Curated Curiosity – reinstituting science museums as Wunderkammern after modernity 

A walk through a twenty-first century science museum is rarely straight. As in other museums, professionals working in science museums experiment with their curatorial practices: they shuffle their showcases, scutter through depots to find forgotten objects, and try to uncover unseen entanglements.

These curatorial practices often explicitly aim to revive “cabinets of curiosities” or “Wunderkammern”, the seemingly chaotic collections of naturalia, artificialia, exotica and scientifica in pre-modern Europe. Wunderkammern emerged in a period of categorical dissonance, when longstanding (meta)physical boundaries were challenged by (colonial) explorations and radical Renaissance thought. Though they may now seem chaotic, they were carefully ordered, letting their visitors wander and wonder through “spaces that could hardly be more didactic”, tailored to the cosmological and epistemic worldviews of their wealthy patrons.¹ Wunderkammern can be seen as the forebears of present science museums, institutions that tend to reify the boundaries fundamental to modernity: science/society, nature/culture, non-Western/Western. As science communicators seek to challenge these boundaries, the Wunderkammer is seeing a comeback.

Despite also being a clever marketing tactic, this revival of premodern strategies of (re)presenting knowledge carries wide implications, changing the dynamics between you –the visitor– and the museum.² Long considered educational bulwarks –they teach, you learn³– contemporary science museums effectively challenge this mode of education as dissemination. They leap across mental boundaries to interweave multiple epistemologies, with your own standpoint reflexively included. Rather than just places of learning, science museums become places where new associations are suggested; they curate your curiosity.

Even to hard-boiled historians and philosophers of science like us, such museums offer something new to associate. So come along on a meandering walk through four recently refurbished museums, the Berlin Humboldt Forum, University Museum Utrecht, Ghent University Museum, and Teylers Museum in Haarlem, a walk across national borders, monumental thresholds, and other boundaries that structure our world from the periphery of our gaze.

After Nature in the Humboldt Forum: Crossing coloniality and the authority of prescribed paths

Humongous as it is, the Humboldt Forum dictates that you start on the outside. You’ve just strolled past a fair share of monuments to Berlin’s history to get here, though few places broadcast Germany’s pasts more loudly than the massive Humboldt Forum, which opened its massive doors in 2020. As the Royal Palace, the building was inhabited by Prussian kings and an emperor and then neglected by anti-monarchist Nazis. Burned, but not destroyed in WWII, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) nevertheless replaced the building with a “People’s Palace” (also an asbestos palace).⁴ Finally, after countless controversies, it was rebuilt as massively and with the same exterior as the imperial palace. You cross the threshold and walk to the massive counters, and you pay… nothing. Naturally, your money wouldn’t matter much against the billion euros of tax money already invested in the place.

You could follow the signs to “Oceania”, or “Africa”. Making an effort in collaboration with–and occasional restitution to–indigenous peoples, the Ethnological Museum within the Humboldt Forum has rehashed its former triumphant display of colonial treasures into what is still a dubious display of colonial history, albeit a beautifully crafted and publicly accessible one.⁵ But before you lose your legs, all your friends, and your wits as you’re walking amongst countless spears, jewelry, and life-size boats and houses(!), you encounter a more convenient, more history-of-science-related exhibit.

The exhibition is housed in one large room, with hypermodern display cases suspended from the ceiling in a grid structure. This frames a motley collection of objects that includes scientific models (old and new), the unsettling flotsam of migration crises, and ugly reminders of natural resource exploitation.  Curated by the Humboldt Universität, the long-term, temporary exhibit After Nature is “a modern chamber of curiosities”, addressing entanglements of environmental changes and societal uproar through “positions from the history of science.”⁶

Rather than one straight path, there are four crooked routes to follow, each with a corresponding booklet and colour-coded exhibition texts. These offer readings from different perspectives such as feminist history of science or industrial and social history in the GDR. You’re too stubborn to be restrained to any preordained route, so you pick two routes, don’t stick to either, and end up wandering about. It works anyway; up to four different perspectives on one object makes for an indecent amount of reading but proves that any object always plays a role in a myriad of stories. The uniform grid of identical display cases doesn’t force any juxtapositions, but leaves room between objects instead. This allows you to make comparisons between cases and their inhabitants in countless permutations, the narratives coinciding within the objects.

Objects have layers: a cobalt ore is shown not just for its aesthetic and geophysical qualities, but also pointing to its role in the global supply chain of electronics, to the neocolonial invisible hand forcing children into the depths and to their deaths to extract them, and to the gaping hole this leaves in the earth where it once sat. These stories come to meet in this single rock and are woven through the exhibit, leading you through similar objects by way of handy colour coding. Walking the exhibit’s grid is the equivalent of dashing through a late-night cocktail party, overhearing conversations, having surprising encounters with new people, and meeting unfamiliar sides of people you thought you knew well.

You talk to your friends, they show you something along their own crooked routes, excited about an artefact you end up finding exceedingly dumb. You show them your favourite artefact. They shrug as well. You quietly salute each other’s enthusiasm as you realise you’ve both walked life very differently.

UMU: Presence and proximity of science and the past

Walking through the historical centre of Utrecht you notice that everything is much, much older than you. Some stuff is really old – probably mediaeval – like the Dom Tower, which has been cloaked in scaffolding since the first time you set foot in the city. Countless little plaques exalt seemingly insignificant buildings as monuments; though not as politically charged as in Berlin, history matters in Utrecht.⁷ You wander on, pass an overpriced coffee bar or two, and finally reach a glass façade growing out of the side of an oddly modern building. The building was recently nominated as a ‘young architectural monument’ for its rare integration of old and new; befitting a museum that seeks to combine academic heritage with contemporary science.⁸ The University Museum Utrecht (UMU) beckons you with its promise of transparency. 

After renovating, the UMU has rebranded itself as a “museum for curious people.” Its collection of instruments, models, and specimens is supplemented with cartoonishly large replicas, digital models with touch screens and physical game pieces, and a couch with a television guiding philosophical group debates. The museum’s interactive installations juxtaposed with the ensconced models of the past jostle conceptions of science as the authoritative result of a faraway practice. Like history is in Utrecht, science is right here; you can touch it. What ‘it’ is, however, is deformed under the pressure to induce participation. Making the scientific process graspable breathes life back into it, but the lively histories of the objects that serve as a counterbalance for the interactive models are muted in the process.

You enter through the small museum store with cute gifts and amateur science kits.  Despite acknowledging their rebranding efforts –you consider yourself a curious person, after all– perhaps you are not quite the intended audience here. You stubbornly decline to participate in the interactive trail that challenges its audience to investigate the content of solid boxes scattered throughout the building; you have little use for making pre-packaged discoveries. Up the steps and into the medical exhibit, which focuses on the ophthalmological work of Franciscus Cornelis Donders and the developments made in reconstructive surgeries in Utrecht around 1900. You are met with a large pair of eyes.

As you approach, eyeballs gaze at you from all sides; you’re drawn toward a pair that gleams with quiet elegance. Made of palm wood and brass, Christian Georg Theodor Ruete’s 1857 ophthalmotrope demonstrates eye muscle functioning.⁹ Turning the eyeballs causes the threads representing muscles to tense and relax, moving small brass weights along a scale that indicates the forces at work. In 1870, Franciscus Donders remarked that students sorely needed such models to grasp the intricacies of ocular motion, highlighting their educational function.¹⁰ However, ophthalmotropes not only provided much-needed instruction to aspiring eye doctors, but also served as the materialised form of arguments made by ophthalmologists in their gradual discovery and professional communication of the biomechanics of our ocular musculature. They played an indispensable role in academic discourse and the process of scientific discovery.¹¹

In the UMU, this lively past is not articulated. Putting scientific practice at the fingertips of visitors makes for a compelling narrative to which material objects are particularly suited. However, this act of curation inevitably compromises the complex roles these objects played in a tangled mess of scientific practices.  Ruete’s piece is towered over by a glass enclosure, bearing a sign that reads: “Pull on the cords. These are the muscles of the eye. All of these muscles have to work in unison. Can you make our eyes look up to one side?”¹²

You cannot, in fact, pull on the cords. The apparatus is out for repairs. It is still out for repairs a month later. The absence of the actual model was a pity, but did ironically underscore the dynamic reality of the scientific process.  Apparently representing our knowledge of the scientific process in a museum is a lively process  as well.

GUM: Fleeing from certainty to fleeting doubt

You begin your visit outside a colossal, grey university building that sends very few museum-like signals, barring a spectacularly tall outdoor anatomical graffiti painting. Inside you encounter the first hints of the museum’s extraordinary graphic design, unheeded by clusters of students hanging about. Stationed at the university campus, the Ghent University Museum (GUM), which opened in 2020, is tailored to students and staff passing by.

In the permanent exhibition space, seven large neon lights, beaming words like ‘CHAOS’ and ‘MEASUREMENT’, form the narrative nodes in the museum’s mission to offer a response to societal “doubts in science”. Refreshingly, this response is not a triumphal display of science as a glamorous march to truth, but rather integrates the conditioning of uncertainties as an essential part of scientific practice; the GUM subtitles itself “The Museum of Doubt”. Though we’ll encounter tricky aspects in this approach, the fact that the GUM – a merger of six antique university museums – has emerged with a tantalising and experimental message is commendable.

To be honest, you only get the GUM’s overarching message subliminally, as you are drawn in by tastefully lit objects assembled under the neon signs. Visiting each of these seven sections is like exploring seven remote islands with distinct ecosystems of objects that are not all strictly “scientific”. You may encounter artistic interventions that force you to observe extra carefully. Or you may see archaeological and anthropological objects juxtaposed with scientific instruments and natural historical specimens. Whether you come to these islands as a tourist devouring highlights, as a systematic explorer directed by a professional tunnel vision, or are guided along a thematic tour, you’re likely to experience something that feels intimate, authentic, and unexpected.

So you pause at a wayang kulit, a charming leather puppet that once figured in theatrical acts which formed a critical medium for maintaining non-literate cultural knowledges on Java. Curiously, this puppet is displayed under the same neon ‘KNOWLEGDE’ sign as leather-bound tomes and anatomical posters – (re)presenting very different kinds of knowledge carriers than the puppet, right? But, as you imagine the mesmerising rhythms of gamelan music setting the puppet’s arms and legs into their jittery motion he seems to ask you a question: how is my communicative choreography any different than the words and visual languages of scientific discourse?

While historians of science have endlessly dissected the strategies used to reinforce objectivity in scientific publications, their work now seems narrow-minded as this wayang kulit opens up a whole new medium for communicating knowledge—and you’ve only scratched the surface here. You can’t answer the puppet’s question, but later, when you read an article on “epistemic” scientific objects or see a “cultural” artefact displayed, you at least dare to doubt their categorical difference. You recognize the implicit science-society and East-West boundaries that you too would have uncritically absorbed before. Now these boundaries seem shaky.

But admittedly, they’re only shaky for you. The GUM has intensively collaborated with Ghent-based scientists, anthropologists, and other specialists, especially in juxtaposing ethnography and scientific collections, which wasn’t always easy. “It’s as if you force ethnography collections into a framework you impose yourself, outside of the context of origin”, a curator reflected.¹³ In displays like the one on wayang storytelling such debates are crystallised, and these contentious crystals can be traced throughout the permanent exhibition, but not so easily, often lost within or even in contradiction with the museum’s main narrative.¹⁴ Though its attempt to explicitly unpack scientific objectivity is a major contribution to rethinking science communication, the GUM still inherits fragments of the triumphal tropes within science communication that it sought to overcome. As Geert Vanpaemel has noted, the Museum of Doubt “seems to reserve the right to doubt for scientists”, not you.¹⁵

Likely reaching out more to non-scientists, a temporary exhibit Wunderkammer of Truth will open in late March of 2024, at the GUM. The exhibit will ask how scientists and citizens condition truth, and how “museums show you the truth… or not”.

Wherefore art thou, Teylers?

Teylers Museum stands proudly on the Haarlem waterfront. ‘The first museum of the Netherlands’ boasts an antique collection of scientific instruments and curiosa that were once used for demonstrations, but have been frozen in time. While change seems essential in present society, Teylers conserves Enlightenment values as a timeless entity. You marvel at the plaster relief of the mountains by Chamonix, the “actual peak of the Mont Blanc”, the sparkly rocks and the leather-bound tomes that look too heavy for a single person to handle. You walk on until you enter a room harbouring an odd reimagination of Pieter Teyler’s “Enlightenment ideal to advance society through research and education.”¹⁶

‘Surreal Science – Wunderkammer of Art and Science’ was an exhibition in Teylers in which Joris Loudon’s historical collection of scientific models was presented with, next to, and through the work of contemporary multimedia artist Salvatore Arancio in an attempt to see these objects ‘prised from their original function as teaching model’. Teylers Museum calls this “a fascinating cross-pollination of art and science”.¹⁷ While Teylers has always been a place where art and science cohabitate, an explicit cross-pollination of the two fields might offer some insight into whether they should be considered so distinct at all.

The very fact that Joris Loudon switched from being a contemporary art collector to one of handcrafted scientific models, makes it difficult to see these works as mere models. Loudon’s implicit selection criteria point to their value as objects of beauty, mystery, and encounters with alterity, irrespective of their accuracy. However, the sense of beauty and mystery of these objects is not independent of their role as attempts to grasp at alterity. The tangibility and proximity of the dividing zygote and the flowers usually found on the southern hemisphere astound you not because of their imaginative quality, but because of their claim to reality. Scientific models seem to tell us: for all intents and purposes, this is as things really are, now they are here for you to see.

The insistent juxtaposition of ceramics erupting from the intricate structure of the bones in a human foot, dreamy music and hazy, colourful, ambient lighting over a set of in vitro specimens and hand-blown seafood seems to cloud over the fact that nature is capable of astounding you ‘as is’. Hand-waving gestures at the supposed hard distinction between art and science, trying to show that sometimes science is more art than science, seems to rest on an understanding of art and creativity that is not subject to the same scrutiny as the way science is conceived of in this exhibit.

Juxtapositions of custom-made artificialia andantique scientifica question art-science boundaries more directly than in the GUM, but these distinctions as such are not explicitly challenged by simply raising questions as to why objects are placed into their respective boxes. Not doing so leaves the authority of science untouched, helping it to ‘beauty’ unquestioningly. By co-opting artistic practices as inherent aspects of science, the art draws away from the fact that not all scientific objects presented here are created equal: a skeletal foot becomes just as ‘natural’ as a glass jellyfish. You no longer have to wonder what happens in the conversion from ‘vivo’ to ‘vitro’.

As you leave the exhibit you stroll into another part of Teylers, encountering paintings splattered across the walls. There’s no question that this is “art”, right? Within Teylers’ foundation, boundaries of Enlightenment philosophy are cemented in brick and mortar. Like the older Wunderkammern from which it developed, Teylers has provided art and science a unique home within a single building for centuries, but unlike in those Wunderkammern, art and science are delegated to distinct rooms.¹⁸ Surreal Science (and several past and future exhibitions) set out to rethink art-science boundaries, leaving the existential matter at hand – the very walls within the museum itself – largely untouched.  Do these walls have any lasting merit? Perhaps, the monumental building would collapse without them.

Closing Considerations

Traversing three countries and four museums  is exhausting, so you take a seat and think about what you’ve seen. What did the museums attempt to do? They are not just trying to show you a parade of the most impressive achievements of the scientific industrial complex. Curators clearly agree that science is not simply a straight arrow pointing directly to a brighter future. With a handful of deft curatorial gestures, they twist this arrow by putting the boundaries between science and society, between practice and result, and ultimately between nature and culture at stake. Through juxtapositions of objects and narratives ‘clearly’ on either side of these divides, dividing lines are shown to be wonkier, more contingent, therefore allowing the museum and its visitors to reconsider where to draw them.

Faced with glaring differences, one may wonder: why are these objects here, why do they strike me as different in the first place? The curators thought it relevant to put them together, so perhaps you should too. From letting us tie disparate stories together at material nodes in narrative networks through the grid of open-ended objects in the Humboldt Forum, to making us directly compare the  entanglement of art and science in Teylers, our journey has faced various ways in which the plurality of stories housed by objects can be evoked. Similarly, through allowing for concurrent narratives by considerate placement of their collection, the two university museums foregrounded scientific practice as a thing that actual people do –and you can too!– intentionally messy in Ghent and invitational in Utrecht.

However, we must ask if these reanimated Wunderkammern succeeded at their attempt to show their boundaries of choice to be capable of osmosis. Often, yes, especially when thresholds were lowered to begin with. The GUM’s cunning injection of incongruous material amongst “scientific” objects raises more questions than the hard-wrought, singular attempt by Teylers. The endless opportunities for discovery in the After Nature exhibit are more titillating than the UMU’s strict pedagogy. In our view, these museums were most evocative when they let uncertainty flourish, reflecting the knowledge practices they examine. The narratives became more compelling when they left much of the storytelling to the visitor and objects themselves, while also addressing the museum’s position upon these boundaries. Understandably, in an institution like Teylers, which has been deeply implicated in Enlightenment constellations of thought for centuries, posing these questions is harder than in the fully refurbished GUM.

What does this do for you, the visitor? Perhaps you are no longer a visitor, but a user, who is less tempted to “learn” than before, but is tempted with making new associations beyond the preconceived boundaries that contemporary curation brings to a head. . Because you visited the After Nature exhibit, the piece of cobalt you see at Teylers may not only look pretty, but also invoke the Anthropocene and colonial violence. The GUM supplements a white-lab-coat-meaning of the word “science” with one that may include Javanese puppets. Curating curiosity means curating for engagement on the audience’s side; curiosity as the desire to know comes to be understood as participating in knowledge practices, confusing though they may be.

You unfurl your brow and lift the chin from your fist, daylight is fading and your friends have already gone on without you. It seems that you have sat here for quite a while, but in sitting down and pondering what you have learned while walking you now realise you had missed the most obvious lesson. You quickly recover and leap to your feet. On to the next museum.

This piece was edited after publication to change one of the included pictures at the request at the Utrecht Museum Utrecht.

---

1. For a history on the evolving ordering principles and didactics therein, see:  Eva Dolezel et al., Ordnen, Vernetzen, Vermitteln: Kunst- und Naturalienkammern der Frühen Neuzeit als Lehr- und Lernorte, Acta historica Leopoldina, no. 70 (Halle (Saale): Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina – Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2018) (quote on p. 7). Similar considerations are packaged into a broader study of pre-modern ordering in: Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750 (Zone Books, 2001), pp. 265 – 276. ↩︎
2. A comeback that has been a while in the making in the wider museological field as well: Sarah Wagner, Die Kunst- und Wunderkammer im Museum Inszenierungsstrategien vom 19. Jahrhundert bis heute, (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 2023). ↩︎
3. This text beautifully illustrates the idea of museums as grounds for disseminating knowledge to the public. They teach, you learn, and you learn that you should be grateful to science and its accomplishments, to be grateful to Western civilisation: N. H. Winchell, Museums and Their Purposes. Science.ns-18, pp.43-46 (1891) DOI:10.1126/science.ns-18.442.43. ↩︎
4. https://www.ddr-museum.de/en/blog/2023/the-palace-of-the-republic-between-splendour-and-controversy; This documentary (in Dutch) beautiful evokes the Palace’s atmosphere, its demolition and GDR nostalgia: https://anderetijden.nl/aflevering/447/Het-Palast-der-Republik. ↩︎
5. Happy voices have argued how the (Ethnological Museum within the) Humboldt Forum, like the British Museum,  has grown into a centre for constructive debate on Western colonial heritage. Unhappy voices have countered how it ironically inherits a colonial authoritative position over this heritage. Either way, the rebuilding of the palace has been (and continues to be) the topic of countless controversies, also on economical, architectural and bureaucratic grounds, which are briefly reviewed here: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/09/19/berlins-controversial-humboldt-forum-is-finally-complete, and collected here: https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/thema/humboldtforum. ↩︎
6. https://www.humboldtforum.org/en/programm/dauerangebot/exhibition/after-nature-16464/. ↩︎
7. Utrecht historians are involved in organised efforts to foreground this history to the people of the city, see for example the Utrecht Time Machine project. https://utrechttimemachine.nl/ Take heed specifically of all the funding bodies listed at the bottom, history matters in Utrecht. ↩︎
8. Selected along with much of the Uithof: https://www.utrecht.nl/nieuws/nieuwsbericht-gemeente-utrecht/gemeente-utrecht-wil-jonge-monumenten-aanwijzen/. ↩︎
9. Ein Neues Ophthalmotrop (1857), C.G.T. von Ruete. The subtitle reads: “zur Erläuterung der Functionen der Muskeln und brechenden Medien des menschlichen Auges”, to explain the functioning of the muscles and lens of the human eye. ↩︎
10. The Muscles of the Eye (1906), L. Howe. pp. 179-186 This fragment also treats of opthalmotropes not only in terms of their didactic purpose, but discusses their successes and failures in terms of whether or not they accurately represent the theoretical knowledge on eye movement. ↩︎
11. Simonsz, H., & den Tonkelaar, I. (1990). 19th Century mechanical models of eye movements, Donders’ law, Listing’s law and Helmholtz’ direction circles. Documenta Ophthalmologica, 74(1-2), 95–112. This article concisely captures the interplay between biomechanical theory, empirical findings and experiments, and the way these were argued for and communicated through the construction of models. ↩︎
12. From the permanent UMU exhibit “Uitdokteren” [from Dutch: ‘to figure out’, literally ‘to doctor out’.] ↩︎
13. Personal communication with Lyvia Diser. January, 2024. ↩︎
14. As for the wayang display: Wayang has a strained relation with Western frames of thought. What was a highly dynamic and situated mode of transmitting religious, historical and (contemporary) political stories (and many other difficult to categorise things) was reduced by Dutch colonisers and anthropologists to an idealised, static artform. One may argue the GUM’s display inherits parts of this functionalist violence by suggesting an inherently dialectical nature of scientific knowledge transmission versus a more unidirectional character of wayang, with only the former being constructive and approaching objectivity. See: Richard Schechner, ‘Wayang Kulit in the Colonial Margin’, TDR (1988-) 34, no. 2 (1990): 25–61, https://doi.org/10.2307/1146026. ↩︎
15. Geert Vanpaemel, ‘Twijfel aan de wetenschap? Wetenschap en kunst in het Gentse universiteitsmuseum’, Wonderkamer, december 2022. ↩︎
16. “…het nastreven van zijn ideaal van de Verlichting om door onderzoek en onderwijs de maatschappij te verbeteren.” Stated in the current constitution of the Teylers Foundation, based on a somewhat liberal interpretation of Pieter Teyler’s last will, see https://www.teylersstichting.nl/. ↩︎
17. https://www.teylersmuseum.nl/en/visiting-the-museum/what-is-there-to-see-and-do/surreal-science. ↩︎
18. Kunst-, naturalien-, and wunderkammern championed close cross-pollination between art and science. “Fusion objects” were  particularly valuable and orderings that emphasised types of continuity between nature and culture were expressed (metaphorically)  in design and architecture. See section 3 in Dolezel, Ordnen, Vernetzen, Vermitteln. ↩︎