Cooperation Project "Cultural Techniques of Collecting

From collecting, techniques, media, and institutions have emerged that are of significance far beyond individual collections: techniques of preparing, conserving, classifying, comparing, and commenting; media and institutions such as necropolises, cabinets of curiosities, museums, libraries, encyclopedias, databases. Collections create constellations and open, regulate, or close access points; they serve to affirm collective identities, represent power, and produce knowledge.

This raises questions about the connection between collecting and violence, the illegitimacy of appropriations, and the (im)possibility of 'healing' them. It also raises questions about the disorder and dispersion that collecting brings, the various entanglements between cultural and economic capital, and the interweaving of materiality and immateriality. These often unsettling questions go far beyond the provenance of individual objects or classes of objects; they concern the cultural virulence of collecting as a whole.

The Gotha collection ensemble, which includes rich, globally oriented object and art collections from the Early Modern period to the 19th and 20th centuries (Friedenstein Foundation Gotha), a library with unique historical manuscript and print holdings (Research Library Gotha of the University of Erfurt), as well as one of the world's most significant geo- and cartographic archives (Perthes Collection) spanning from the 19th century through the 'Third Reich' and the GDR to the post-unification period, forms a predestined field to reflect on these questions in a systematic and historical perspective. The collaborative project "Cultural Techniques of Collecting" (Erfurt—Gotha) aims to establish a sustainable research infrastructure that connects the Research Group "Cultural Techniques of Collecting" at the University of Erfurt and other researchers at the universities of Weimar and Jena with various collection institutions in Gotha. This is intended to make the unique collection ensemble more accessible, especially for young researchers, who have special opportunities for qualification in the practice and theory of collecting and specific collections.