| Summary: | In the basement preservation lab, figures were lifted onto cloth by the German head of cultural policy with gloves while the Nigerian delegation joined to discuss their return. The empty gallery rooms above them, reserved for these Benin Bronzes, still had white pedestals wrapped in plastic, pumps of conditioned air preserving the space for artifacts never to arrive. Of course all of the Bronzes were soon repatriated home with thousands of other objects, leaving behind an empty Ethnological Museum in the middle of Berlin.
Once a People’s Palace, now a conglomerate of private-turned-public Wunderkammers, the recently completed Humboldt Forum building was the result of hundreds of millions of federal, city, and non-profit Euros. The shoddily rebuilt Prussian Palace, encrusted in re-cast princes and cream paint splashes, demands innovative reuse from its expensive vacancy.
To (mis)use Fukuyama’s words, perhaps the end of history means that we are now allowed to leave linearity and enter a multiplicity of post-history. In this state of emerging time, used to describe the postcolony by Mbembe as an “interlocking of presents, pasts, and futures”, one can only contend with this thick density of data through fragmentary encounters.
As the German Federal Ministry assesses lost revenue to the mass repatriation, Preservation Agency LLC has been asked to develop options for the building’s future. The Acts that Agency LLC presents to the board are Boym’s Architectures of the Off-Modern, or structures that exist in the murky space parallel to the past.
Each Act uses tactics of care to interrupt the projective sequence of demolition; Act I with slab cuts and scaffolding that slow the Humboldt Forum’s construction; Act II rehabilitating the Palast Der Republik with layers of fireproofing and insulation; and Act III gathering the bombed rubble of the Stadtschloss in netting, rebar, and glass. These tactics riff on Gissen’s concept of subnature by perpetuating architecture that exists on the margins of finality, cleanliness, and enclosure.
Agency LLC’s final proposal is not another building, but an epilogue of tactics developed from these Off-Modern Acts. The question of emptiness is answered with actions on the building itself, nonlinear acts that set up hospitable encounters through time as a proposal for its future.
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