Clémentine Deliss. Clémentine Deliss

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       Prologue

      A few years back, some close friends encouraged me to apply for the directorship of an ethnographic museum in Germany. At first, I was cautious. I had been working independently as a curator and publisher for more than twenty years, traveling from city to city to set up new projects with artists, and I was keen to retain my autonomy. At the same time, I needed to settle down and transfer my experience onto an environment I could qualify with my own model. I was selected for the job and moved to Frankfurt, where I lived for five years. This is the narrative of my endeavor to transform the modus operandi of a contentious genre of European museum and develop a post-ethnographic institution.

      Sometimes renamed museum of world cultures, the ethnographic museum is the most extreme rendition of a cultural institution that retains “colonial presence” even today.¹ While I focus on the crisis of this particular museum, I hope to address other types of venue that hold collections and recognize the necessity to rethink their constitution in the twenty-first century. If museums have to be pioneering and fight against routine, habit, and conservatism, what model of critical and reflexive methodology can be deployed on existing, forgotten, soiled, or non-restituted collections?

      The subjective, dialogical activity undertaken in collaboration with artists, designers, writers, anthropologists, and lawyers at the Weltkulturen Museum between 2010 and 2015 consolidated the modus operandi of my earlier transdisciplinary curatorial practice. In Frankfurt, I sought to generate movement within the museum’s institutional structure, affecting how we worked and where the priorities lay for a museum, both internally and toward the public. Located in three nineteenth-century villas, our domestic research centered on the tens of thousands of artifacts and the vast photographic archives housed within the museum.

      This book was written in great part while I was a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin. Practically airlifted out of Frankfurt, I was given a room of my own, safeguarded from inquisitive journalists, and encouraged to СКАЧАТЬ