Queering the museum? – An anthropological toolkit for intersectional relation-building in the arts
Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
Final Report Abstract
The project started out with two main research questions: 1) what can queer methods be, in relation to ethnological museums and collections; and 2) how can non-normative relations around these collections be researched and fostered? The aim was to provide researchers and museum practitioners with new tools for thinking about ethnological collections. Working to expand relations around the collections beyond the clear-cut categorizing logic of museums as institutions with a colonial past, the project aimed to give hands-on examples that show how this logic can be identified (as has already happened in a lot of critical museum work of the past decade) and subverted. Queer was understood in an intersectional sense, bringing in positions outside the center and thinking beyond given institutional logics. Such subversions, which the project took to be research and practice based, point towards relations in the museum context that are not sufficiently recognized or made use of. They may reveal subaltern narratives around parts of the collection and re-connect them with different actors, while also working for a more accessible and solidary future in which museum collections are steppingstones for connecting people outside the center of power. The project should be understood as an addition to restitution work and research, supporting the aim to restitute any cultural belongings that are of interest for communities while showing how the logic of working only with states and certain institutions is not a justified way to think about the potentials of these collections. Results of the project consist of a one-year research-led seminar with two cohorts of interdisciplinary and international students, funded by the Berlin University Alliance. As research collectives, the PI and the participants investigated queer methods and queer temporality. The courses combined field research in museum spaces, input from guest speakers and close reading of literature with group work on projects. Tangible outcomes of the seminars were the pop-up exhibition 'Non-normative relations wanted' (18th-19th November, 2023) in the rooms of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin and the article ‘The Sinking: Speculative Futures Collective’ in the peer-reviewed anthropology journal Etnofoor (2024). A major work concluded by the PI was the interactive sound installation 'Queer Sonic Fingerprint' which was realized in collaboration with sound artist Adam Pultz Melbye and shown at Art Laboratory Berlin from October until December 2024. The installation featured sounds (sonic fingerprints) of about 50 artefacts from ethnographic collections and sonically put these in new and unexpected relations through a queered genetic algorithm, which evolved generations of new sounds based on the initial ancestral group. Instead of evolving them in the Darwinian sense, filtering for 'perfection' as genetic algorithms were made to do, the algorithm selected for diversity. The installation featured a catalogue of interviews around the collections and information about all artefacts as an open catalogue, to which visitors could contribute. With these three major tangible outcomes, two articles and a book review on the topic of the project published during the funding period and more writing on the research and the production of the works still underway, the project achieved what it had set out to do. The main insight of the project is that while queering of museums and archives has been a topic over the past years, this has not been sufficiently applied to ethnological collections.
Link to the final report
https://doi.org/10.18452/34541
Publications
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Working Through Colonial Collections. Universitaire Pers Leuven.
von Oswald, Margareta
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Non-normative relations wanted. Exhibition at Ethnologisches Museum Berlin (18-19 November 2023)
Isabel Bredenbröker et al.
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Queering Alfred Gell’s Art Nexus: Conceptualising Non-normative Relations and Queer Methods in the Art and Ethnological Museum. Context. Ikonotheka(32), 59-80.
Bredenbröker, Isabel
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The Sinking: Speculative Futures Collective.” Etnofoor 36, no. 1 (2024): 53–74
Bredenbröker, Isabel, Dilara Hadroviç, Frederike Nolte, Sarah Wulbrecht, Sophie Breßler, Josefine Ketelsen, Polina Shablovskaia, Xu Ding, Maria Laurids Lazzarotti & Meyçem Ceren Ulu
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“Beyond Boundaries: Fostering Reflexive Learning in Anthropology through Collaborative and Queer Methodologies at the Berlin Ethnological Museum” Conference paper presentation. RAI 2024: Anthropology and Education. Panel: Flipping the conference space. Student’s perspectives on learning anthropology (EASA Teaching Anthropology Network Panel). London, UK.
Isabel Bredenbröker et al.
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“Queer livelihoods and public forms of representation in Cape Town” Conference paper at EASA Barcelona 2024 – Doing and undoing with anthropology. Panel: Queering social reproduction: queer materiality in its ambivalence / sponsored by the European Network of Queer Anthropology ENQA
Bredenbröker, Isabel
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“Queer Sonic Fingerprint: On sound and museum anthropology”. Academic presentation. Co-hosted by Religious Matters and Pressing Matter. Utrecht University
Bredenbröker, Isabel
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“Queer Sonic Fingerprint”—Listening to speculative queer relations in ethnographic collections. Anthropology and Humanism, 50(1).
Bredenbröker, Isabel & Melbye, Adam Pultz
