the history department of the Universität Freiburg i. Br. and a lecturer at the Max-Planck-Institut for history in Göttingen. He served as a curator of the Ruhrlandmuseum Essen (1993–2004) before taking up his current post. Since 2006 he has been in charge of the conceptual planning of the museum’s re-build. Since 2014 he has been a member of the jury for the European Museum of the Year Award (EMYA). Janna Graham, head of Public Programmes and Research, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, United Kingdom. Originally trained as a geographer, Janna Graham has initiated and collaborated on a number of pedagogical, artistic and research projects in and outside of the arts. She was projects curator at the Serpentine Gallery, where she worked with others to create The Centre for Possible Studies, an artistic residency, research space and popular education programme in the Edgware Road neighbourhood of London. Graham is also member of the 12 person international sound and political collective Ultra-red. Susan Kamel, Professor in the department of Design und Culture for collecting and exhibiting in theory and practice at the HTW Berlin, Germany/project manager, Goethe Institute Gulf Region, Abu Dhabi, United Arabic Emirates. Works on the interface between research and practice, and between curating and museum education. She is currently working on a collaborative project between the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and Sharjah Museums Department for the Goethe Institute in Abu Dhabi. She has been responsible for two successive research projects dealing with learning on Islamic arts and culture in German museums and those in the Arab world.

Authors and Editors

Nora Landkammer, gallery educator and deputy head at the Institute for Art Education at Zurich University of the Arts, Zurich, Switzerland. Currently participates in the project ‘TRACES – Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritage with the Arts’ and is active in the international research network ‘Another Roadmap for Arts Education’. After studying to become a teacher in Vienna, she worked as an agent for contemporary art exhibitions. She is a lecturer for Curatorial Studies as part of the Master of Arts in Art Education at the Zurich University of the Arts and is working on her PhD thesis about decolonising perspectives in education in ethnographic museums. Andres Lepik, Professor for the History of Architecture and Curatorial Practice/director of the Museum of Architecture, Technical University of Munich, Germany. Studied art history and German at the Universities of Augsburg and Munich. He became curator at the Staatliche Museen in Berlin in 1994, and at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2007. He was the 2011 Loeb Fellow at the GSD, Harvard University, and has been Professor of the History of Architecture and Curatorial Practice at TU München and director of the Museum of Architecture since 2012. Hanno Loewy, director, Jewish Museum of Hohenems, Austria. Literature and film scientist, curator and publicist. From 1990 to 2000 he worked as founding director on the development of the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt am Main. PhD thesis on medium and initiation, film theory and tales in the work of Béla Balázs. Lecturer at the University of Constance. Director of the Jewish Museum in Hohenems since 2004, and President of the Association of European Jewish Museums since 2012. He has published widely on media history as well as Jewish history and contemporary life. Bernadette Lynch, museum writer, researcher and consultant, London/Manchester, United Kingdom. Is an internationally known academic and museum professional with twenty-five years’ experience in senior management in UK and Canadian museums. Formerly deputy director at the Manchester Museum, University of Manchester, UK, she researches, advises and publishes widely on all aspects of participatory democracy in museums and the decolonisation of museum practice. She is honorary research associate at University College London (UCL). Adriana Muñoz, curator, National Museums of World Culture, Gothenburg, Sweden. PhD in archaeology at the University of Gothenburg. She has been working for ICOM with problems around the illegal import/export of archaeological

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plundered objects from Latin America. Her PhD examined the relationship between political paradigms and how collections have been interpreted. She has participated in research projects since 1998, the last years in projects around decolonizing practices. Franziska Mühlbacher, curator education, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland. Studied art education at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and has a certificate in art and art mediation from the Institut für Kulturkonzepte in Vienna. She is curator of education at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich, and teaches in the Curatorial Studies Specialization of the Master of Arts in Art Education at Zurich University of the Arts. She has been an independent mediator of culture and the arts at, amongst others, MAK Vienna and the Austrian National Library, and has worked on numerous educational projects in the arts, art history, visual design, architecture and contemporary art. Carmen Mörsch, Professor and head of the Institute for Art Education (IAE) at Zurich University of the Arts, Zurich, Switzerland. Is trained as an artist, cultural theorist, and art educator. Since 1994 she has worked in learning in museums and galleries and in arts education. From 2004 to 2008 she was Junior Professor of Material Culture and its Didactics at the University of Oldenburg. Since April 2008 she has been head of the Institute for Art Education (IAE) at Zurich University of the Arts. Her research interests are in the history and present of art education as a practice of critique of hegemony. Juana C. Paillalef, director, Museo Mapuche de Cañete Ruka kimvn taiñ volil Juan Cayupi, Huechicura, Cañete, Chile. I’m a Mapuche woman, mother and grandmother, from the Maquehue territory (Araucanía region in the south of Chile). I studied at the Universidad de la Frontera in Temuco and received a scholarship at the Universidad de San Simón in Cochabamba-Bolivia, where I completed the MA in Bilingual Intercultural Education. As director of the Museo Mapuche de Cañete, I have been able to contribute to a reinterpretation of the history of the territory with the modernization and decolonization of the MMC. Angeli Sachs, Professor, head of Master of Arts in Art Education and of specialization in Curatorial Studies at Zurich University of the Arts/curator at Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland. Studied art history, German and sociology at the Universities of Augsburg and Frankfurt am Main. She has been head of exhibitions at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zurich, editor-in-chief of Architecture and Design at Prestel

Authors and Editors

Verlag Munich, assistant at the History and Theory of Architecture Institute at ETH Zurich, researcher at the Museum of German Architecture in Frankfurt am Main, and press officer for the Frankfurter Kunstverein. She has also worked on numerous exhibitions and publications on twentieth century and contemporary architecture, design, art, and culture. Julia Schäfer, curator, Gallery of Contemporary Art, Leipzig, Germany. Has been curator and educator at the Leipzig Gallery of Contemporary Art since 2003, between 2001 and 2003 she was a volunteer at GfZK. She was an assistant at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, in 2000, and from 1999 to 2001 worked freelance at the Wolfsburg Art Museum. She studied art, art education and German. The focus of her work is on gallery education as curatorial practice. She lectures at the Burg Giebichenstein, Halle/Saale, at the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and the Federal Academy of Cultural Education, Wolfenbüttel. Thomas Sieber, Professor at the Zurich University of the Arts, Zurich, Switzerland. Studied history and German in Hamburg and Basel, and then obtained the Higher Teaching Diploma in these fields. He teaches with a focus on the history and theory of museum, exhibition and education at Master of Arts in Art Education, Specialization Curatorial Studies and Bachelor of Arts in Art Education. Since 2005 he works at the Zurich University of the Arts, where he has held a variety of leading positions. Previously he worked as a curator at the National Museum in Zurich, as head of Postgraduate Studies and Development at the HGK Basel, and head of the Education Department at the Historical Museum in Basel. Paul Spies, director of the foundation Stadtmuseum Berlin und chief-curator of the country of Berlin at Humboldt-Forum, Berlin, Germany. Graduated in art history and archeology at the University of Amsterdam. In 1987 he founded D’arts, a consultancy bureau, that produced museum concepts, exhibitions, publications, marketing campaigns etc. In 2009 he was appointed director of the Amsterdam Museum and Museum Willet-Holthuysen. He has lead the renovation of the presentations and organisation of these museums. Nora Sternfeld, Professor and head of Curating and Mediating Art, Aalto University Helsinki, Finland/Co-head of ecm  – educating, curating, managing  – Master Programme for Exhibition Theory and Practice, University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria. Is a founder and board member of the Viennese office trafo. K, which works at the intersection of education, the arts and critical knowledge production in

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research and education projects, and is a team member in the Viennese network schnittpunkt. ausstellungstheorie & praxis. Sonja Thiel, scientific co-ordinator at museOn | advanced learning & network, Universität Freiburg/curator and project leader ‘Freiburg sammelt’, City Museums of Freiburg, Germany. Studied history and philosophy in Leipzig and Berlin and is currently completing her PhD project on participative collecting. Before starting her PhD, she worked at the Historic Museum Frankfurt (2011–2014) as a curator for the touring exhibit ‘Stadtlabor unterwegs’. Linda Vlassenrood, program director China and India, International New Town Institute, Almere/program manager Eindhoven, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Is an architecture historian and worked as curator at the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) from 2000, serving as chief curator from 2008 to 2011. As chief curator, she gave shape to a more public-oriented and socially engaged program. Her department worked successfully on a rich program of exhibitions, lectures, events and educational programs for professionals as well as broader audiences. She is currently an independent curator writer and consultant on architecture, urban planning and design. Syrus Marcus Ware, program coordinator of the AGO Youth Program, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada. Is a visual artist, activist and educator who has been the program coordinator of the Art Gallery of Ontario Youth Program for the past 10 years. In this role he has led several award-winning projects and collaborations, including The Living Room Project and The Youth Solidarity Project. He is pursuing his PhD at York University.

Illustration credits Reaching Out  | 19 Fig. 1: © Katrien Franken. Fig. 2–4: © Mike Bink.

Curation & Education as an Integrated Concept  | 31 Fig. 1–4: © Museum für Gestaltung Zürich/ZHdK.

In Dialogue with the Visitors  | 45 Fig. 1–4: © Ulrike Myrzik.

PUZZLE  | 53 Fig. 1–4: © GfZK, photo: Sebastian Schröder. Fig. 5: GfZK Education team/Christin Müller, September 2010. Fig. 6: GfZK team, Julia Kurz and Christin Müller.

Curatorial Work Towards a New Relationship Between People, Places and Things  | 65 Fig. 1: Photo: Luisa Ferreira. Fig. 2: Photo: Luke Hayes. Fig. 3: Photo: Luisa Ferreira.

Identity and Ambiguity  | 81 Fig. 1–4: © Jüdisches Museum Hohenems, photo: Dietmar Walser.

City History Museums as Generators of Participation  | 91 Fig. 1: © Amsterdam Museum, photo: Monique Vermeulen. Fig. 2: © Amsterdam Museum, photo: Caro Bonink. Fig. 3: © Amsterdam Museum, photo: Monique Vermeulen. Fig. 4: © Amsterdam Museum, photo: Richard Lotte.

Exhibiting Migration  | 101 Fig. 1–2: © Schweizerisches Nationalmuseum, photo: Danilo Rüttimann.

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Fig. 3: © Shedhalle Zürich, photo: Susi Bodmer. Fig. 4: © Shedhalle Zürich, photo: Guido Henseler.

How Access-iting?  | 117 Fig. 1–2, 4–6: © Susan Kamel. Fig. 3: © bpk – Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur and Geschichte

The Participatory City Museum  | 131 Fig. 1: © hmf, photo: Fred Kochmann. Fig. 2: Design: Gardeners. Fig. 3: © hmf, photo: Petra Welzel. Fig. 4: © hmf, photo: Alex Urban. Education at the Centre of the District Six Museum  | 141 Fig. 1 + 3: © District Six Museum. Fig. 2 + 4: © District Six Museum, photo: Paul Grendon.

Inside the Post-Representative Museum  | 175 Fig. 1: Photo: Lisl Ponger. Fig. 2: Courtesy of the artist and ADN Galeria, Barcelona. Photo credit: Jens Ziehe für NBK, Berlin. Photo credit for the video still: mounir fatmi. Fig. 3: Photo: Werner Prokop. Fig. 4: Photo: Nora Sternfeld. The Anatomy of an AND  | 187 Fig. 1–4: © Marcus Kern.

Who’s Gallery?  | 203 Fig. 1–4: © Syrus Marcus Ware. Wiphala  | 219 Fig. 1 + 3: © Världskultmuseet. Fig. 2: © Världskultmuseet, photo: Ferenc Schwetz.

The Decolonisation of the Mapuche Museum in Cañete  | 231 Fig. 1–5: © Museo Ruka Kimvn taiñ Volil-Juan Cayupi Huechicura.

Education in Museums, Community Mediation and the Right to the City in the Historic Centre of Quito  | 243 Fig. 1: Contents: Mediación comunitaria, Fandación Museos de la Ciudad. Design: Cristian Tapia. Fig. 2: Photo: Antonio Collados.

Illustration credits

Fig. 3 + 4: Contents: Mediación comunitaria, Fandación Museos de la Ciudad. Design: Jaime Villaroel.

“Good for You, But I Don’t Care!”  | 255 Fig. 1:  http://ourmuseum.org.uk/reflecting-with-stakeholders-bernadette-lynch/. Fig. 2: http://ourmuseum.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/A-five-year-perspective-fr​ om-a-critical-friend.pdf.

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