INFRASTRUCTURING MUSEUMS

CHAPTER 13 INFRASTRUCTURING MUSEUMS Friederike Landau-Donnelly INTRODUCTION: REFRAMING MUSEUMS AS INFRASTRUCTURE This chapter uses the analytic of infrastructuring to conceptualize museums along the lines of what they do, rather than by what they are or are supposed to be. With a practice-oriented and activist approach to museums, this chapter challenges existing, conventional museum definitions. It thus engages infrastructure as a verb rather than as a noun. Infrastructure as a noun predominantly grasps concrete and tangible human, organic, technological and material facilities. In contrast, Matthias Korn et al. (2019: 12) describe infrastructuring as a verb that initiates a shift “from single artefacts and sites to the connectedness and entanglement between them”. Accordingly, infrastructuring is understood as an embodied process and practice, that shapes, and is shaped by, socio-spatial encounters between different actors – including people, places, objects, feelings, discourses, histories, herstories and memories. Hence, the chapter deploys the lens of infrastructuring as a malleable and mobile conceptual frame to understand and practices of collecting culture. This chapter argues that if museums are thought of as fluctuating formations that are articulated via practices of infrastructuring, we can better attend to different people and places, as well as the symbolical and material absences and presences of voices, narratives, traumatic and joyful memories, hopes and dreams, that together constitute cultural infrastructure. With the encompassing notion of infrastructuring the museum, existing definitions of museums can be radically challenged. When museums are approached via a lens of infrastructuring, it not only allows for more versatile and less spatially fixed imaginaries of museums, but importantly, also makes room for more socially diverse and intersectional practices of museum-making. The objective of this chapter, then, is to chart novel socially and spatially engaged museum practices as exemplary approaches of doing museums differently. 207 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781788214933.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press FRIEDERIKE LANDAU-DONNELLY For this purpose, the chapter discusses two projects of infrastructuring the museum, one from Ahmedabad, India, and the second from Berlin, Germany. To approach museums as activist exercises of infrastructuring, this chapter is situated in theories of political difference and conflict (Landau et al. 2021). Political difference, in a nutshell, distinguishes between the realm and practices of “politics” (which aim to create order and control with the goal to maintain and institutionalize power) and “the political” which extends beyond formalized and routinized institutions where the logic of politics resides. The political is more excessive, untameable and ever-present, embodying an irreducible dimension of conflict that cannot be contained or settled. Both overlap in real life, thus cross-contaminating each other. “The political” amplifies the analytical trajectory of infrastructuring to draw attention to the fact that any position of power, be it spatial or symbolical, is always conflictually and contingently put together, namely, infrastructured. In the context of reframing museums and practices of collecting and exhibiting culture, “the political” lens assists with moving beyond narrow and institution-centric understandings of museums. Interlaced with the infrastructuring of museums, a more conflictattuned, and thus political understanding of museums seeks to push museum scholarship and practice into a more activist practice. Inspired by cultural mediator and museum scholar Nora Sternfeld’s (2018) work on the “radical democratic museum”, such a conflictual understanding of infrastructuring museums foregrounds their contingent character, but also their potentially critical role in processes uprooting systemic injustices in the cultural field, and the urban cultural fabric more broadly (e.g., showing solidarity with refugees and migrants, gentrification-induced displacement, homo- and transphobia and institutional racism). Thus this chapter aligns with literatures that consider the museum as activist actor (Janes & Sandell 2019) or disobedient place (Message 2018). To ground such a conceptual proposition, the chapter introduces two examples of what infrastructuring museums can look like. First, the Conflictorium – Museum of Conflict in Ahmedabad, India, founded by artist, curator and dancer Avni Sethi. Located for nearly a decade in the vibrant urban neighbourhood of Mirzapur, the Conflictorium’s infrastructuring museal activities also take place in many other spatial settings. Second, the Women’s Walking Museum (WWM), which notably has not taken place somewhere yet, but as imagined by artist Yishay Garbasz and writer Maike Stein, has been growing as a counterproposition and queer alternative in comparison to the already existing Schwules Museum (Gay Museum) in Berlin. The chapter concludes with a poetic outlook on how future-oriented, infrastructured museums might contribute to intersectional and embodied practices of doing the museum. 208 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781788214933.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press INFRASTRUCTURING MUSEUMS TOWARDS A CONFLICT-ORIENTED UNDERSTANDING OF MUSEUMS Museums have historically maintained and continue to shape hegemonic representations of history as well as social values and norms about what is normal, civil or morally good (see Hetherington 1997). These charged processes of inclusion and exclusion – determining, in short, who and what matters in museums – undeniably point to the conflictuality of museums previously touched upon via the frameworks of political difference and conflict. In the quest for a conflictual conceptualization of the museum, Sternfeld (2018) has assembled a rich collection of essays challenging what a museum “is” according to the standards of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). The latter’s formally acknowledged definition, instituted in 2007, defines the museum as follows: “a museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment” (ICOM 2007: n.p.). Sternfeld (2018: 37) extracts five definitional parameters of the museum (i.e., acquisition, conservation, research, communication and exhibition) and inverts them into the following five parameters to advance understanding of the counter-hegemonic, or radical democratic, museum: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Challenge the archive. Appropriate (exhibition) space. Organize counter-publics. Produce alternative knowledge(s). Radicalize (cultural) education. With this reversal, Sternfeld turns the definition of a museum on its head, stretching it beyond common parameters of collecting culture, or agreed-upon conventions of what counts as a museum. This approach contributes to existing critiques of the standing museum definition, which (after undergoing transformation for a number of years), was redefined by the ICOM in 2022 as: a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing. (ICOM 2022: n.p.) 209 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781788214933.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press FRIEDERIKE LANDAU-DONNELLY The ICOM Standing Committee for Museum Definition, Prospects and Potentials (ICOM 2018) had initiated a global, participatory process to develop a new and arguably more inclusive definition already in 2018, but many of the suggestions were critiqued as being “too political” and “too vague”. Others found the museum charged with too many social, environmental and humanitarian tasks. While the 2022 definition incorporates some of these aspects (e.g., by explicitly naming diversity and sustainability as values museums “should” embrace), it does not, however, radically redefine what a museum “is”. In terms of infrastructuring, a singular definition – regardless how broad – might appear essentializing, controlling and constricting, reining in the logic of “politics”. In contrast, the logic of “the political” aligns with infrastructuring because it leaves room for ambivalence and difference in an effort to envision museums differently. At this critical junction of the future of museums, Sternfeld (2018) proposes the term “para-museum” which posits the Greek prefix παρά (besides/against) as a precondition for critical, counter-hegemonic museum formations. The para-museum does not merely reject the museum, but wrestles with the complicated continuous existence of museums. The paramuseum can be a real or imagined institution “in which fugitivity and continuity do not exclude each other, which enables us to think singularity and collectivity together, which simultaneously insists on criticality and pushes forms of reappropriation” (Sternfeld 2018: 64, translation by author). The para-museum thus both reproduces and contests conventional museum logics, logistics, spaces and institutions. In this sense, it seeks to intervene besides and between institutional museum practices and places without wanting to tear them down for good. It is here that the conceptual synergy with the logic of infrastructuring comes to the fore. In the para-museum, the place, presence and absence of objects and stories to be exhibited can be challenged, reconfigured and, ultimately, infrastructured. The para-museum forages new answers to the question of what museums could do for very diverse people, places and objects. The proposition of the para-museum resonates with conceptualizations of micro-museums (Gregory & Robertson 2018), post-museums (Watermeyer 2012) or placeless museums (Rojas-Pick 2014). Albeit differently imagined, these museal formations share a political trajectory to challenge hegemonic and oft-exclusive practices of collection, education and leadership. However, these accounts do not conceptually tackle the crucially conflictual dimension of museum space that a conflict-oriented approach emphasizes. Yet it crucially matters whether and how conflicts are embraced in museums (Landau 2021). In sum, the conceptual leverage of the para-museum pushes museum scholarship and practice to unsettle hegemonic notions, places and practices of museums. While it is an intriguing abstract proposition, the para-museum’s 210 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781788214933.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press INFRASTRUCTURING MUSEUMS biggest challenge is that it remains difficult to grasp empirically. In a quest to provide more concrete empirical footing for a conflict-attuned or paramuseum, infrastructuring is deployed as analytical lens to shed light on two projects that exhibit, embody and do museums differently. INFRASTRUCTURING MUSEUMS Beyond conventional associations of infrastructure with technological set- ups (e.g., sedate and bulky buildings, concrete jungles, autobahns, tracks, trails, arrows, as well as cables, data, flows of bits and bytes as information infrastructure), the “infrastructural turn” (Amin 2014) directs attention to the manifold socio-material, affective and more- than-human usages of infrastructures in urban and political life. Social and cultural theoretical accounts qualify infrastructure as matter of “promise” (Anand et al. 2018) or as matter of “politics” (McFarlane & Rutherford 2008). With regards to the potential of infrastructure to reimagine spaces of and for the commons, Lauren Berlant (2016) emphasizes the potential of infrastructure to develop new approaches to difference. This resonates with the analytic of political difference discussed above, to situate the infrastructuring of the museum as a political practice. Furthermore, it aligns with Michael Glass, Jean-Paul Addie and Jen Nelles’ (2019: 1634) observation of a renewed interest in the politics of infrastructure that positions it as “a setting and stake of social struggle”. Accordingly, this chapter extrapolates the political, poetic and activist understanding of infrastructure into the realm of critical museum scholarship and practice through the concept of para-infrastructuring. Extending Sternfeld’s suggestion of the para-museum, para-infrastructuring points to the diverse potentials for relation-building and place-making practices by different agents (including subjects, objects and things) in museums that exist besides or beyond their institutions or spaces. In that sense, the concept of para-infrastructuring adds to critical and counter-hegemonic approach to museums in its embrace of conflict, contingency and radical versatility. On the one hand, para-infrastructuring offers a decidedly spatial focus on museums because it is concerned with where and how infrastructured museums could materialize. The spatial politics of infrastructured museums unfold the museum not only as a contact zone (Clifford 1997), but also as a place where different meanings and actors meet, and mutually constitute their social positions and identities. More politically, the museum also comes to the fore as conflict zone (Løgstrup 2021; Mouffe 2016). In sum, para-infrastructuring the museum as a conflict zone creates an arena where culture is produced through tensions about presences, absences, voices and meanings. 211 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781788214933.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press FRIEDERIKE LANDAU-DONNELLY Para-infrastructuring suggests that museums do not have to “be” permanent to become (infrastructured as) museums. With such an open-ended, permeable approach, the infrastructuring – and queering – of museums can begin to unravel possibilities to envision and enact museums as places of activism, care and ever-present possibility for change and transformation in the spirit of the political (Sullivan & Middleton 2020). To see how queering as a verb interlinks with (para)infrastructuring in a conflict-laden museum landscape, the chapter now turns to two museums that differently infrastructure conflicts, activisms and care. INFRASTRUCTURING A MUSEUM FROM NOTHINGNESS: CONFLICTORIUM – MUSEUM OF CONFLICT The Conflictorium was founded in 2013 in Ahmedabad, India’s fifth-largest city, with over five million inhabitants. Located in the western province of Gujarat, Ahmedabad has experienced droughts and earthquakes in conjunction with historical and ongoing violent political and religious upheaval between Hindus (82 per cent of the local population) and Muslims (14 per cent) (Bobbio 2015). The Conflictorium is located on the east side of the Sabarmati River in the historic Old Town, designated India’s first World Heritage Site in 2017. It sits amid a Hindu Temple, a mosque and a Christian church in a two-storey building that once housed a hair salon and NGO storage space. As the Conflictorium name suggests, it does not only understand conflict as the opposite of peace, or as married to war, but rather conveys a significantly broader understanding of conflict as integral to life. With 30 exhibitions – including temporary and more permanent ones such as Moral Compass, Empathy Alley, Conflict Timeline, Gallery of Disputes or Sorry Tree – the museum educates not only about historical lines of conflict and the struggle for democracy in India, but also by appealing to visitors as the primary co-producers of the space (Figure 13.1). The museum relies heavily on participation and the co-design of museum objects, experiences and encounter. It challenges the archive by not collecting artefacts in the conventional sense of a museum definition (#1) and radicalizing the exhibition space by leaving it to participants to temporarily “fill” (#2). While the Conflictorium can be experienced as a lively and joyful space, it is also a space for mourning, reflection and the marking of absence and erasure in museums (Landau-Donnelly & Sethi 2022). The Conflictorium is nothing but what visitor-produced everyday objects, narratives, memories and feelings bring to the space. Furthermore, this (para-)museum invites counter-publics that may use the museum space for non-museum usages such as sleeping, playing hide and seek, chatting and 212 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781788214933.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press INFRASTRUCTURING MUSEUMS Figure 13.1 View of the permanent exhibition Empathy Alley at the Conflictorium Source: Conflictorium. phone charging (#3). Using diverse modes of communication and finding ways to invite atypical museum audiences into their space, the Conflictorium both seeks to produce alternative knowledge about what a museum can do for its local context (#4) and implicitly offers an alternative approach to cultural education (#5). In sum, this place enacts para-infrastructuring by expanding its activity to various urban (and rural) places, both local and international, concurrently a neighbourhood drop-in space and a location on social media, thus existing besides or beyond museum institutions or spaces. EMBODYING A MUSEUM WITHOUT WALLS: WOMEN’S WALKING MUSEUM The second case study of infrastructuring museums is the Women’s Walking Museum (WWM), initially envisioned by Berlin-based, British-Israeli trans artist Yishay Garbasz (2021), together with Berlin-based writer Maike Stein. In dialogue, Yishay and I have imagined how new/other/different museums can actively fight against ongoing systemic exclusion, erasure and exoticization of trans women artists in contemporary gallery and museum contexts (Landau-Donnelly & Garbasz forthcoming). We acknowledge that hierarchies of sexual desire and (in)visibility, in museums and elsewhere, are complex and sometimes create mutually aggressive forms of gender-related 213 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781788214933.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press FRIEDERIKE LANDAU-DONNELLY exclusion, oppression, objectification and vilification. Hence, we share the desire and dream to envision and embody cultural infrastructures otherwise, making space for vulnerability, individuality and care. It is important to note that the WWM project has not yet received cultural funding and in that sense has never claimed space in Berlin or elsewhere. Hence, the following descriptions of such embodied museum practice – which is neither reliant on, nor constricted by physical museum space – stem from personal thoughts, ideas and sketches by Yishay and Maike, and their continued imagining about the futures of museums. Yet the WWM will never be one discrete or fixed place; rather, it would act as a moving formation, a para-infrastructure par excellence. In contrast to conventional forms of museum display such as walls, cabinets, pedestals and screens, WWM aims to mobilize museum display onto the micro-political unit of the body. Imagined to first take place in Berlin, WWM sets out to intervene in an existing museum landscape of more than 170 museums in Berlin ranging from prestigious historical collections, national galleries to world-renown contemporary art museums such as Gropius Bau or Hamburger Bahnhof. Within Berlin’s rich urban cultural landscape, which remains attractive to tourists and locals alike, WWM seeks to address a heterogenous set of haphazard spectators or passers-by. The drive to critique existing museums in para-museal activity, comes from Yishay and some of her colleagues’ disappointing experiences with established institutions such as the Berlin-based Schwules Museum, which has long privileged cis-gender and gay male positionalities in museum exhibitions and management. This discontent with the Schwules Museum has, in part, crystallized in the WWM as a response to this insufficiently queer museum institution. WWM is intended to publicly mark that Schwules Museum is not a safe and welcoming place for every member of the inherently multiple queer community. With regards to the lens of para-museums, WWM acts in critical relation with an established museum, but simultaneously aims to work beyond the existing institution of Schwules Museum to request another, more inclusive gay museum – a queer museum – that also exhibits trans positionalities, is open to elderly and disabled artists, and artists without academic degrees, to name a few different social groups that are often marginalized within art scenes and art communities. With this leap, WWM envisions an intersectional museum space and practice, infrastructured by differently abled artist-agents. The WWM’s DIY, low-tech and low-cost easily replicable approach to mobile museum display proposes the body as a place and plane for exhibition. Makers of the WWM can choose to wear a harness, similar to a backpack, over their shoulders (Figure 13.2). After temporary exhibition walks, lasting different amounts of time, the harnesses are returned to the museum 214 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781788214933.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press INFRASTRUCTURING MUSEUMS Figure 13.2 Sketch of WWM exhibition views and harness Source: Drawn by Yishay Garbasz. organizers, and reused in the next iterations of WWM. The WWM can be an individual body’s exploration into public space, or a collective exercise of a million mini-museums walking into urban space (relating to the paramuseum’s aim #2). This infrastructured museum can appear in countless different forms and it is different every time it takes place (and can also take place in different places across the globe). Touching this embodied museum may be allowed – of course, only if the museum carriers are consenting. Panels with objects, texts and other artefacts can be carried and displayed; small objects, replica or informational materials might be available for take-away in the harnesses; perhaps spectators can write on it, maybe it speaks, maybe there are sounds, smells or tastes. WWM can be walked, wheelchaired, danced, crawled, painted, projected or Instagram-storied. This museum creates an ingeniously multi-dimensional, immersive museum experience: you can see 215 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781788214933.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press FRIEDERIKE LANDAU-DONNELLY the museum walking past you, you can see its back, its front, its face and you see it in movement. With this inventive intervention, museum space does not necessarily become redundant or wholly abandoned, but appears as a constantly moving object, dependent and in service of the carrier’s physical and emotional capacities and micro-curatorial choices. In sum, WWM variously takes and temporarily occupies urban space; this museum does not need walls. Its pieces can be safely stored at home, in accessible deposits spread over town, this museum infrastructure can be open 24/7 (para-museum #2). The harnesses themselves are bodily extensions of their volunteer carriers who can flexibly switch roles with visitors or passers-by to become part of the WWM. Arguably, “everybody” can become a museum-maker and everybody can experience museum content. In relation to the para-museum framework, WWM then broadly addresses counter-publics or “non-audiences” (#3) and offers an alternative approach to knowledge (#4) and education (#5). This radically experimental and open approach, however, also comes at various costs. The harness-carriers invest and exhaust their bodily capacity (and this might have different implications for different harness-carriers), which enables and invites some and could possibly (further) exclude others who do not feel welcome in museum settings. In sum, WWM attempts the para-museal critique against existing institutions, and radically expands the scope of who and what is to be exhibited in museums, who and what can make museums, who and what matters. It might add to the democratization of exhibition arrangement, build-up and dismantling. With these multiple practices of extension and embodiment of the museum, WWM resembles a practice of queer infrastructuring, which is committed to the interconnected struggles against sexism, racism and oppressive heteronormativity (Brochu-Ingram 2015). In the museum context, queer para-infrastructuring then actively works towards the decolonization of the museum beyond its Western-centric, hetero- and/or cis-normative and/or and masculinist historical baggage. Moreover, museum initiatives such as WWM attend to the much-neglected role of bodies and embodiment in the museum (Leahy 2016). Hence, if we take seriously Tiwari’s (2010: 18) claim that “it is the body that inscribes its thoughts, emotions, meanings, and memories onto the space, and in the process is transformed”, museum space is an embodied place that cultivates learning and understanding, gaining traction in efforts to critique, decolonize and queer museums. In sum, WWM proposes an alternative to disembodied or “cold” museum halls. By means of personalizing opportunities for display, and drastically multiplying choices of what, when, where and whom to exhibit, WWM de-mystifies the making and unmaking of museums, which all too often appear as immutable, majestic decisions that no mortal being could ever reverse. Aligned with the parainfrastructuring of the museum, WWM’s movements grow into and out of 216 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781788214933.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press INFRASTRUCTURING MUSEUMS museums – to intervene and uproot existing structures, privileges and places of exhibition, but also to create wholly new ones. OUTLOOK: MUSEALIZING YOUR SKIN In lieu of a conclusion, I have written a poem that shares a dream about museums of the future, conveying a sense of what visiting, dwelling and being in infrastructured museums might feel like: you wear this museum on your skin spotty museum display dark pores, a hair here and there the body (as) museum sometimes, this museum is tired, it might need to rest this museum is human, after all the infrastructured museum literally visits your limbs oh, this is what they meant by “access” they don’t need walls anymore, boxes fall flat this museum is a hosting body chosen family of people, places and things – infra-dance This chapter has outlined how the lens of infrastructuring can unravel new ways of projecting, presenting, and carrying culture into urban space. By interconnecting conceptual threads of conflict and political difference with existing accounts of activist and para-museums, the chapter has sharpened the notion of para-infrastructuring, those malleable museum formations between human and more-than-human agents, places and dreams that jointly critique existing hegemonic, and therefore exclusionary museums, but at the same time also do museums differently. The chapter has problematized the desire to define museums, which might reproduce power asymmetries. Instead, it has opened space for conflict, difference and queer practices, articulating museums as counter-hegemonic, activist spaces that engage in the fight against systemic marginalization, inequity and exclusion. With this provocation, the chapter extends discussions about museums not only as urban cultural infrastructure (Landau 2020b), but as para-infrastructuring entities that advance an intersectional understanding of care in and for museums. For museums to be infrastructured as spaces of care and solidarity, it is necessary to make space, time and resources available to accommodate vulnerability in all of its unevenly distributed forms (Butler et al. 2016). At last, these exercises of dreaming might help to rethink museums of the future as queer infrastructure from which ‘the political’ can take place. 217 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781788214933.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press https://doi.org/10.1017/9781788214933.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press