"Nature and Technology in the Anthropocene": Curating a Special Exhibition for the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany
The concept of the Anthropocene as geological era and new frame of thinking about humans’ role on Earth holds many opportunities, but it also challenges the way we think about museums and their role in society. Analogous to its calling for interdisciplinary sciences and research, the Anthropocene demands a new understanding of museum types and turfs, calling for a bridging of historically grown boundaries between museums of technology, history, art and natural sciences. On a practical level, curating the Anthropocene means that museum curators, collection managers, educators and designers need to tackle issues and topics on a vastly extended temporal and global scale. New concepts of collecting and exhibiting are needed in an age of globalization and digitalization, some of which are bound to meet with fierce resistance, as they seem to call for a complete reorganization of the museum landscape. The Anthropocene also fluidifies the boundaries between past, present and future and problematizes the museum not just as storage of knowledge, but rather as active producer and negotiator of knowledge in the Anthropocene as an era of the here and now, connected to the geological past and future. Finally, for museums of technology in particular, the Anthropocene opens up the discussion about the presentation of technologies in their full ambivalence – as part of many environmental problems and possible solutions. The contribution to the roundtable discussion focuses on these aspects by presenting the approach and concept chosen for a special exhibition covering 1.200 square meters (ca. 13.000 square feet), opening in October 2014 at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany.