Reflecting on Module 2: Notes from Berlin as a Landscape of Memory

Module 2 brought Fellows to Berlin for six days. The intention was not to survey the city's museum landscape but to use it as a testing ground for the ideas we had wrestled with in Module 1. Each day posed a different question about how institutions hold memory, exercise power, and imagine alternatives. What follows is a reflection on how those questions spoke to one another.

Agency Before Critique

We began at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) with 'Tirailleurs: Trials and Tribulations', an exhibition that did not merely display history. It interrogated the curatorial choices behind it. How do we represent erasure without reproducing it? The show modelled strategies for research and agency while forcing us to confront critical gaps: Who navigates this history? Who finds it legible? Who remains excluded?

The afternoon shifted inward as a chance for the group to come together and set some intentions to frame their week ahead. Peer group coaching asked each Fellow to surface a real challenge from their own practice and field feedback from colleagues. A workshop on the museum of the future demanded we think not just critically but creatively: How might we design institutions that redistribute power rather than just critique it? The logic was simple: You cannot dismantle institutional power if you do not first understand how it operates through you.

Memory as Infrastructure

Days 2 and 3 immersed us in Berlin’s memory infrastructure—the state-sanctioned sites where Germany confronts its own violence. The Stasi Museum, Federal Archives-Stasi Records Archive, Berlin Wall Memorial, Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz, Topography of Terror and Sachsenhausen presented no single narrative. Instead, they offered competing and sometimes clashing responses to the same problem: How do we remember what we would rather forget?

Some sites are monumental, state-run and architecturally oppressive. Others, like the Aktives Museum or Office for Everyday Culture, thrive in universities and civic networks. The Jewish Museum and the memorial landscapes of the Tiergarten added another layer: Memory is not just preserved—it is performed, walked and felt. No single institution could hold the full weight of remembrance. Each site became a piece of a larger puzzle, its edges deliberately left unfinished.

What bound them all together? Documentation. The records we keep. Who gains access. How interpretation shifts under new evidence, witnesses or political winds. Conversations with Sven Behrend, Dr. Ulrich Mählert, Dr. Juliane Haubold-Stolle, Dr. Andrea Riedle, Dr. Astrid Ley and others made one thing clear: Nothing here is settled. These institutions exist in perpetual motion, their meanings renegotiated with every new archive box opened, every testimony recorded, every law rewritten. Accountability is not a destination—it is an ongoing process.

And yet, a tension emerged. Resistance, fundamental to democracy, is conspicuously absent from Erinnerungskultur. Commemoration too often defaults to institutional power, passive victimhood or abstract ideals, sidelining the messy, lived acts of defiance that shape history. This is not accidental. Memory is selective by design, and commemoration frequently serves stability over justice. Museums, as its gatekeepers, must ask: Do we amplify voices or merely reinforce silences? The challenge is to decentre dominant narratives, platform marginalised histories and confront the physiological and psychological toll of systemic injustice—not as an afterthought but as core to our mission.

Networks as Method

Thursday's Forum Day at the Museum für Naturkunde widened the frame. Esme Ward delivered a keynote connecting memory culture to broader questions of strategy and institutional purpose. Fifteen roundtables ran across two sessions, bringing Fellows into conversation with museum professionals from across the network.

This was the day that expanded the programme beyond the Fellow cohort. It grounded the week's intellectual work in relationship-building. TheMuseumsLab is a network, and the relationships built across those tables carry into the residencies and beyond.

Architecture, Collections, and Our Ongoing Work

Friday was the day where the module's threads converged most forcefully.

The morning began at ESMT Berlin with a workshop on leadership strategies. Fellows explored ethical leadership and adaptive decision-making. This session was paired deliberately with what followed.

The group then walked to the Humboldt Forum. Tarek Ibrahim guided them through the building's exterior and interior, introducing its architecture and contested history. Stone, sightlines, and layout encode decisions about whose history occupies the centre. Fellows then had time for a self-directed visit, examining how the Forum approaches difficult questions of collecting and display ethics.

After welcome remarks from Han Song Hiltmann and Henrietta Lidchi, four parallel workshops opened:

• 'Restitution and Provenance' with Sophia Bokop traced object histories and what accountability looks like.
• 'Plaster Casts and Human Remains' with Isabelle Reimann and Dr. Veronika Tocha tackled the ethics of sensitive collections.
• 'Intertwined Memories' with Patrick Helber and Assumpta Mugiraneza introduced a collaborative project linking the Shoah and colonialism in Berlin Palace and ethnological collections, with partners from Rwanda, Namibia, Jamaica, Israel, and elsewhere.
• 'Decentering the Object' with Jocelyne Stahl explored community perspectives and collaborative storytelling through the Tanzania exhibition.

Each path addressed a different dimension of responsibility. Together they formed a composite picture. You cannot ethically display what you have not contextualised. You cannot claim representation if you centre objects rather than the people and the relationships they carry.

An Alternative in Practice

Late afternoon, the group walked to BARAZANI.berlin, an interdisciplinary collective working with decolonial questions and practices. The name comes from Kiswahili and means "forum": a space of gathering, discussion, and adjudication. Rather than drawing on European frameworks, Barazani deliberately centres perspectives that colonialism has silenced and continues to silence.

The collective hosted our 'Digesting and Reflecting' workshop over shared food. Their commitment to an honest reckoning with intergenerational traumas, an ethics of relations built on justice, respect, and symbolic as well as material reparation, was not presented as theory. It was enacted through hospitality. After hours inside the Humboldt Forum, sitting in a space that refuses its logic made the day's tensions tangible.

Where the Lines Meet

Saturday closed with open reflection and evaluation at the Museum für Naturkunde as a chance to debrief and come together as a group once more. Many felt that while we still had questions, they were now clearer than when we first set out together on Day 1.

Two key arcs held across the six days. The first moved from internal to external, beginning with personal leadership and expanding outward to institutional structures and networks. The second ran from institutional critique to alternative practice, positioning the Humboldt Forum and BARAZANI.berlin as diverse visions of how cultural institutions might reposition themselves.

If Module 1 provided conceptual grounding and Module 3 offers comparative practice in Kigali, Module 2 bridges both. It confronts structures, negotiates ethics, and immerses participants in alternative spaces they actively move through.

The Author

Matthew Watts
Curator at TheMuseumsLab
Museum für Naturkunde Berlin