BIOTOPIA is a new concept for a museum at the interface of life sciences and society currently in development in Munich, Germany. As an institution being planned from the ground up, BIOTOPIA has a unique opportunity to create audience engagement and curatorial strategies that draw on traditional and contemporary museological discourse and practices.
Traditionally, the exhibition halls of natural history museums have been organized according to discrete modes of scientific classification. As collections of facts, museums have displayed and interpreted natural history collections primarily to illustrate scientific principles, displayed in separate categories and from an authoritative institutional voice. This singular depiction was considered to reflect an underlying truth about the natural world, however the cultural systems and processes behind these sets of facts were seldom made transparent to the public (Bartels et al. 2010; Yanni 1996). While scientific research collections defined museums of nature for much of the nineteenth century, museum display for the purpose of educating and entertaining a broader public became an important part of museum work starting at the turn of the twentieth century, rivaling that of taxonomic, collections-based display paradigms (Köstering 2003; Rader and Cain 2014). Objects were created specifically for museum display via taxidermy, dioramas, and models while research collections—such as skeletons, skins, and spirit collections—largely disappeared behind the scenes. These museum displays were often prepared in dramatic poses or scenes as a way to create spectacle, using artifice as a means to (re)present the living world. This living world was often reduced to a snapshot of one animal and one behavior in a “natural” habitat, separate from the systems impacting their environment or interactions with other life forms, including humans. By placing the public on the outside looking in, these representational practices implicitly reinforced the separation of nature from culture.
Moreover, individual taxidermies were often reduced to stand-in representatives of their entire species or sex, perceived as generally interchangeable objects rather than material culture inscribed with their own stories and provenance (Baumunk 1996). As such, the subjects of these displays became further disconnected from the times, places, and cultures from which they were collected as well as from whom they were collected or prepared by and why. The static and disconnected nature of many of these public displays tacitly conveyed a fixed view of how the natural world was to be understood as well as a narrow interpretation of life forms’ complex ways of being in the world. In so doing, the pathway to becoming an “object”—and the inherent value systems underlying this practice—remained mostly hidden from view.
Gradually, the static “look and learn model” of display shifted to a more interactive, entertaining approach (Rader and Cain 2014). However, in many cases, the work still involved collection-based research that took place behind the scenes, continuing to distance visitors from the process and practice of doing science, the cultural and historical dimensions involved, and the inevitable provisionality and contestability of scientific findings (Secord 1996). Over time, the museums’ seeming neutrality and impartiality, when it came to scientific interpretations, was challenged in both public and scholarly arenas (Cain and Radar 2017; Hine and Medvecky 2015; Hopper-Greenhill 2000; McDonald 1997). Pre-prescribed representations and divisions within the living world—often between the realms of nature and culture—offered little room for individual interpretation or meaning-making and seldom provided the social, economic, or ethical context helpful to find personal relevancy.
Prevailing Western views have often treated the realms of nature and culture as dichotomies, with humanity and human practices equated to “culture” and the living world to “nature.” Numerous scholars in anthropology and environmental studies have examined the dualism between nature and culture from various perspectives (Descola 2021; Haraway 2003; Ingold 2000; Latour 1993; Tsing 2015). Natural history museums have historically reflected the nature–culture divide in their exhibitions and interpretations of the natural world, with the display of biological collections or preparations intended to illustrate scientific principles, separate from the human culture from which they were produced.
The stark demarcation between nature and culture also left a gap in depictions of the living world, as significant life forms that have shaped life on Earth—such as bacteria, fungi, and plants—were also largely absent from display. Additionally hidden from view in the halls of natural history museums were animals used for scientific study, such as the house mouse; those altered by humans, such as domesticated species; and Kulturfolger (hemerophile species), referring to life forms that thrive in human-made landscapes, such as crop weeds or pigeons—all considered within the sphere of human culture rather belonging in the halls of natural history museums (Ashby 2017; Pell and Allen 2015).
In recent years, the division between nature and culture in museums has started to blur as it has become harder to separate rapidly changing patterns of diversity observed in the living world from their anthropogenic influences. Humans and their cultural processes of selective breeding, research, and collecting, and social behavior are being increasingly considered part of, rather than separate from, nature.
It is against this backdrop that BIOTOPIA is reimagining museums of nature for the twenty-first century—a time when planetary challenges require a paradigm shift and a repositioning of humanity's place within the living world. Shifts in this direction are currently taking place within the museum landscape, as many well-established natural history museums are seeking to reinvent themselves and their approach to human–environmental relations. Museums—many with long histories—are increasingly bringing scientific collections and research into public spaces and dialogues. In so doing, they are attempting to reconfigure the museum as a place of cultural, transdisciplinary encounters and novel engagement with science while stepping away from the authoritative role previously ascribed to their institutions (Jardine and Spary 2018). The sections that follow provide examples of methods employed by existing museums to reactivate their scientific collections and lay out BIOTOPIA's proposal for an interstitial practice of curating as it develops a new holistic approach to human–environmental relationships.
Drawing on Current Examples in the Field
Three European research museums—Naturalis Biodiversity Center Leiden, The Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN), and Senckenberg Naturmuseum Frankfurt—provide examples of museums with long histories that are reactivating their collections by creating novel modes of public engagement with their research. Since 2019, Naturalis offers in “Live Science” a gallery free of charge in which the public can engage in direct conversations with research staff and collection managers while they work. The space is framed by large-scale storage shelves displaying a variety of specimens collected throughout the institution's history and furnished with drawers containing smaller, touchable collection objects.
In October 2021,1 the MfN Berlin introduced the pilot project “digitize! Live Science,” whereby museum staff digitally scan the museum's extensive insect collection in the public gallery space for visitors to observe. The goal is to create a direct encounter with the scientific process, in this case the digital transformation of the collections. Through the display of insect boxes and various media stations, the unique stories behind the collections are brought to life.2 MfN has also created a Center for the Humanities of Nature3 in 2012 that interrogates the multiple dimensions of the museum's material archives and modes of knowledge creation. One such example is the 2015 cross-disciplinary research project and experimental exhibition “Tote Wespen fliegen länger / Dead Wasps Fly Further.” The exhibition curators, a sociologist of science and a visual artist, chose three specimens—a digger wasp, agave seeds, and volume 14 of the Cosmic Dust Catalog—from the research collection as a point of departure for interventions into their movements between different spaces, times, and knowledge orders, which shed light on the human–environmental stories wrapped up in the specimens that had yet to be told, that is, global concerns around the Anthropocene and biodiversity, colonial contexts, knowledge orders, and representation practices (Nadim 2015).
In July 2022,4 Senckenberg opened its “Aha?! Science Lab,” an experimental hands-on space for examining specimens from the research collections, taking part in citizen science projects and interacting with the museum's research scientists. “Aha?!” combines traditional object display with workstation areas, research boxes and meet-the-scientist programs into a uniquely designed space that fosters close interaction with the museum's material culture.5 The Naturmuseum is also experimenting with new formats in what it terms “forschendes Kuratieren” (“investigative curating”) as in the exhibition project “Meet the Reef!,” to address curatorial challenges such as making timely changes to main exhibitions, considering societal perspectives, and reflecting on their own methods of public engagement.6
These approaches transform the knowledge-making process within the exhibition into an experimental endeavor that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries and serves as the foundation for envisioning the future of a research museum for the modern age.
BIOTOPIA: A New Concept for a Twenty-First-Century Museum of Life Sciences and the Environment
The development of the BIOTOPIA concept and its exhibitions is guided by the mission7 to explore, question, and reconfigure the relationships between humans, other life forms, and the environment while repositioning the museum as a place for pluralized forms of knowledge production. At the same time, BIOTOPIA will bring in aspects of other earth and human-made systems relevant for understanding the stories being told. Important overarching themes are interconnected evolution, health, and behavior of human and nonhuman life as well as links between science and society. This focus will aid in achieving the museum's vision to support a more balanced and sustainable relationship between humans and the living world for the future of our planet. Underpinning the museum development are the values of curiosity, empathy, and agency. Through a layered approach to engagement, the museum sets out to spark visitors’ curiosity to explore life, foster empathy by creating perspective-shifting experiences, and promote individual and collective agency.
The museum concept relies on five principles to guide curation: “Repositioning the Human,” “Audience and Participation-focus,” “Plurality of Voices and Perspectives,” “Process and Practice Orientation,” and “Material-Based and Mediated.” These principles provide a framework to bridge not only the long-held dichotomy of nature versus culture but also human versus nonhuman, academic versus experiential knowledge, and discursive versus non-discursive modes of communication. In order to carry out this complex undertaking, a team of exhibition curators have been assembled from cross-disciplinary backgrounds who can bring about novel configurations of perspectives—spatial and design, anthropological, sociological and biological, historical and literary.
Curating in the Gaps
In order to bridge the gaps listed above, we need a new way of thinking about museums and the curation of exhibitions as an interstitial practice. The word “interstice” is defined as a space that intervenes between things.8 In architecture or urban planning, it describes a space between walls or floors, the nexus between built or planned space and unplanned or natural environments. In art, works are described as interstitial when they lie between disciplines, media, and cultures (Canonne and Fryberger 2020). In relation to museums, the authors draw on these definitions from art and architecture to refer to the dynamic, overlapping border crossings within the museum that intervene between physical space and forms of engagement, between content and design, and between diverse perspectives and forms of knowing as “interstitial museum ecologies.” As such, BIOTOPIA as a whole aims to become a liminal space for creating lively sites of cross-disciplinary, embodied social exchanges. The physical spaces within the museum are intentionally curated to break down the barriers commonly separating schools of thought. “Interstitial museum ecologies” suggests that museum spaces bring together the disciplines typically siloed by university structures while still contributing unique perspectives to the discourses of anthropology, environmental studies, and museology.
This, however, should not be understood as an attempt to collapse the disciplines into one another. Rather, it should be thought of as an attempt to replace formerly impenetrable boundaries with permeable borders or porous edges that—as described for natural ecosystems and built environments—are active zones of exchange (Sennett 2008). In this vein, we will also tap into knowledges created outside of formal academic spheres, such as through the lived experiences of diverse communities and their cultural practices surrounding our themes. It is in these dynamic, in-between spaces where material, spatial, visual, written, aesthetic, experiential, and social practices meet and nourish new forms of knowledge-making unique to the museum. Within the exhibition space for instance, interlocking object genres and mediation strategies create novel forms of public engagement and spark new interactions between visitors and the exhibition as a space for action. These interstitial museum ecologies extend beyond the museum walls, in that museums are not isolated entities but rather interconnected bodies within larger systems, both physical and digital.
Overarching Concept: The “Mesh of Life”
Following the notion of interstitial curation, we have developed an overarching concept that acts as both a figurative metaphor and practical approach to the institution's mission, vision, and values: the “Mesh of Life.” Drawing on the writings of Tim Ingold (2007, 2011), Donna Haraway (2008, 2016) and others, this concept unsettles lingering notions of hierarchy in the living world as well as the traditional dichotomies surrounding nature versus culture. It reimagines the phylogenetic tree by considering not only evolutionary history but the symbiotic, interdependent interactions between organisms and the systems influencing these relationships. This concept repositions the human as one protagonist among many when considered within the vast biological diversity of life on Earth. At the same time, it demonstrates the profound impact human-made systems—particularly in the industrialized world—have on the living world. By placing these curious entanglements central to the concept, individuals should be able to recognize themselves within this mesh of interactions and empathize with the many other life forms with whom they are intertwined. The following case studies provide examples of this approach.
Case Study 1: Birds-of-Paradise within the Exhibition Area
“Seduce and Reproduce”
Core to the “Mesh of Life” are the behaviors, activities, and processes shared across the living world. For instance, a look into the planned exhibition area “Seduce and Reproduce” provides an example of interstitial curating through the display of a material archive in which human–environmental relations are conserved: a Birds-of-Paradise collection from the Bavarian Natural History Collections and the Museum Mensch und Natur. Through thoughtful and surprising juxtapositions and multiperspective storytelling, the display will bridge otherwise disconnected narratives and knowledges from the life and environmental sciences, colonial history and practice, Indigenous knowledge, and early actions for animal conservation.
Birds-of-paradise are a diverse group of birds primarily found in the forests of Papua New Guinea. Males are known for their diversity of plumage used in elaborate courtship displays and mating strategies to attract females which include dances and complex vocalizations. Birds-of-paradise have been the subjects of numerous museum exhibitions in recent years (see Natural History Museum, London 2015; Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, New Zealand 2015; Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Netherlands 2017; and more) but have a long history of being integrated into collections and museum displays that can be traced back over centuries.
The first bird-of-paradise skins to arrive in Europe in the sixteenth century were quickly integrated into the cabinets of curiosity of the aristocracy and, despite the subsequent arrival of additional birds possessing neither legs nor wings, they became viewed as valuable commodities. It has been written that the legless and wingless nature of these skins led to both angelic images of the birds as well as depictions of them as monstrous, straying from the type-specimens previously described. The birds-as-monsters imagery prevailed long after European scientists confirmed their bodies possessed feet and wings, but the birds existed in a state of multiple forms in natural histories—some “objects” existing with and others without legs in different collections across Europe. In this sense, the way they were depicted depended not only on scientific evidence but rather on the historical imagery (Lawrence 2018 in Jardine and Spary 2018).
Example from the Birds-of-Paradise collection, Museum Mensch und Natur, Munich, Germany. Courtesy of Dieter Schön.
Citation: Museum Worlds 12, 1; 10.3167/armw.2024.120109
Within the exhibition space, such strands of cultural–historical knowledge production associated with the birds-of-paradise material archives will be explored. Additionally, scientific investigation, collecting practices, and ecological and behavioral studies of these animals will be woven together with their strategies of seduction. Visitors will be invited to dance and mimic the elaborate performances of the birds, as well as experience other senses of seduction, such as smell and sound. An augmented reality lens held over a map of Papua New Guinea will build a bridge for visitors to the living birds in their natural habitats.
The material archive will also be reconnected to Papua New Guinean past and present cultural practices through photographs and shared oral histories while they are juxtaposed with the European use of their feathers in fashion and the subsequent first conservation efforts imposed by a colonizer, in this case Germany, to limit the threat of extinction of these rare birds (Reichs-Kolonialamt 1913). The curation of the Birds-of-Paradise installation will engage “knowledge holders,” such as the Indigenous communities whose cultural and environmental practices have included these birds for generations and from which they were initially obtained, as well as the collectors and researchers, conservationists, and exhibition makers who have contributed to the discourse around these diverse animals. This practice of curation will reactivate a historical collection across multiple systems of being and knowing and inspire novel ways of thinking about human–environment relations.
Through these modes of engagement, BIOTOPIA seeks to reconfigure human–environment relations by presenting the various meanings inscribed in the birds-of-paradise “specimens” and contextualize their trajectories through different spheres of knowledge. In this way, BIOTOPIA curators take up the approach of framing life forms as active agents and storytellers, rather than as objects with no voice of their own (Elpers and Fenske 2019). These interstitial spaces are created to support an exploration of the living world rather than simply hold a mirror up to it.
Case Study 2: The “Science Exchange”
The Bavarian Natural History Collections (SNSB),9 the second largest natural history collection in Germany, are central to the future museum. The rich material legacy held in the collections not only reflects scientific information but embodies the relationships between objects, people, places, and the environment. Another physical space within the museum intended to break down barriers and offer a novel form of public engagement is the Science Exchange. As James A. Secord puts forth in Cultures of Natural History, the public is often distanced from the actual process of research in museum settings. “Museums look more like department stores, and knowledge is presented as a finished commodity,” Secord posits. Among the risks of presenting science as a finished product is that the dynamic nature of scientific discovery, along with its complexity and context within a societal framework, is lost (Hine and Medvecky 2015). Within the “Science Exchange” BIOTOPIA will create a novel interstitial ecology in which the process and practice of collecting and inventorying material archives of natural history can be made accessible to wider audiences.
Here, natural history collections are brought into public dialogue, intended to spark exchanges between scientists, artists, public participants, and others looking to make their own meaning in the unique museum space. In an attempt to build a bridge between display and the sociocultural world of the researchers and the knowledge holders in the objects’ places of origin, the Science Exchange poses questions such as “how can collections open up multiple understandings of the living world, allowing for discussions and debates about the rationale for collections and the human–environmental entanglements carried within them?”
A view of the Botanical Spirit Collection in the Bavarian State Collection for Botany, Munich, Germany. Courtesy of Samara Rubinstein.
Citation: Museum Worlds 12, 1; 10.3167/armw.2024.120109
An example of such an archive of human–environmental relationships is the “spirit collection” of the Botanical State Collection Munich, which has contributed to an inventory of the living world and is a rich example of what could be included in the Science Exchange. This is an environmental and historical archive of preserved plants and flowers in alcohol from the “Botanisches Museum,” a part of Munich's Botanisches Institut between 1914 and the 1950s, which was arranged according to general botany, systematics, and economic botany. Munich's Botanical Museum showcased a wide array of preserved plant samples, including pickled flowers, woods, stems, branches, palm fronds, dried fruits with dissected seeds and embryos, as well as other dried plant parts like bark or roots (Renner 2020). Collections of economic botany such as this can shed light on early notions of nature and culture and allow for new interpretive frameworks for the human–environmental relationships preserved within them (Nesbitt and Cornish 2016). The Science Exchange is envisioned as a forum for this kind of reactivating and reinterpreting of collections—also those with colonial histories—while multiplying their stories and leading to new methods of discourse.
Case Study 3: “Entdeckothek”
The Entdeckothek is another space created to bridge the gap between the museum and the environment beyond its walls and offer opportunities for novel forms of engagement, this time by fostering individual and community agency and meaning-making. The name is partially taken from the Swedish word lekotek (play library) founded in the 1960s to lend toys and equipment to children with disabilities (Juul 1984) and the German word entdecken, which means “to discover.” The concept is inspired by the Ann Arbor District Library's successful program of lending art prints to its patrons.10 BIOTOPIA's approach is to lend the museum community equipment and other things to carry out their own investigations into science, technology, art and design, or culinary experiments.
As one would borrow a book from a library, people can borrow tools of discovery and experimentation, allowing for an extension of the museum experience to the outside world and a new way to make meaning within one's environment. For instance, visitors would have the opportunity to borrow equipment to make their own birdsong audio/visual recordings, thereby extending the meaning they ascribed to the Birds-of-Paradise exhibition and taking agency for their own production of knowledge. By recording the mating rituals of birds in one's own environment, the material archive of the Birds-of-Paradise is re-activated and new human–environmental relationships open up. Similarly, kits for botanical investigations would be available in the Entdeckothek, providing the tools for self-exploration of the botanic biodiversity outside the museum walls. Tweezers, magnifying glasses, and specimen jars contained in this kit would allow people to connect personal meaning to the “spirit collection” by embodying the role of botanical collector and creating their own micro-inventory of the life surrounding them. The renewable resources found in the Enteckothek provide multiple engagement opportunities through which people can discover what inspires them and possibly can be contributed to existing material archives.
Rendering of the future space, “Entdeckothek,” planned for the BIOTOPIA museum. Commissioned by BIOTOPIA, rendering by Konstantine Landuris.
Citation: Museum Worlds 12, 1; 10.3167/armw.2024.120109
Conclusion
There is a transformation taking place in the museum landscape, a shift that reflects the changing role of museums as social institutions and places for multiple forms of knowledge production. This article has positioned a new concept for a twenty-first-century museum of life and the environment within the broader historical context, recognizing that current planetary challenges and societal changes require a paradigm shift and a reconfiguration of human–environmental relations. As shown, natural history museums typically reinforced the Western philosophy of segregating nature and culture epistemologies while, at the same time, keeping the layered histories contained in their collections mostly out of the public sphere. In so doing, the meanings and relevancies of material archives, as well as the cultural practice of doing science, all remained largely unexplored in exhibition practices. While this persists in both theory and practice today, museums are increasingly experimenting with ways to reactivate their collections and create novel forms of public engagement in order to question such long-held hierarchical knowledge orders. As the role of museums evolves, their material archives as portals to environmental and Indigenous knowledges also hold the potential for new forms of meaning-making, shifting the view of scientific collections from static to constantly changing. A plurality of stories and perspectives carried within material culture—including those on the process and practice of science—hold a record of human–environmental relations. This article posits that by unlocking their histories and inviting the public into dialogue, a new framework emerges for curating exhibitions and museum spaces as active zones of exchange.
BIOTOPIA has taken an interstitial approach to curating the museum that is reflected in the overarching concept termed the “Mesh of Life” as both a figurative metaphor and practical approach to the institution's mission, vision, and values. As demonstrated, the “Mesh of Life” establishes a framework that transcends traditional dichotomies and lays the groundwork for reimagining museums and exhibition curation as an interstitial practice. By creating what the authors refer to as “interstitial museum ecologies,” BIOTOPIA reconnects spheres of knowledge production and inspires cross-disciplinary exchanges within and between the museum's liminal spaces. Three case studies exemplify how the interstitial practice set forth here can activate natural history collections and foster novel forms of engagement. The first case study is set within the museum's permanent exhibition space and invites visitors to experience a birds-of-paradise archive. Through provocative juxtapositions and embodied interactions, the curators uncover the often-hidden pathways animals take to becoming “objects” or “specimens” and the human–environmental relations embedded within each of them. The second example is the Science Exchange, a hybrid space uniting traditional forms of collection display and contemporary dialogue, where the processes and practices of collecting and cataloging natural history become subjects of public discourse. The third case study is the Entdeckothek, a space dedicated to the loaning and borrowing of things for independent discovery outside the museum walls. The relevancy of the material archives and interstitial ecologies found within the museum is extended to the outer environment, in which people can actively design their own investigations and modes of knowledge production.
These case studies demonstrate new ways of interacting in museum spaces and bringing material culture to life. Through an overarching concept that includes the “Mesh of Life” as a metaphor for life's entangled systems and a framework serving as a practical guide for museum and exhibition curators, this article posits a novel approach to reconfiguring human–environmental relationships in a twenty-first-century museum context.
Notes
MfN Berlin pilot project “digitize! Live Science”: https://www.museumsportal-berlin.de/en/exhibitions/digitize-live-science/ (accessed 13 February 2024).
Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. “Digitize!” https://www.museumfuernaturkunde.berlin/en/museum/exhibitions/digitize (accessed 13 February 2024).
Personal communication with Ina Heumann (Email, February 2024).
Familien App Hessen. “Senckenberg Natural History Museum Frankfurt: Aha?! Research workshop.” https://www.familienapp.hessen.de/news/Senckenberg-Naturmuseum-Frankfurt-Aha-Forschungswerkstatt-2022 (accessed 13 February 2024).
Senckenberg Museum Frankfurt. “Aha?! Science Lab.” https://museumfrankfurt.senckenberg.de/en/exhibition/permanent-exhibitions/aha-science-lab/ (accessed 13 February 2024).
Senckenberg Museum Frankfurt. “Hit the Reef! A New Exhibition Module in the Coral Reef.” https://museumfrankfurt.senckenberg.de/de/ausstellung/sonderausstellungen/triff-das-riff/ (accessed 13 February 2024).
Naturkundemuseum Bayern, Botanisches Institut. “BIOTOPIA, For the Future of Our Planet: Bavaria Becomes Pioneer with Innovative Museum Concept.” https://biotopia.net/en/vision/mission-values (accessed 15 June 2023).
“Interstice.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/interstice (accessed 20 March 2024).
Bavarian Natural History Collections (SNSB). “Why Collections Matter.” https://snsb.de/en/category/why-collections-matter/ (accessed 15 June 2023).
Unusual Stuff to Borrow | Ann Arbor District Library https://aadl.org/catalog/browse/unusual (accessed 15 June 2023).
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