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

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

To Weave Or Not To Weave: Vernacular Textiles and Historical Change in Romania

This article discusses the historical and social change associated with textiles in a rural setting in central Romania. Using ethnographic fieldwork with the Horniman Museum’s folk textile collection, it considers the transformation of traditional weaving in the source community. It highlights that the local perceptions of traditional fabrics are embedded in the narratives of practice and personhood. Weavers’ stories provide insights on the craftswomen’s adjustment to major historical transformations and ideas of modernity and femininity. This perspective sheds light on local values beyond fixed folk styles and traditional designs

Chronotopic Materialities

How do objects - their placements, textures, routes and traces - come to encapsulate the bonding of time and space? And, to what ends? What claims do they make and what novel directions do they indicate? What is the breadth of such objects' sensorial potency? Time, even in its most abstract conceptualisations, is a spatialised phenomenon. Its telling requires a bodily turn - a relation - towards another thing/body/… Space is, likewise, temporalised, imbued with cycles, durations and stoppages, coloured by epochs and speed, punctuated by intervals and rhythms. Some such relations congeal into timespaces. 'Time', as Bakhtin has famously told us, 'thickens, takes on flesh' and 'space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history' (1981: 84). For Bakhtin, narratives are constructed within specific settings that intersect with temporalities, rendering certain spaces powerful materialisations of the past. Anthropologists have indicated the affective disclosure of chronotopes, for example through dreaming and historical consciousness in Greece (Stewart 2012) or the affective ruination in post-partition Cyprus (Navaro 2012). Buchczyk (2016) has shown how a Romanian village is situated between contrasting chronotopes of folkloric past and utopian future, whilst HadžiMuhamedović (2018) has described the rift between two dominant timespaces - a schizochronotopia - in the Bosnian Field of Gacko, where the past ('religiously plural and shared') and the present ('nationalist and ethnically cleansed') landscape have rendered each other unbidden. This panel explores the affective resonances, directionalities and political deployments of chronotopes in material contexts and asks: How do objects make bodily impressions in the form of chronotopic claims? Or, what kinds of historicity and transformation in social life can objects signal? How are experiences of time and space mediated through material culture? What chronotopes might be revealed in traces or artefactual collections, archives and museums