Transforming legacies, habits and futures: reshaping the collection at the Museum of European Cultures

This article was supported by the Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.Collection development presents a major challenge for contemporary museums as part of wider efforts to address their changing societal role. This article considers what could be learned from a Berlin-based museum’s attempts to rethink its collection as part of an institutional self-reflection. On its twentieth anniversary, the Museum of European Cultures (MEK) considered the blank spots within the collection. Focusing on how the MEK seeks to reshape the collection through creating a new policy and acquisition practice, the article demonstrates that collection development is enmeshed in complex institutional legacies, habits and future orientations. As numerous museums experience similar challenges regarding collection legacies, this article calls for making future-oriented collection development explicit. First, this includes a reflexive practice of accounting for the implicit futures incorporated within long-standing collection plotlines and institutional habits. Secondly, it necessitates reframing collection development as a bold, prefigurative practice, rather than just a form of corrective, preventative or anticipatory action. By developing prefigurative curatorial practice, museums could advance new approaches instead of being pushed and pulled by the past and the future. Learning to inhabit the future could transform the museums’ social role and their capacity for actively shaping desirable outcomes.Peer Reviewe

The Stuff of Contention and Care:Affective Materiality and Everyday Learning in Bristol, UK

Drawing on fieldwork in Bristol, UK, the article resituates the increasingly popular policy framing of a “learning city” within recent anthropological debates on urban political materiality. Using research findings from fieldwork conducted in sites of informal and non-formal learning on the margins of a UNESCO Learning City, we argue for an ethnography that is attentive to the ways in which learning manifests itself in everyday life. Through three field sites—a community space, a bicycle workshop, and a contested heritage campaign—we demonstrate the significance of material culture, controversy, and care as constitutive of learning processes within urban life. Through these examples, we aim to reframe questions on the complexity of learning at a city scale as part of affect-driven knowledge and the material, embodied transmission of skill and everyday practice. By tracing how learning plays out in everyday life, we can begin to interrogate what happens beyond the neoliberal forms of educational governance, and the extent to which the everyday practices challenge or reinforce top-down formulations as well as potentially transforming forms of knowledge production.Peer Reviewe

Beyond the Horniman Museum : history, heritage and craftsmanship in the collection of Romanian artefacts

This thesis provides an exploration and critique of the Horniman Museum’s Romanian collection of folk art through an investigation of the front stage and back stage of the collection. Firstly, the museum’s holdings are unpacked through archival study of the events that led to their collection, including the cultural exchanges of the 1950s and the myriad institutional and personal encounters that informed their collection and original display. Investigation of the historical context of the objects’ arrival in London reveals the importance of their performance on the Cold War cultural stage, where acts of exhibiting and giving away folk art across the Iron Curtain became a pretext for building diplomatic relations and creating particular representations of the state. A second form of backstage is explored through a series of ethnographic encounters that generate insights into the afterlives of the art forms represented in the Horniman Museum collection by bringing these objects into dialogue with contemporary craft makers in Romania. Whilst in the context of the museum, the folk art collection appears as a homogenous set of traditional things, in the context of contemporary Romania, different art forms have undergone very divergent histories and hold very different social and economic value and significance. Focusing on the contemporary flourishing of pottery-making and neglect of textile production in Romania today sheds light on the various ways idioms of tradition and modernity, work and heritage are understood in the local context as well as lending insights into transformations in material environments, techniques of making, life histories, and the spaces in which crafts are situated. An exploration of the past lives and afterlives of craft objects held in the Horniman museum offers a window onto the diversity of modes of production and meaning-making that co-exist in Romania and the embedded historical relations and specific social, economic and political milieus in which different art forms have developed and become valorised. This combination of archival and ethnographic research provides a means of locating the Horniman collection in time and space whilst at the same time recognising the dynamic and ever-changing nature of craft production in Romania. The thesis highlights both the limitations of folk art and heritage discourses within the museum and their contemporary relevance and reinvention beyond the museum