(Un)Making Monuments – Museum of Colonialism (English)

The contribution »Reinterpreting the Humboldt Forum: From colonial museum to museum of colonialism« has been created as part of the block seminar Rethinking Monuments: Ideology, Narratives and Artistic Interventions, in which students at Freie Universität Berlin addressed the question: How can the cultural heritage of historical monuments be critically examined and reinterpreted?
In conversation with architect Fabian von Ferrari and art historian Christoph Balzar, the students discussed the duo's project idea »Museum des Kolonialismus« (Museum of Colonialism), which envisions renaming the Humboldt Forum and artistically recontextualizing its exterior surfaces - i.e. the replica palace façades - using modular container architecture.

In the kitchen of BARAZANI.berlin, an interdisciplinary action space at the city's center in the Nikolai quarter opposite the Humboldt Forum, the students, together with Christoph Balzar and Fabian von Ferrari, examined the symbolism of the former Prussian royal house. They discussed the possibilities and potentials of using container architectures as sites for artistic interventions, exhibitions and public dialogues, with the aim of breaking up the rigid colonial monumentality of the building.

The Vision Behind the »Museum of Colonialism«
A contribution by Christoph Balzar & Fabian von Ferrari

The Humboldt Forum, located in the reconstructed Berlin Palace of the Hohenzollerns, stands as a prime example of the debates surrounding colonial continuities in German cultural policy. Despite widespread criticism, ethnological collections from colonial contexts are exhibited there in a representative building of the former German Empire. The violent conditions of their acquisition are thereby aesthetically obscured.

The project »Museum of Colonialism« positions itself as a deliberate intervention into the symbolic order of the Humboldt Forum within the reconstructed palace. (1) It opposes the museum's mission, which aims to glorify the Humboldt brothers through an identity-political lens. The goal of the project is not to repair the Humboldt Forum as a supposedly cosmopolitan cultural institution, but to bring its operations to an end and establish an entirely new mission within the existing museum structure.

The intervention proposes that colonial history should no longer be treated as an isolated topic, but rather become the central interpretive framework of the site. In doing so, the previously constructed narrative of a supposedly humanistic Prussian-European identity is deconstructed in its ideological function. The existing museum is thus to be transformed into a confrontational space where colonial guilt and postcolonial responsibility can be addressed authentically. (2)

This systemic shift is architecturally realized through a modular container structure that encircles and thereby reframes the palace. This structure, composed of freight containers in ever-changing configurations, serves to critically frame the authoritarian logic of representation embodied by the palace. It alludes to the colonial continuities of globalization and to current systems of trade and exploitation. By disrupting visual axes in the urban space and interfering with the symmetries of the baroque architecture, it offers aesthetic resistance to the monumentality of the existing museum.

In the »Museum of Colonialism«, hegemonic narratives are replaced by a polyphony of diverse, marginalized perspectives. Drawing on institutional critiques such as those by Andrea Fraser and Fred Wilson, as well as the anti-monumental practices inspired by James Young, the »Museum of Colonialism« explicitly opposes both the existing exhibition system and the monumental architecture of the Humboldt Forum in the Berlin Palace. In doing so, the supposed stability of the white German narrative is fragmented and relativized through open and plural forms of storytelling within the freight containers.

In workshops and seminars, students developed concrete strategies for utilizing the container architectures. These include a deliberately disorienting container village with a school, a »room of frustration«, participatory projections onto the palace façade, live broadcasts from former colonies, as well as spaces for performances, assemblies and a community kitchen. Central to all of these approaches is that the containers are curated in a decentralized and non-hierarchical manner, and are explicitly open to migrant, postmigrant, Black, Indigenous and queer-feminist perspectives.

Museum of Colonialism – A Feature

In this experimental audio feature, presented in German, Balzar and Ferrari have their say as well as the students, who present creative ideas with which the containers could be filled. The project is seen as an example of a dynamic and open culture of remembrance that reflects and transforms historical power structures. With contributions by Christoph Balzar, Fabian von Ferrari, Johanna Kehne and Tom Lagodny.

Concept and production by Naira Estevez

The block seminar Rethinking Monuments: Ideology, Narratives and Artistic Interventions was taught by Marla Heid in the winter semester 2024/25 as part of the CRC Intervening Arts at Freie Universität Berlin. It explored how artistic practices critically engage with existing monuments and propose alternative forms of remembrance in public space.

The projects are independent interventions, research-based works and conceptual proposals. They reflect individual engagements with politics of memory, historical representation and spatial contexts and demonstrate the diversity of artistic strategies at the intersection of monuments, publicness and the present.

Footnotes

(1) Contribution by Fabian von Ferrari and Christoph Balzer to the International Call for Ideas for the Contextualization of the Reconstructed Façades of the Berlin Palace

(2) Initiative »Schlossaneignung« (Berlin Palace Appropriation Initiative)

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