Stedelijk Studies Journal Issue #13

Forgotten Worlds: Cultivating Museums Otherwise

by Colin Sterling and Asia Komarova

December 15, 2023

The following is a story millennia in the making. It is a story of ruptures and discontinuities, but also of unexpected connections across space and time. It is a story of loss and return that goes beyond questions of restitution and repatriation. At the heart of the story is one museum—a nomadic, unassuming, and playful experiment in museological form that troubles commonplace assumptions about what a museum could or should be. Monolithic notions of The Museum find little traction in this story. Instead, the story we want to tell is one of differentiation and mutation, of emergence over stasis. The story has been written collaboratively between a scholar of heritage and museums and an artist-researcher working on food activism. In this and many other ways, the story is drifting and speculative. It does not seek to offer clear-cut answers or neat solutions. It does, however, want to plant seeds—seeds of doubt as well as inspiration. It is offered here in the spirit of sowing, gathering, and harvesting knowledge and experience across social worlds and disciplinary boundaries. As may be clear from this slightly meandering introduction, it is a story with no clear beginning, but it also recognizes that all stories must start somewhere, and so ours begins with a question.

What makes a museum?

It is difficult to say with any great certainty how many museums there are in the world. The International Council of Museums (ICOM) estimates around 55,000.^[1] UNESCO, on the other hand, includes almost 104,000 museums in its database, which shows huge variation in the distribution of museums globally (33,000 in the United States alone, according to this taxonomy, whereas the whole of Africa has only 868).^[2] A recent study in the United Kingdom found that over 4,000 museums had opened across the country between 1960 and 2020.^[3] Tellingly, this project used a far more expansive definition of the museum than typically found in formal classification systems, recognizing that “any definition that is devised in relation to normative ideas of professional practice will exclude ad hoc, community, and commercially operated venues.”^[4] ICOM’s own recently adopted definition of the museum now sets the limits of such normativity, with museums defined as not-for-profit public institutions that are “accessible and inclusive” and “operate and communicate ethically, professionally, and with the participation of communities.”^[5] Such phrases are closer to a vision or mission statement than a definition, telling us more about how museums and museum professionals want to be seen rather than how they actually operate or function.

Should this classificatory fuzziness be a cause for concern? Writing in the introduction to a recent, edited collection on the history of museology, Bruno Brulon Soares traces the considerable difficulties experienced by various committees and projects tasked with defining the museum and subsequently shaping a related discipline of “museology” over the past century.^[6] Crucially, Soares argues that models developed by theorists and practitioners in Europe were progressively challenged from the 1970s onward through constructive dialogue with museological approaches found in other social and political contexts, which revealed “the plurality of cultural experiences that can be defined under the broad term of the ‘museum.’”^[7] As Soares makes clear, museology is “inescapably bound to the technicality of the museum institution,”^[8] but this institution is constantly mutating and differentiating. While notions of permanence and perpetuity haunt museological thinking and practice (and find their way into formal definitions of the museum), the reality is somewhat different. Strategies of conservation, display, interpretation, and education are constantly revisited; acquisition policies shift with each new curator; narratives are questioned and pluralized. Critiques of museological practice are also widespread and vociferous, and approaches to museum work can and do change with remarkable frequency. Indeed, as Fernando Domínguez Rubio has recently argued, museum critics have experienced “what is arguably the rarest and most precious distinction that any form of social thought can enjoy: their critiques have been heeded by the object of critique.”^[9] Perhaps definitions only serve to highlight particular intervals in this constant feedback loop between critique and praxis: a way of apprehending, if only for a moment, the critical mutations that signal yet another variation in the museum form.

Classificatory fuzziness also points to new openings and new possibilities, to unknowability as a space of promise rather than frustration. The proliferation of museums globally already speaks to the impossibility of defining a particular approach to museum-ing: the neologism that animates this issue of Stedelijk Studies. We could easily read this term as a way of describing a cultural experience, something akin to shopping (i.e., “I’m off to do some museum-ing”), but when applied to the work that happens in museums the critical potential of the expression becomes apparent. To museum—the implied infinitive form of the proposed new term we are dealing with here—already suggests that the museum is something done, rather than something that simply is. In his recent book Correspondences, anthropologist Tim Ingold argues that replacing nouns with verbs in this way might help to show how “the world we inhabit, and that we share with so many other things” is never “ready-cut.”^[10] The examples Ingold puts forward to explain this shift (“to stone,” “to tree,” “to mountain,” “to human”) specifically aim to highlight the mutability of “things” that grow, develop, decay, fall apart, or recombine with other things over vastly different time scales and across myriad ecologies. For Ingold, such a shift in language might finally lead to a recognition that we are always “pitched into a world in which things are ever differentiating from one another along the folds and creases of their formation.”^[11] Focusing on the verb “to museum” in this sense offers one way to track and understand the varied processes of museum-ing now evident across different social, political, and environmental contexts—processes that routinely push against the boundaries of “the museum” as a clearly defined institution or apparatus.

The Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills, an initiative led by Utrecht-based artist collective The Outsiders^[12] and Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons,^[13] offers a recent example of the increasingly frayed edges of the museum as a category of thought and practice. Bridging socially engaged art, heritage practice, regenerative agriculture, and food activism, the museum in this case seeks to make visible what has been lost in the building of the Leidsche Rijn development in Utrecht—a new neighborhood that is expected to house 80,000 people by 2025. It would be easy to imagine the developers and architects responsible for Leidsche Rijn proposing a new museum for this site; somewhere to tell the story of the area before urbanization; a memory bank of objects, words, and images such as can be found in many cities around the world. As we outline in this essay, the Travelling Farm Museum offers a very different model of museum-ing, one rooted in giving and receiving, connectivity and sharing, movement and care. In the words of the project team: “How can we listen together to the earth, trees, insects, and children of Leidsche Rijn? And if we do, what do we learn from what we hear?”^[14] “Museum-ing” here embraces many forms and processes, oriented toward an alternative relationship with the land and a commitment to the grounded politics of commoning. We may see this as a generative rather than extractive use of heritage and memory, a way to build together from what has come before, rather than simply hold on to what has been lost.

What value does the word “museum” carry in this context, and how precisely does the Travelling Farm Museum index new forms and processes of museum-ing? What might this tell us about the relationship between museums and the broader social, cultural, and environmental ecologies they emerge from and feed back into? The argument we want to make here is that museum-ing otherwise is not just about reforming or reimagining individual museums, or even redefining the idea of the museum itself. Rather, to museum differently can be an act of radical re-enchantment,^[15] a way of engaging with the world that actively resists intersecting forms of domination and mastery. The small case study at the heart of this story aims to cultivate this attitude in the hope of demonstrating one pathway museums might take in the future, as the dense back-and-forth between reflection, critique, and praxis continues to unfold.

The Travelling Farm Museum represents a nascent example of what it might mean to museum otherwise. It would be easy to dismiss such an initiative as wholly separate from the mainstream museum world, and in some ways, this is certainly true. Nobody involved in the project would see themselves as a museum professional. It is our contention, however, that this is precisely where we need to look for seeds of radical change in museum-ing. While institutional reforms have undoubtedly led to significant transformations in the museum sector, the paradigm shift we are interested in tracing here asks for a broader reimagining of the museum as a distinct category of thing in the world. Artistic Research is well-placed to push at these boundaries, exploring the ambiguities and latent possibilities of the museum from new methodological and conceptual vantage points. As an emergent and inherently transdisciplinary field, Artistic Research avoids easy categorization. In relation to museums, we understand it as designating a particular comportment toward the work that museums perform in the world and a creative desire to rethink and reimagine such spaces in the service of critical agendas.^[16] More broadly, we follow Natalie Loveless in seeing artistic practice and artistic research as crucial tools for learning how to learn, think, and know differently in “compromised times.” As Loveless puts it,

The arts […] offer modes of sensuous, aesthetic attunement, and work as a conduit to focus attention, elicit public discourse, and shape public imaginaries. “How might the world be organized differently?” is a question that matters urgently, and it is a question that art—particularly art attuned to human and more-than-human social justice—asks in generative and complex ways.^[17]

To understand how such generative changes might emerge—and what needs to be unraveled and unlearned to get to this point—it is worth briefly revisiting a much earlier moment of museum-ing, one that continues to resonate into the present and, in so doing, helps demonstrate the impact of museums and museological thinking on broader processes of material and symbolic worlding.^[18]

Anthropocene Museologies

If the International Commission on Stratigraphy is to be believed, we—a purposefully all-encompassing term in this context—now live in the Anthropocene, a geological time interval defined by the profound and potentially irreversible impact of humans on the Earth System. While geologists are yet to formally agree that the planet has left the Meghalayan age of the Holocene epoch (officially the current geologic age at the time of writing), the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG for short) of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy has voted in favor of treating the Anthropocene as a formal chrono-stratigraphic unit. A key task in defining such a unit is the search for stratigraphic signals or markers that might tell us when the Anthropocene began.^[19] In 2016 the AWG put forward the mid-twentieth century as the optimal starting point for the Anthropocene, coinciding with the Great Acceleration^[20] and clearly demarcated by the presence of artificial radionuclides around the world—a result of thermonuclear bomb tests in the early 1950s.^[21]

This proposition raises an interesting conundrum for museums (and many other social and cultural practices besides): should all museums built after the second half of the twentieth century now be considered Anthropocene museums? Does this mean that any museum created before this time should be classed as a Holocene (or perhaps even Meghalayan) museum? The obvious absurdity of such questions reveals a stark gap between complex sociohistorical processes and the desire for rigid scientific classifications. Indeed, as Kathryn Yusoff—one of the sharpest critics of the Anthropocene hypothesis—has persuasively argued, “Origin stories bury as much as they reveal about material relations and their genealogies.”^[22] For Yusoff, it would be wiser to view the Anthropocene as a “psychopolitical staging of subjectivity as well as a historical rendering of materiality.”^[23] This counter-reading of the Anthropocene offers a useful entry point to begin tracing the dense entanglements between museum-making, social formations, and relations with the Earth. Put simply, if we understand the Anthropocene not as a definitive break or rupture in the Earth System but as a “set of material practices of duration and arrival that brought this world into being,”^[24] then a different socio-geologic narrative begins to emerge, one in which the very idea of the museum can be seen to have played a key role.

The earliest known text on museums—Samuel Quiccheberg’s Inscriptiones from 1565—maps out this sense of material worlding in minute detail, describing an ideal system for gathering and ordering “artificial and marvelous things… so that by their frequent viewing and handling one might quickly, easily and confidently be able to acquire a unique knowledge and admirable understanding of things.”^[25] As art historian and museologist Bruce Robertson notes, Quiccheberg’s expansive and—crucially—active sense of the museum (or “theater” as he describes it) represents “an ambitious attempt to outline why the desire to create curiosity cabinets was becoming so gripping just at this point in European culture”:

Assembling and displaying physical objects offered sixteenth-century intellectuals a powerful means to access new knowledge, knowledge that lay outside the realm of texts… Quiccheberg’s inscriptions and classes serve to map out and organize the collectability of the material world, but they do so for a greater purpose than to taxonomize it. Above all, Quiccheberg sees the goal of his ideal cabinet as practical: the acts of collecting and organizing mobilize objects into their greatest usefulness.^[26]

While Robertson goes on to question whether contemporary museums still function in this way, Quiccheberg’s early delineation of “museum-ing” clearly established the importance of assembling, ordering, comparing, displaying, and interpreting material objects as a means of building knowledge about the world beyond the museum. This form of knowing can only take place through the detachment and dissociation of things from the world, but this does not mean its effects are contained by the walls of the museum. Indeed, Quiccheberg’s ambition to house “Exemplary Objects and Exceptional Images of the Entire World” already gives some indication of the context in which his treatise was written, namely the early colonization of large parts of the globe by European powers. To borrow from Yusoff, the “psychopolitical staging” enacted through such practices drew together historical and cultural knowledge, early colonial relations, the rise of empiricism, and new aesthetic regimes. The seeds of the Anthropocene may be usefully located in these symbolic and material practices, even if the precise “mark” they have left on the Earth is more difficult to identify than the fallout from thermonuclear explosions.

Listening, Travelling, Unlearning

In its pursuit of an alternative approach to museum-ing, the Travelling Farm Museum actively seeks to reverse such knowledge-making systems. Rather than gathering and ordering “things” to produce knowledge, the museum attends to multiple ways of relating to the earth/Earth with humility and respect. Every Saturday during summer the museum travels to different farm sites around Utrecht with a small group of people from different backgrounds to listen to the stories of farmers and their families. Some talk about their lifestyles, others their animals and the produce they cultivate. Some are very ecologically minded, others less so. In this way the museum acts like a school without walls in which different communities can learn about what has been lost and forgotten, so that they might come back to themselves; to know, when looking at the sky above and the land below, what the Earth is trying to tell them.

This approach was greatly inspired by a residency in Brazil in 2015, in which twelve artists were invited to live together for a whole year and learn from different professionals within and beyond the art world. As an introduction to the residency, the artists were told about traditional lifeways in Brazil by anthropologist Pedro Cesarino, who shared how he would ask Indigenous storytellers to “draw” their narratives in the soil whenever they began to tell a story relating to the natural world. Such communities had little interest in the written word or symbolism; for them, oral heritage was paramount. This runs counter to the dominant ways in which such stories and traditions are typically communicated in museums. Indeed, Cesarino’s approach led to the realization that learning about roots, ancestral memories, and ecology could only happen through listening.

To try and bring this idea into practice, The Outsiders and the Casco team occupied a dilapidated farmhouse in Leidsche Rijn in 2018 to create a space for community members, artistic practitioners, and other beings (human and nonhuman) to gather and “(un)learn” deep-seated ecological practices. The farmhouse in question was once part of a large tract of farmland called Terwijde. Today the farmhouse faces a modern train station and is surrounded by a shopping center that both carry the same name. Plans to develop the farmland to the west of Utrecht go back to the 1960s, when a new masterplan for the area was accepted by the municipal council. The farmhouse itself was owned by the Van Vuuren family for over fifty years, operating as a dairy farm and creamery. The family raised pigs, chickens, and dairy cows, and made cheese and yogurt at the rear of the farmhouse. There was also a store that sold milk and homemade dairy products to the local community.^[27] In the 1990s the Van Vuuren family and other farmers had to sell their land to make space for approximately 100,000 new residents.^[28] Today the farmhouse sits in the middle of a modern housing estate, its connection to the land radically altered to serve a growing population. This of course is a familiar story across the world: 55% of the global population now lives in urban areas, a figure which is only expected to rise in the coming years. Urbanization typically divorces people from land, separating individuals and communities from ways of living that sustained them for generations. Alongside this, industrialized agriculture has significantly reduced the number of people who directly depend on the land for their livelihoods. In the Netherlands, the number of agricultural enterprises has decreased by 80% since the 1950s, driven by modernization, centralization, and a lack of young farmers willing to take on the work.

Figure 1. Opening of Erfgoed (Agricultural Heritage and Land Use), 2018. Photo by Rachel Morón.

Reflecting on the early stages of their project, originally titled Erfgoed (Agricultural Heritage and Land Use), Binna Choi and Rosa Paardenkooper note that agricultural skills largely vanished as the Leidsche Rijn development progressed. This realization led them to ask whether the farmhouse might be used to reconnect people to the land, helping the area to “reinvent itself to become a model and example for how we can and want to live together in the 21st century.”^[29] While the farmhouse was sold to a developer in 2019, this spirit of connectivity has endured in the creation of the Travelling Farm Museum, which explicitly aims to “[listen] to the history, (im)material heritage, and present-day inhabitants—human and nonhuman—of Leidsche Rijn to develop skills and stories for fair and sustainable world-building.”^[30] The museum in this context is a mobile vehicle covered in mirrors that evokes the shape of the old farmhouse while quite literally reflecting the new areas through which it travels, offering a repository for objects, stories, knowledge and—crucially—ecological relationships between “farmers, citizens, artists and nonhuman beings.”^[31]

Figure 2. The Outsiders Union and the Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills. Photo by Merel Zwarts.

Clearly this approach to “museum-ing” is very different from the familiar image conjured by the word museum. It would be wrong to say, however, that the Travelling Farm Museum represents a total break from standard museological practice. Indeed, the museum in this case may be usefully understood as an evolution of the ecomuseum, an alternative museological tradition that now reaches back over fifty years. Ecomuseums are typically defined through their opposition to classical museums, which—despite many variations—continue to follow the basic schema laid down by Quiccheberg five centuries ago. Where conventional museums are formed around objects, buildings, and audiences, ecomuseums are characterized by their in situ relationship to specific places, communities, and local traditions.^[32] The Travelling Farm Museum both reflects and subverts this framework. Most notably, the territory the museum responds to has developed so rapidly that few reminders of the “traditional” Leidsche Rijn are left. Ecomuseums normally involve the preservation of built heritage alongside and in conjunction with the transmission of collective memory; the Travelling Farm Museum is forced to confront a more fundamental rupture between past and present. As French historian Pierre Nora recognized, the disappearance of “peasant culture, that quintessential repository of collective memory,” often gives rise to a nostalgic desire to document, collect, and historicize rural life.^[33] As a result, it is not uncommon for new urban developments to include some hint of the agricultural past, whether in the form of evocative road names, individually preserved structures, or whole new museums designed to bridge the gap between rural past and urban future. The Travelling Farm Museum responds to this sense of loss and rupture with a peripatetic outlook that is at once nomadic and rooted: a reflection, perhaps, of the fluid social and ecological bonds that mark urban life in the Anthropocene.

Figure 3. Alphabet Maudit, Joélson Buggilla and Jorge Menna, 2021. Photo by Joélson Buggilla.

We would like to suggest, however, that the ruptures addressed by this museum go deeper, reaching beyond standard Anthropocene temporalities to evoke a more profound separation of people from land. One of the few collection items held by the Travelling Farm Museum speaks to this dissociation very directly. Alphabet Maudit, by artists Joélson Buggilla and Jorge Menna Barreto, is deceptively simple: a small collection of leaves underlines the individuality and complexity of these everyday wonders. Brought together as an “alphabet,” the leaves seem to invite decryption, but their language is ultimately unknowable. In this sense, the leaves force us to confront the limits of human knowledge systems, or at least those knowledge systems we have come to associate with Western culture and science, not least the museum itself.

Buggilla and Barreto’s indecipherable alphabet documents an estrangement between the human and the nonhuman that haunts the present and, in many ways, undergirds the Anthropocene. To try and understand this rupture, cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram suggests that we need to go back much further than the early modern period and the spread of colonialism. Tellingly, Abram instead proposes that we look to ancient Greece for the roots of this estrangement, and more specifically to the emergence in the early fourth century BCE of a “detached, abstract mode of thinking engendered by alphabetic literacy.”^[34] Indeed, Abram’s book The Spell of the Sensuous hinges on this invention, which he argues slowly came to transform—though not completely eradicate—the “synesthetic association” held by many Indigenous cultures toward land, a reciprocity Abram describes as “the intertwining of earthly place with linguistic memory.”^[35] While we do not have space here to explore Abram’s complex reasoning in full, the crucial point to note is that, with the emergence of the phonetic aleph-beth, written characters no longer had to refer to “sensible phenomenon out in the world.”^[36] As a result, individuals and societies could disengage their senses from the “encompassing earth.”^[37] In this analysis, the land itself falls silent through disembodied knowledge: “to learn this new magic, we had to break the spontaneous participation of our eyes and ears in the enfolding terrain in order to recouple those senses with the flat surface of the page.”^[38] Alphabet Maudit—and the work of the Travelling Farm Museum more broadly—documents this separation while also highlighting the possibility for other ways of being to emerge; other ways of learning from and with the Earth.

We are used to thinking of museums as storehouses of memory, but systems built on gathering, ordering, classifying, and displaying the world always threaten precisely the opposite: forgetting on a vast scale.^[39] Indeed, we might even argue that the earliest museums extended and in many ways perfected the dissociated mode of knowledge production made possible by the alphabet, sundering connections between communities and the “encompassing earth” through material, economic, social, and symbolic means. Understanding the history and contemporary purpose of museums in this context means asking deep questions about memory, loss, time, and the importance of forging new relations between people and place. If, as Abram argues, modernity is characterized by an “astonishing dissociation—a monumental forgetting of our human inference in a more-than-human world,”^[40] then what role might museums play in reversing or at least attending to this rupture? Can we imagine “museum-ing” in dialogue with rather than against the Earth and its many inhabitants?

The Travelling Farm Museum offers one way of responding to such questions, but addressing these concerns should also be seen as a responsibility of the broader museum world. The Stedelijk, for example, has recently explored the climate crisis in its exhibition It’s Our F***ing Backyard, which focused on designing new materials that might have a positive impact on the planet. The title of the exhibition specifically aimed to highlight the urgency and proximity of climate change, which needs to be understood as a problem of the here and now rather than a concern that only effects other places or will only become significant in the future. Like many museums addressing this topic, the Stedelijk also committed to reducing the “environmental footprint” of the exhibition by using recycled or renewable materials, minimizing transport, and avoiding or compensating for carbon emissions related to the project. Such initiatives need to be pursued further, but it is also important to recognize that the idea of a “footprint” denotes the impression of one thing onto another, rather than the dense entanglement that defines ecological thinking. As Dominguez Rubio has argued in relation to the ecological status of museums,

We need to give up on that modern idea that describes the environment as something that is “outside.” An ecological inquiry can only begin with the recognition that there is no outside. That is, with the recognition that we do not work “with,” “over,” or “upon” these natural elements and processes—we work inside them.^[41]

Working inside and with natural elements and processes would entail a wholly different approach to museological thinking and practice than has typically been the case since Quiccheberg’s time. It would require a sense of openness, embeddedness, and accountability that goes against many foundational museum principles (of conservation, autonomy, and perpetuity, for example). Five centuries of museological knowledge production will not be reversed in a generation. Nor should this be our aim. Knowledge is cumulative, but it is also marked by material processes of erasure and forgetfulness. The Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills evokes this ambiguity, modifying one of modernity’s foremost knowledge apparatuses to highlight broader histories of socio-ecological amnesia. This moment demands new practices and vocabularies of knowing, making, listening, remembering, and cultivating together. This task can only unfold in common with others and with the Earth, through multiple stories that always remain open to uncertain mutations.

[1] See Ruth Lochar, Alexandra Meinhold, and Hildegard Toma, eds., Museums of the World (Munich: De Gruyter Saur, 2011).

[2] “Number of museums worldwide as of March 2021, by UNESCO regional classification,” UNESCO, accessed March 14, 2023.

[3] Fiona Candlin and Jamie Larkin, “What is a Museum? Difference all the way down,” Museum & Society 18, no. 2 (2020): 115–130.

[4] Ibid., 118.

[5] “Museum Definition,” ICOM, accessed March 14, 2023.

[6] Bruno Brulon Soares, ed., A History of Museology: Key authors of museological theory (Paris: ICOFOM, 2019).

[7] Bruno Brulon Soares, “Museology, building bridges,” in A History of Museology: Key authors of museological theory, ed. Bruno Brulon Soares (Paris: ICOFOM, 2019), 34.

[8] Ibid., 39.

[9] Fernando Domínguez Rubio, Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2020), 14.

[10] Tim Ingold, Correspondences (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2021), 7.

[11] Ibid., 7.

[12] The Outsiders is a union that implements services to people, the environment, and to society… Through public art and architecture they construct spaces in order to understand the city and its shared existences. “Learning by doing” is the motto. The Outsiders intervenes, in collaboration with different organizations and citizens, on long-term and temporary projects, indoors and outside. Members of the Outsiders are: Leonardo de Siqueira, Merel Zwarts, Txell Blanco, and Asia Komarova. The Travelling Farm Museum also includes many collaborations with farmers, artists, and members of the Leidsche Rijn community.

[13] Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons is a small-scale art institution founded in 1990 in Utrecht. Casco offers a bold, daring, and affective vision of the ways in which society can be formed and shaped differently with its varied artistic program… Casco makes a unique repository of art practices that mix artistic genres—artistic research, archival practices, public art, community art, relational aesthetics, performance, institutional critique, cooking, farming, speculative fiction, comics, carpentry, architecture, design, digital art, sound art, art pedagogy, etc.—with a broad range of civic practices including self-organization, transdisciplinary study, cooperation, community economies, assembly, and coalition building. Members of Casco are Marianna Takou, Erik Uitenbogaard, Binna Choi, Luke Cohlen, Kim van der Zijde, and Leana Boven.

[14] “Who Are We?” Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills, accessed March 14, 2023.

[15] Silvia Federici, Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (Brooklyn: PM Press, 2019).

[16] This can be seen in projects such as The Museum of Neoliberalism, co-curated by satirical artist Darren Cullen and art historian Gavin Grindon, or the Museum of Capitalism by FICTILIS, a collaboration between multimedia artists and curators Andrea Steves and Timothy Furstnau. Both these examples deploy and subvert familiar museological tactics—telling stories in space through text, objects, and creative commissions—to “defamiliarize” and ultimately challenge dominant socioeconomic conditions. The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles may be seen as an early precursor of this form, while other examples—the Museum of Nonhumanity by Finnish duo Gustafsson&Haapoja, Museo Aero Solar by artist Tomás Saraceno—highlight the creative potential of the term museum when confronting issues of waste, pollution, and the more-than-human. For a further discussion of these and other similar initiatives, see Colin Sterling, “Heritage as Critical Anthropocene Method,” in Deterritorializing the Future: Heritage in, of and after the Anthropocene, eds. Rodney Harrison and Colin Sterling (London: Open Humanities Press, 2020), 188–218.

[17] Natalie Loveless, How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research Creation (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019), 16.

[18] On this subject, see Sharon Macdonald, “Re: Worlding the Museum; or, the Museum for Possible Futures,” in The Museum of the Future, ed. Joachim Baur (Bielefeld: transcript, 2020).

[19] “Anthropogenic Markers,” Anthropocene Curriculum, accessed March 14, 2023.

[20] Will Steffen, Wendy Broadgate, Lisa Deutsch, Owen Gaffney, and Cornelia Ludwig, “The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration,” The Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1 (2015): 81–98.

[21] “Working Group on the ‘Anthropocene,’” Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, accessed March 14, 2023.

[22] Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 58.

[23] Ibid., 8.

[24] Ibid., 12.

[25] Samuel Quiccheberg, The First Treatise on Museums: Samuel Quiccheberg’s Inscriptiones, 1565, trans. Mark. A Meadow and Bruce Robertson (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2013), 61.

[26] Bruce Robertson, “Preface: Wonderful Museums and Quiccheberg’s Inscriptiones,” in The First Treatise on Museums: Samuel Quiccheberg’s Inscriptiones, 1565, trans. Mark. A Meadow and Bruce Robertson (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2013), vi.

[27] Sabrina Maltese and Binna Choi, “Woorden van het Land,” The Outsiders Union, accessed March 14, 2023.

[28] Txell Blanco, “Terwijde Farmhouse in Leidsche Rijn Throughout the Years,” The Outsiders Union, accessed March 14, 2023.

[29] Binna Choi and Rosa Paardenkooper, “How to Grow Together? De Leidsche Rijn Luister Academie,” The Outsiders Union, accessed March 14, 2023.

[30] “Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills,” The Outsiders Union, accessed March 14, 2023.

[31] “Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills,” Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, accessed March 14, 2023.

[32] See Peter Davis, Ecomuseums: A Sense of Place (Newcastle: Newcastle University Press, 1999).

[33] Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7.

[34] David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World (New York: Vintage, 2017 [1996]), 109.

[35] Ibid., 176.

[36] Ibid., 100.

[37] Ibid., 187.

[38] David Abram, “Magic and the Machine,” Emergence Magazine, accessed March 14, 2023.

[39] Italo Calvino captures this sentiment in his satirical short story World Memory, written in 1968: “There are moments in our work… when one is tempted to imagine that the only things that matter are those which elude our archives, that only what passes without leaving any trace truly exists, while everything held in our records is dead detritus, the left-overs, the waste. The moment comes when a yawn, a buzzing fly, an itch seem the only treasure there is, precisely because completely unusable, occurring once and for all and then promptly forgotten, spared the monotonous destiny of being stored in the world memory. Who could rule out the possibility that the universe consists of the discontinuous network of moments that cannot be recorded, and that our organization does nothing but establish their negative image, a frame around emptiness and meaninglessness.” See Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics (London: Penguin, 2010), 365–372.

[40] Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 260.

[41] Dominguez Rubio, Still Life, 22.