Research area

City museums are undergoing a period of transformation. Questions regarding societal relevance, cultural participation, and the representation of a diverse, post-migrant (urban) society have become increasingly significant in recent years. This also raises the question of the relationship between museum and city anew: how can museums become places that do not merely represent urban society, but where social relationships are created, negotiated and transformed? Which stories are made visible, whose memories find their way into museum narratives, and what opportunities exist to broaden or reinterpret hegemonic views of history?

This research project examines these forms of relationship between museum and urban society. At the centre of this is a relational understanding of the museum, which conceives of the institution not as a self-contained space for collection, preservation and mediation, but as part of an urban network of relationships. The aim is to investigate through which museological, artistic, scenographic and participatory practices such relationships are established, and what forms of participation and agency are thereby enabled.

Particular interest is focused on practices that expand the institutional and spatial boundaries of the museum: mobile and decentralised outreach formats that shift museum work into the urban space, as well as the opening up and acquisition of museum spaces by various actors. In this context, participation is explicitly understood as a physical and spatial practice of engagement, utilisation, appropriation and establishing connections. The aim is to investigate which forms of knowledge and memory production are generated by such practices and how they thereby transform museum and urban narratives.

Latin American museology is also incorporated as a theoretical and historical perspective. In particular, the concept of a socially responsible museum embedded in its living environment (“museo integral”), developed since the Santiago Declaration of 1972, as well as the concepts and strategies of “museología social” — which views museums as tools for social transformation — offer a perspective on museum practice that goes beyond the current Western understanding of participation. Using selected historical and contemporary examples, the research will examine the different conceptions of the museum, the public sphere, participation, and urban identity expressed therein, as well as the practices and goals pursued through them.

This research project aims to identify the conditions and practices under which city museums can become “third places” (Ray Oldenburg). Of central importance here is the question of what different forms of relations between the museum, the city, and society emerge when established museum limitations and institutional roles are reimagined and tested.

The doctoral project is supervised by Prof. Dr. Lioba Keller-Drescher.