Imani Jacqueline Brown, MARCH 02: Black Ecologies (St Louis, Missouri: MARCH, 2021)

A facsimile, the Humboldt Forum reconjures the demised Imperial Palace in gleaming definition. Omissions set in stone, memories are precluded that question its revival, suppressing stories of removal, revolution, republic, rebellion and reunification.

Funded with right-wing prosperity, these absences gild the edifice with false continuity. Drawing the past into the present, history is remade as uninterrupted, continued and colonial. The Museum resumes and glorifies German Imperialism, reforming the refuge from which genocides were ordained and Africa was conferred into a European resource. Remade is a monument once funded by slavery and adorned with minerals hacked from subjugated lands.




The façade encloses a landscape of stolen lives. The Humboldt Forum imprisons countless objects captured by the Prussian Empire, trophies to its violent expanse. Forcibly displaced, far from their origins, items are severed from use and stripped of names, makers, rituals, climates, stories and essences. With voices erased, they are spoken for. Objects are thus objectified by an accumulation of operations; renamed, categorised, fumigated, disembodied, omitted, accumulated, concealed, incarcerated, and exhibited. They are silenced and re-presented along a linear past that suffocates around the building, freezing cultures in an immutable state of history, as backwards others to be studied, owned and controlled.




Colonial imaginaries are preserved by the restored façade, as the stone skin petrifies the looted emporium. Suppressing daylight and cooling air, history is entombed in stasis, its construction immutable, conserved and unquestioned behind glass vitrines. The new facade of Humboldt has become a space of regulation, of light, humidity, sound, views, perspective, time, perception, history, self.




The exterior of the Humboldt Forum and the objects it encloses entwine and refract, heightening their segregations and suppressions. To appropriate the castle is therefore to reconsider it from the inside out. 

‘The Museum of Nothing’ understands the Forum as a reservoir of memory imprisoned in its simulacra skin. In principle, we propose no physical change to the exterior of the building. Its material, political and environmental costs weigh too heavily already.

Rather than adding to this accumulation of mass on the exterior of the building, the project demands emancipation of its entombed objects over time, slowly repatriating the entire museum. Objects are freed from their hermetic confines, passing out of newly opened windows and doors, returning to the places from which they were violently extracted. The Museum therefore metabolises itself, a place of accumulation now a locus of dissemination, stasis to life. 




As the contents are restituted over time, vitrines remain, filled with absence and potential. Lacunas and caesuras usurp the (neo)colonial rhetoric of continuity and separation; meaning no longer set in stone but mutable, ready for new inscriptions. The threads of objective history are undone, inviting visitors to occupy and interpret the gaps with narratives of ambivalence and simultaneity, forming a dialogue where there was once soliloquy. Here, the authority of colonial history becomes the ambiguity of new stories made in its absence.




The Museum of Nothing allows the same building to be viewed in an entirely different way. Emptying its walls reveals the whispers in the corners. The rituals of previously unseen bodies become underscored by the absence of objects and exhibitions. Security workers, cleaners and ticket counters resonate through depleting corridors. Tasked with upholding the (neo)colonial edifice, these peripheral bodies are all-too-often drawn from the places from which the Museum’s contents once originated. Echoing through emptying halls, the dis-membered museum heightens their presence to reveal the absent presence of colonialism in Berlin, that continues to condition both meaning and matter. Liberated once more, these forgotten bodies are free to sing and dance within the walls of the facade, background figures brought now to the fore.

No longer enclosing frozen tales, the façade is now unburdened by the need to regulate, to shade, to cool and to silence. Windows can be opened and doors left ajar, inviting the city in to appropriate its terrain. The facade becomes no longer a seal but a threshold - a space where new knowledge is formed, in the absence of the old. Authority becomes Ambiguity