Reflections on prefigurative collection development

In my ethnographic research at the Museum of European Cultures in Berlin, I learned that collection development is shaped by institutional legacies. As Sara Ahmed reminds us, institutional habits are inherited and so is a collection. It is never just a gathering of things but also ways of doing things, repeated over time, harden into institutions. The past is woven into the very fabric of the institution’s daily life.

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

During my ethnographic research with the curators in Berlin, we often discussed how collection legacies could affect futures. One curator described a haunting 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 metaphor of a museum ready to spread its wings may suggest hope, but the curator’s words revealed deep anxiety. Collections, especially of folklore, carry the risk of being drawn into nationalist narratives when political tides shift. These unwanted futures are not distant threats but 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. Futures take shape through repetition, through the familiar stories institutions are used to telling, knotted into the ways of doing things.

But if collections can carry regressive 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 preventing 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 not fixed and inevitable. People create new institutions and social relations all the time, and people can dismantle them. For Graeber, the popular imagination holds the power to create new institutions. Thinking with Graeber is to understand that new kinds of institutions and relations are possible.

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 living as though another world is already possible — and acting in such a way that this other world begins to take form, and materialise. 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 in shaping it. Collection development, in this view, becomes a speculative gesture — a way of proposing 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 allows museums not to drift aimlessly within current political currents but to turn, try, fail, and try again—to shape the possible into new forms.

Prefigurative collection work offers one such path: an approach to weaving future values into the fabric of institutional life. It is a transversal practice, political and ethical, that unfolds through acts of care and quiet repair, through the embrace of de-growth, the redistribution of attention and resources, the art of holding space, and the power of refusal. Through these gestures, something in the texture may begin to shift, and perhaps museums can become places where we we warp the possible, slowly and collectively, 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

Home

About Research Collaborations Talks & Events Teaching Publications

← Prev Index Next →