Guided Tour

The curators will explain their concept for the exhibition, with special reference to the Humboldt Forum, which is planned for Berlin’s historic center and will be one of the largest anthropological museums in the world.

About this they write: “The building plans are finished, but the debate about how the empty space should be filled – and thus about concepts that hold future promise in the collision of cultures – has yet to begin in earnest.

“In the exhibition ‘Der Traum vom Fliegen – The Art of Flying’ we attempted, with a view to this future ‘Humboldt Forum,’ to bring together diverse forms of knowledge about designing comparative cross-cultural exhibitions. We were concerned with the framing and isolating of prime examples of art and ethnography, with processes of minimization and maximization between art and technology, and with the problem of arranging objects that are in part considered modern and in part primitive or premodern.

“Working from a cultural studies perspective, we carried out experiments with technologies of throwing and flying and found that ethnographic and prehistoric objects are actually very modern. In principle, there is no difference between, for example, the aerodynamics of arrowheads and bomber jets, or the imagery of advertising leaflets and shamans’ stories. The traditional and the modern are both based on the universal biological phenomenon of the floating human consciousness, the equilibrium of which is susceptible to all manner of disturbances. Even highly modern technologies are driven, but also hindered, by ancient dreams. Here we happen upon a reserve of knowledge that could prove vital as we develop a new generation of energy and technologies. That which manifests itself in the benign cultural comparisons of an exhibition can at the next moment become a technology that helps us survive, or finally pushes us into the abyss.”