Black Mountain and Beyond – Research Practices between Universities and Museums

In 2013, everything began with a few general questions. How can universities and museums benefit from each other? How can they complement one another? Where are their thresholds, and where are common grounds? What is their educational agenda? And finally, can they unite theoretical and curatorial endeavors into, well, what exactly? How could they actually bring theory and practice together? In other words, how could students, scholars, curators, and artists cooperate within one project? As a small team based at the Institute for Theater Studies at Freie Universität Berlin—namely Verena Kittel, Annette Jael Lehmann, and Anna-Lena Werner—we wanted to find answers for these questions, and started an in-depth conversation with a part of the curatorial team of Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, about opportunities to collaborate. The university is in need of practice, of social experiences with people, and of the expertise of preserving and exhibiting. In turn, the museum is in need of research, of alternatives to public programs, and of creating a fundamental analysis of art historical events, aesthetic questions, and philosophical contributions. On both sides there was not only a desire for supplementation, but also a frustration about the growing economization and instrumentalization of educational institutions. What we were looking for might sound idealistic, but we later figured that this attribute was exactly key to our aim: developing a collaborative practice-based research.