Reflections on prefigurative collection development
Working with instititutions I came to think about this recursive relationship between the past and future of collections. As museums strive to reinvent themselves, the past returns persistently — in the metadata that quietly accompanies each object, in the catalogue entries, the object labels or the categories by which objects come to be known. Many museums now work tirelessly to confront their imperial pasts, yet they rarely ask how to unsettle the habits these sedimented histories have ingrained in institutional life.
Anxiety in collections
In discussions with curators in Berlin, the question of how collection legacies might shape futures came up repeatedly. Years before the alarming rise of far-right parties in German politics, one curator had speculated about what she saw as a nightmare scenario:
“a development towards a museum for German folklore, which is then politically instrumentalised, because there are nationalist aspirations all over Europe and the basic idea of the museum is a very nationalist one. It would really be the nightmare if the political tides turned in such a way that someone would again come up with the idea to understand the costumes and objects as a mark of German identity. But I really don’t think that I am ready for a future, I think that we are still at the beginning of the Museum of European Cultures, that we are still like a butterfly that has emerged from the caterpillar.”
The butterfly may suggest hope, but what struck me in this account was the anxiety. Folklore collections in particular carry the risk of being drawn back into nationalist and völkish narratives when political tides shift. For her, writing in 2019, these unwanted futures were not distant, theoretical threats but recurring patterns, repeatedly re-entering the frame and woven into the very fabric of the collection.
Interrupt habits
Futures are rehearsed in the institution’s everyday practices, from the handling of objects to decisions about what to acquire, how to label, what to display, and what to relegate to storage. They take shape through repetition, through the familiar stories institutions are used to telling.
But if collections can carry certain futures, they can also become sites where path dependencies are interrupted. They can be spaces where inherited rhythms are unsettled, where the past is not merely revised but where the pattern of possibility is reconfigured. What if, instead of correcting the past or guarding against unwanted repetition, museums began to collect in ways that actively pull other futures into the present? What would it mean to treat the collection as a tool for shaping what comes next?
Prefiguring collection futures
The work of anthropologist David Graeber reminds us that institutions are never fixed or inevitable. They are human creations, sustained by everyday practice, and can be rebuilt and remade. He saw social imagination, or the capacity to envision new ways of living together and to act on that vision collectively, as the force that creates new institutions and dismantles established ones.
Out of this possibility emerges the idea of prefigurative politics, a practice that enacts the future by experimenting with remaking institutions in the present. Prefiguration emerged from social movements committed to living their ideals today, refusing to wait for revolutionary change or a better time to start a utopia. It is about acting as though another world were already possible, so that everyday action is used to shape the contours of the future today. Prefiguration asks what it would mean to inhabit the future as a practice unfolding.
Thinking through the implications of such work for collection development, I began to consider collection development as a space in the museum where prefigurative work can take place. Rather than passively responding to or predicting the future, prefigurative practice in heritage could harness collection development as an active, imaginative force. This allows collections to be oriented toward what is not yet here, but what we want to bring into being. Collection development, in this view, becomes a speculative gesture — a way of shaping new kinds of gatherings and new relations.
Warping the possible
In a time of mounting curatorial dilemmas and political pressures, museums could, instead of sleepwalking into the future, reorient themselves toward such an experimental and inventive spirit. This offers an alternative to drifting with prevailing political currents: a chance to imagine and practice other possibilities, to try, fail, and try again.
In practice, it is political and ethical work that unfolds through concrete gestures, acts of care and quiet repair, de-growth, the redistribution of attention and resources, the art of holding space, and the power of refusal. Through such gestures, something in the texture of institutional life may begin to shift, and perhaps museums may become places where we warp the possible, and other futures are, slowly and collectively, brought into being.
To learn more about the ideas around prefigurative collection development, check out my article on Transforming legacies, habits and futures: reshaping the collection at the Museum of European Cultures: https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2021.2025143