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In the next few issues, we look at a number of pioneering positions in the international museum world. We begin with Clémentine Deliss, curator and publisher of the highly praised magazine Metronome, as she completes her first year as director of the Museum of World Cultures in Frankfurt.‘Oh, I had not even noticed that.’ A surprised Clémentine Deliss pulls on the old-fashioned blinds in the historic villa that she moved into not long ago, testing them. The sun is not shining through, but the new occupant still wants to try out the newly discovered protection from the sun.Testing and investigating seem to be her motto – for everything. Deliss reports that she has promised herself that as the new director of the Museum der Weltkulturen, founded in 1904, she will redefine the museum in all its facets, from the collections, the building, to the interior, the layout, and its public function. ‘For me, this museum is a jewel. It has 67,000 objects, 120,000 images, a massive library of 50,000 books. It has enormous potential, if you look at objects as unfinished texts, in the Barthes sense, rather than as completed, hermetic works. These artefacts are true blueprints for the future production of knowledge. As such, they are a stored code, to quote Alan Kaprow. In order to decode them, it requires an experimental readiness on the part of the researcher, maybe even signal scrambling (as Kaprow calls it) between roles and disciplines.’ She knows that she has a lot on her plate. ‘Ethnological museums are still not sufficiently recognized as locations where new ideas are produced. But that is the reason for their initial existence: to convey ideas, in this case to the citizens of Frankfurt.’ Africa, America, Oceania, Europe, Asia and Southeast Asia are the geographical centres of gravity of the municipal museum, which was expanded in the 1930s with the contemporary art collection of the ethnologist Leo Frobenius. In professional circles, the collection is considered outstanding, but since World War II, there has been no space to exhibit it. Deliss, an internationally recognized curator and independent publisher in contemporary art, was recently appointed to breathe new life into the museum. Her main role, as she explains, is to make the collection once again into the focal point, but under broader, more spacious conditions. ‘The moment I started thinking about what a museum of world culture could mean in the twenty-first century, it became incredibly exciting. What I think is important is that these objects are recognized again as prototypes: They have not yet finished speaking about what they are. No object in the museum can be regarded as useless.’For Deliss, the shift from art to a museum of ethnology is not a strange one. Overstepping the boundaries of disciplines and institutional borders is part of her life. Born in London in 1960 as the daughter of a French mother and Austrian father, and living in London, Vienna and Paris, she initially studied contemporary art in Vienna. From her interest in artists such as Joseph Kosuth, Susan Hiller, Lothar Baumgarten, and Michael Buthe, she began reading ethnology and ethno-psychoanalysis, most of which was published in Frankfurt by Qumram, Syndikat or Suhrkamp. As a result, she decided to study anthropology and wrote her dissertation on the French ethnologists of the 1930s and their famous Dakar to Djibouti expedition. She met Michel Leiris and was in Paris as the same time as James Clifford and Paul Rabinow, all three responsible for shifting debates in anthropology, whether in the 1930s or 80s. Deliss, however, missed her connections with visual culture and artistic practice. Since then, as a curator, she has been involved primarily in creating different platforms for ‘backstage’ research into artistic production, including such exhibitions as Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa (in collaboration with Salah Hassan, Chika Okeke & David Koloane, and El Hadji Sy at Whitechapel and Konsthalle Malmö in 1995-6), with the independent organ Metronome, which played a role in Documenta 10 and Documenta 12, and with the art research collective Future Academy, that took place from West Africa to Australia. She is critical about every discipline in which she has been active. ‘There are orthodoxies in museums of modern art and there are orthodoxies in museums of ethnography. One of the orthodoxies in the ethnographic museum is the adherence to the polarity between the type of exhibition that presents ethnographic artefacts as art and those that present them in a contextual way, providing lots of information about the cultures. That orthodoxy really needs to be really thrown out, as quickly as possible. It is extremely helpful to have ethnographic objects recognized as art for a whole number of legal, financial, and conservation reasons, not to mention basic respect for other cultures. That means recognizing that we are all on the same level everywhere, that these aesthetic productions are extremely important, have a discourse of their own and have produced discourses outside of their own location. I do not want to instrumentalize these objects out of some kind of sense of didactic duty. That is not what it is about. They are, to quote Pontus Hulton, energy sources. I would even say they are capital, and we can do a lot more with them than has been done lately.’Being able to work slightly outside the fast pace of the art business is something she sees as an advantage ‘Personally, I feel I can be much more experimental in this museum than if I took on a museum of contemporary art. In some ways, that would feel like being on an autobahn, whereas this museum is more like a series of small roads. It will take you longer to get where you need to be, but for me at the moment, it is much more interesting.’ This does not stop her from setting a vigorous pace. As she explains, she has now written the concept for the new museum building, and the architectural competition will be completed by the end of this year with construction finished by 2015. The new design embraces the renovation of several villas. Mathis Esterhazy, the designer from Vienna, has already begun to produce prototype furniture for the Laboratory of World Cultures, which will open at the beginning of 2011. ‘I want to create places where people can use the exhibition as a workspace. The permanent exhibition will have a very large reading room at its centre, so you can stop, sit down, read a paper or talk to people about something that you have seen in the museum.’For the villas near the museum, she has in mind a new Laboratory of World Cultures. With ethnologists, artists, writers, filmmakers and students, fieldwork can be conducted and reviewed according to criteria that bring the collection into the spotlight once again. ‘Here we will have the opportunity to work out what the new classifications might be that make sense today, so we do not recreate an anachronism of geopolitical division. The way we can define our own specific identity is to decide from which angle enter the collection. I am particularly interested in forming a relationship between anthropology, art and literature. This was already part of the museum’s history. There are different phases in this relationship, on the one hand, the 1930s, with the ethnographic laboratories in Paris, and at the same time, the vagabonding anthropology of someone like Leo Frobenius. Later, in the 1970s, you have the development in the German-speaking world of ethno-psychoanalysis, a lot of which was published here in Frankfurt. This is incredibly important proof that a lot happened in this city that actually disseminated ideas into the arts, into literature and back into anthropology. Frankfurt was a trading ground for new ideas, and the Museum of World Cultures was a part of this debate.’The Laboratory of World Cultures will provide researchers and artists with the possibility of working directly and intensively with the collection. ‘I want to investigate whether an institutional framework is possible that has not already been laid down or pre-determined, with research that does not fit into the standardized context of research politics such as the Bologna Declaration, but that focuses instead on what is newly emerging…. We can take objects from the depot, which are in hermetic locations and hard to work with because there are so many of them, into the laboratory and organize think tanks, workshops and discussions around these objects. At the same time, a writer can spend time with the objects. If we want to do an exhibition in fifteen months’ time, for example, we can bring the ideas, artists, curators and objects into the laboratory and develop the exhibition thoroughly in advance. Whereas what you normally do is to decide what to show, then work with your people and bring the objects straight from the stacks into the museum. All of our future exhibition projects will pass through and be workshopped in the laboratory before becoming shows. This intermediary process is very exciting, because it allows us to develop a more precise way of integrating objects. Anyone invited, as guest curator, artist, filmmaker, etc., will first work with elements from our collection in the Lab.‘The Laboratory of World Cultures in Frankfurt takes on the anarchistic position of Carl Einstein, who in the 1920s said that museums were the basis for “living schools”, that they were in a position to reflect on the extremes of intellectual exploration and to build on their own collections. If they do not do that, they risk becoming ‘preserving jars’, rigid in the myth of guaranteed continuity.’ She refers to the anthropologist Paul Rabinow, whose work is “anti-theory, pro-concept and pro-experiment”.’In addition to the laboratory and its living and working spaces for guest artists and academics, Deliss also plans three apartments for students in curatorial studies and museology from countries associated with the museum’s collection. In the context of a new certificate in museology, a Mexican, a Senegalese and an Australian, for example, could each spend six months together working with the collection and gaining practical experience in the museum.When asked if such a relationship with a museum can serve as an example for other museums in keeping their collections alive and up to date, she replies, somewhat diplomatically, ‘I think it is up to each museum to decide how it is going to re-mediate its past and the objects that have been collected and that have formed different identities over time for that museum…. Some want to be active in the integration and communication of different cultures and people living in the city in which they find themselves, which is a very important function of museums, including this one. Other museums, such as the Berlin Haus der Kulturen der Welt, are more focused on events, debates and discussions. Still others want to reconfigure their permanent collection and leave it at that.’It will be another few years before Clémentine Deliss’s policies become apparent, but she is certainly involving herself in the discourse in the city of Frankfurt, with, for example, a recent lecture with the unusual title, Anti-Psychiatry/ Teaching deviance: somewhere between art practice and radical ethnography within a museum, which she gave for students at the local Städelschule. ‘One area I am investigating right now is ethno-psychiatry and the vital role played by Frankfurt as a location for many of the developments in this field. I am in contact with Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs, writer and publisher of the extraordinary Qumran Verlag of the early 1980s. Heinrichs published key figures, such as Michel Leiris and Hubert Fichte, and the ethno-psychoanalysts, including Paul Parin and Fritz Morgenthaler. I am keen to re-mediate this material in today’s context, to work on the one hand on the counterpoint between material culture in ethnographic analysis, and on the other, the psychology of the human condition and transcultural encounters.Marion Ritten is a curator and art critic, Cologne