Beyond the Universal machine
Short Description
Beyond the Universal Machine is an ethnography of curators of contemporary art in Berlin, Milan, and Marseille, who grapple with Europe’s colonial heritage against the backdrop of anthropological museums of world. A central prism through which this book unfolds is curating as a three-dimensional narrative, linking the situated, embodied, and concrete practices of curators in making exhibitions and rethinking museums with the wider cultural technologies of narrative world-making. In the book, I analyse different practices and legacies of world-making and how they relate to art, anthropology, and museums of world. The book investigates how the expanded curatorial field can offer strategies, methods, resources, and concepts for expanding the practice of anthropology. It is based on almost a decade of research with independent publishing houses, neighbourhood associations, artists, curators working variously within, against, or on the fringes of some of Europe's largest cultural heritage and museum institutions. The book traces how contemporary curators and artists rework the legacy of the museum of world as a universalising machine, exploring artistic and curatorial narratives of worlding that do not fall into the trap of a ‘worldly universalism’ or a problematic identitarian relativism. Through several case studies drawn from work with the Humboldt Forum, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (Mucem) and La Friche – La Belle de Mai in Marseille, as well as Archive books and the Palazzo di Brera in Milan, Beyond the Universal Machine unravels hopeful struggles for producing a more just and humane public cultural imagination of a shared world.
The book, which will be submitted as a habitation in the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, will subsequently appear in open-access format in the de Gruyter / Brill book series Beyond Universalism. Studies on the Contemporary / Partager l'universel. Études Sur le contemporain edited by Prof Markus Messling (Saarland University / KHK CURE).
Beyond the Universal Machine is an ethnography of curators of contemporary art in Berlin, Milan, and Marseille, who grapple with Europe’s colonial heritage against the backdrop of anthropological museums of world. A central prism through which this book unfolds is curating as a three-dimensional narrative, linking the situated, embodied, and concrete practices of curators in making exhibitions and rethinking museums with the wider cultural technologies of narrative world-making. In the book, I analyse different practices and legacies of world-making and how they relate to art, anthropology, and museums of world. The book investigates how the expanded curatorial field can offer strategies, methods, resources, and concepts for expanding the practice of anthropology. It is based on almost a decade of research with independent publishing houses, neighbourhood associations, artists, curators working variously within, against, or on the fringes of some of Europe's largest cultural heritage and museum institutions. The book traces how contemporary curators and artists rework the legacy of the museum of world as a universalising machine, exploring artistic and curatorial narratives of worlding that do not fall into the trap of a ‘worldly universalism’ or a problematic identitarian relativism. Through several case studies drawn from work with the Humboldt Forum, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (Mucem) and La Friche – La Belle de Mai in Marseille, as well as Archive books and the Palazzo di Brera in Milan, Beyond the Universal Machine unravels hopeful struggles for producing a more just and humane public cultural imagination of a shared world.
The book, which will be submitted as a habitation in the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, will subsequently appear in open-access format in the de Gruyter / Brill book series Beyond Universalism. Studies on the Contemporary / Partager l'universel. Études Sur le contemporain edited by Prof Markus Messling (Saarland University / KHK CURE).
