Reflections on prefigurative collection development
Even 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, the shelves where things rest. It is felt in the texture of exhibitions, in the categories by which objects come to be known. Today, as many museums confront the heavy burden of their problematic histories, what is required is a way of working with collections that unsettles and disrupts these ingrained institutional habits.
Anxiety in collections
In discussions with curators in Berlin, the question of how collection legacies might shape futures came up repeatedly. One curator described what she saw as the 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. These unwanted futures are not distant threats but repeatedly re-enter the frame, folded into the collection‘s fabric.
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?
Prefigure collection futures
The work of David Graeber reminds us that institutions are never just fixed or inevitable. People create new institutions and social relations all the time, and people can dismantle them. For Graeber, popular imagination holds the power to create new institutions.
Out of this possibility emerges the idea of prefigurative collection development, a practice that enacts the future in the present. Prefiguration emerged from social movements committed to living their ideals in the present, refusing to wait for a better time. It is about acting as though another world were already possible, so that it begins to take material form. This allows orienting collections toward what is not yet here, but what we want to bring into being. Prefiguration asks what it would mean to inhabit the future as a practice unfolding.
Rather than passively responding to or predicting the future, prefigurative practice in heritage could harness collection development as an active force. Collection development, in this view, becomes a speculative gesture — a way of shaping new kinds of gatherings and new relations.
Warp the possible
In a time of mounting curatorial dilemmas, instead of sleepwalking into the future, museums could reorient themselves toward an experimental and inventive spirit. This offers an alternative to drifting within current political currents, to imagine and practice alternatives, 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