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

Abstract

ABSTRACT 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.