Using transversal pedagogies, conversational care, artistic experimentations, mutual listening, taking note(s), collections-based analysis and situated practices, the Transcultural Academy aims to unsettle the chrononormativity of museum-time. It builds on knowledge that emerges from a spectrum of encounters, for example, when art-historians, conservators, assistants and museum guards of SKD are in dialogue with artists, curators, designers, students and researchers of various educational backgrounds. The concept of “futurity“ operates as an analytical-pedagogical tool that is singular for each participant. It activates images, documents, displays or situations of the collections as portals to enter narratives of the past as intertemporal constellations in which claims for justice are real and possible in the present. Neither future nor past appear as monolithic blocks but compose an ongoing process in the making. The future is neither completely reinvented nor is the past conclusively closed. Rather, futures are nourished by the rhythms of the past: inventories, material science and archive studies are just as much a part of this process as losses, violence, absence, the undocumented, the repressed, and the excluded. The Academy is, thus, a set of exercises that does not seek final answers, but proposes scenarios that practise an “ethics of relations” (Bénédicte Savoy) in a future museum.

The Transcultural Academy “Futurities” consists of an assembly school with a cross-collections curriculum, an exhibition, art-research residencies and a film programme. Overall concept: Doreen Mende and Anna-Lisa Reith of the Research Department in conversation with colleagues.