Interview by Fredi Fischli & Niels Olsen, PIN-UP Magazine

Why do we even go to museums? Mariam Issoufou, architect and professor of architecture heritage and sustainability at ETH Zürich, poses the question early on in her conversation with Adam Caruso, ETH’s chair of architecture and construction. Asked to take the museum thoroughly to task, both institutionally and architecturally, each came at the subject from a vastly different place, yet, perhaps surprisingly, they arrived at similar conclusions. Caruso’s childhood in Montreal was marked by seminal trips to prestigious museums, while Issoufou, who spent much of her childhood in Niger, visited very few when she was young. But for both, the museum as a sacred temple of culture that elevates visitors is no longer a tenable proposition. In their conversation, moderated by PIN–UP’s guest editors Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen, Caruso and Issoufou unravel the tangle of capitalistic, colonial implications embedded in many museums’ DNA, question such institutions’ accumulative acquisition policies, and wonder if we really have to call museums museums.

Fredi Fischli & Niels Olsen: For this issue, we are looking at the museum as a troubled space in need of revision. Mariam, you recently taught a master’s diploma at ETH entitled “At the End of the World: Museums.” How did you approach the topic?

Mariam Issoufou: It was almost a sideways approach. Museums aren’t necessarily a core topic of mine in teaching. But, in practice the subject preoccupies me a lot. As an architect, I work mostly in West Africa, but I teach in Europe, where there’s a lot of talk about museums, their successes and failures, and the way they need to reinvent themselves. At the same time, we’re actively exporting that typology to other parts of the world, telling them they should do something that we’re questioning in Europe. This is kind of odd. I’ve long felt an ambivalence and discomfort toward the idea of the museum. To me, it doesn’t quite make sense outside of a Western context. Showcasing art has existed for a really long time in many parts of the world. The museum as we understand it today, with its collections and accumulations from all over the globe, was born of an age of empire and plunder. This immediately makes it irrelevant outside of the imperial context. I’ve spoken to a lot of people who are struggling with the notion of the museum, whether it’s NGOs or other institutions who make museums in Africa. They complain that nobody visits them, that they stay empty, gathering dust, not cared for. Well, the reality is that very few people in those countries are interested in going to museums. Which made me ask myself the question, “Why do we go to museums?” At the end of the day, when you grow up in the West, there’s this social and cultural engineering that tells you that going to a museum is a good thing, that it’s culturally elevating. That doesn’t necessarily happen elsewhere.

Adam Caruso: Even in the West, the concept of the museum can be just as problematic. I was taken to museums from an early age, and I did the same with my son, for whom they represent a kind of safe space. But in the past decade I’ve woken up to the fact that museums often take a classist, even colonialist attitude toward their home audiences. For example, Andrea Fraser’s video at the Philadelphia Museum of Art [Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989] illustrates how the museum is intended as a kind of controlling instrument with regards to the working classes, with the city building museums so that collectors could show their collections in lieu of paying taxes, which increased their value while supposedly educating the unwashed masses. Most of our museum clients are fortunately engaged with this situation. Many museums in the West also struggle with attendance because nobody’s interested in visiting them, they either become very niche or part of the mass-tourism spectacle.

MI: So many people don’t engage with the museum, yet museums continue to acquire objects, most of which remain in storage. They’ve essentially emptied out the rest of the world to make these collections nobody will see. There’s an incredible greed there, gorging yourself on all of these materials, literally leaving nothing behind. I’ve seen it happen in my own lifetime — I come from a context where these objects have all been taken away. I spent part of my childhood in the Agadez region of Niger, in the southern part of the Sahara, which 10,000 years ago was a region of lush, green prairie, where prehistoric civilizations flourished. I remember, aged eight, going to the mountains there with my family and seeing shards of pottery and carved stones lying on the ground. When I went back, in 2019, there was nothing — it had been wiped clean. Which, for these source countries, results in a profound cultural disconnect with their history, because these objects are now in some Western museum. How they ended up there is complex — some objects were obviously stolen, while others were sold by local populations, because in a context where nomadism is no longer economically sustainable, it can be a way for non-settled communities, with their knowledge of the desert, to make a living. But for me, the Western archeologists and paleontologists who buy these artifacts display an imperial attitude that’s profoundly upsetting. With an acquisitions policy of that kind, there’s no such thing as a decolonized museum — it’s not possible because the very premise is colonial. Acknowledging its colonialist attitude is not enough as it only makes us feel better about being part of this colonial project. The only way to decolonize a museum like that is to destroy it! [Laughs.] We hear a lot about how these museums should make amends by emptying out their collections and sending everything back. But it’s not only about what happens to the objects they hold, it’s also about trying to figure out what happens to these institutions if they do that. What does that mean for the future of a museum that has built its existence on these types of artifacts?

This idea of exporting the museum all over the world is a part of a wide-reaching Enlightenment project of modernity. Yet if this modern project is no longer viable, how do you translate this to architecture and the architectural rhetoric of the museum, which is so enmeshed with it? What’s left of this ruin of modernity? And what does it mean for teaching, especially at a school like ETH Zürich, which is so strongly charged with a Modernist architectural legacy.

AC: Modernism and modernization are different things. Modernism, specifically the kind of neo-Modernism that arose in the 1990s and that still dominates architecture, is a formal language of late-capitalism and an instrument for turbocharging consumption and extraction. It pervades everything that architects do, not just museums. As for modernisation which emerges on the back of empire, it is shocking to think that an institution like the British Museum, which holds something like ten-million objects, most of which have never been displayed, still acquires artifacts. Only recently did I start to understand the full implications of that, that museums themselves are in the consumption game. The last semesters that I’ve taught, I’ve made sure to talk about these issues. For a long time, I thought, “Well, we’re in Postmodern times and one has no choice but to practice in a Postmodern way.” I wouldn’t say that now. And I certainly have no interest in practicing in a Modernist way either, but there’s the question of what comes after the current phase of capitalism. There were some very benevolent things to come out of Modernism — for example, it was the first form of architecture that gave expression to social classes other than the elite. It gave rise to architecture that was about workers, it gave us dignified mass housing. Many of my students are politically engaged, and in most of the discussions I’ve had with them these past few years there is an acceptance that there has to be something after extractive Modernism. We’re all going to be on fire soon, aren’t we? And we’re not going to be able to practice architecture if we’re on fire. There are very urgent issues that must be addressed, issues in which architecture is highly implicated. This is another thing I feel I acknowledged way later than I should have. Over the last five or six years, our practice has really changed its focus, but somebody like Barbara Buser, cofounder of the architecture office Baubüro in situ, established an alternative position 25 years ago, saying that you shouldn’t construct new buildings, that you should really be trying to work with things that are very local. I have enormous admiration for what she’s done. I still have plenty of colleagues who are mostly just interested in designing a new museum or a new tower. So at least I’m past that. But I think that students have acknowledged that we’ve now entered a different paradigm, one where architecture can still be important and exciting, but where it has to be different.

MI: I completely agree. What I’ve felt a lot from the students is a desire to no longer be part of the problem, and an acknowledgment that profound issues must be addressed, whether it’s climate change or other types of depletion. We have these really long conversations about how, through architecture, we’ve contributed in very negative ways to our environment. We have conversations about the enormous impact the construction industry has on economies, and how it’s complicit in the systems of capitalism, which are intimately tied to colonialism. Because of this incredible openness, this desire for intellectual honesty, it’s a fantastic time to be an educator. We’re dealing with a generation that was coming of age when a lot of the fictions our generation grew up with were already being dismantled. For example, this idea that modernity and Modernism are the same thing, that modernity has an aesthetic called Modernism. That’s not true. Modernism is the product of one current of thought at one time in the world, and it’s being exported as this universal truth for architecture, which is incredibly impoverishing because it denies all other expressions. That’s the cultural imperialism of Modernism. It’s a form of erasure.

Mariam, your design for the Bët-bi Museum in Senegal deals with the history of this sacred place and the history of the landscape. Could your approach be understood as a resistance toward the erasure caused by an imported “museum as copy machine,” as the scholar and visual artist Debasish Borah calls it?

MI: When it comes to the museum as an engine, I’m still incredibly conflicted. I almost didn’t participate in the competition for the Bët-bi — I was going to sidestep it and say, “I refuse to engage with this animal.” Then I started realizing that it’s not so much about what we call it as it is about what we make of it. It is also about how we empower local knowledge and engage with vulnerabilities, be it in Africa, Europe, or elsewhere. Technically, Bët-bi shouldn’t even be called a museum, it’s just what it happens to be called. I was much more interested in what art means in this specific context. In Senegal, the relationship to artifacts is arguably different. What makes a cultural space successful? What kinds of equivalences can you find in history, in the way that you deal with objects of great value that teach you something, that are part of certain rituals? How do you put them back in their place, to some extent? Our design is extremely specific to that particular place and to the ancient culture that once flourished there. You have around 3,000 megaliths in the region, the most recent of which are thought to be around 2,300 years old, as well as burial mounds and places for rituals and worshiping ancestors. Our building is also buried, while the life of the museum is above ground. The museum is actually a public space first, which is really what would bring people there — they wouldn’t go see artifacts, but to be together. We were looking at the cultural behaviors of a place and making space for that, not just making a design for design’s sake. We were really trying to solve a problem and create something positive using local skills, materials, and engineers — local everything — which is essentially how I built my practice. It’s this idea of really interrogating the place and figuring out what is available, and designing after I figure that out. Only once I understand which forces are at play, what the skills are, and what the materials are can I start making a project.

AC: All the things you’re talking about are equally relevant in a European context. If I think about the references I’ve used with my students in the last few semesters — curators like Seth Siegelaub and artists like Group Material or Theaster Gates — it’s not about making the art object somehow less valuable or denying its importance, but rather trying to locate it in a way that it can also be read as part of everyday life. That is the only hope for making contemporary work that starts to distance itself from the art market. This idea that you go to a museum and it’s like going to a chapel, where you contemplate the art and are moved to tears is just not credible anymore. Art has to be more than that. If you look back at history, the idea of art working in this quasi-spiritual way is recent. Even in the 19th century, art was much more programmatic. Manet was making paintings that were about painting, but they were also saying something about what happened last week and about the institutional structures of art and the French Empire. It was saying all of those things, some of which were more timeless than others. I think there are plenty of artists and curators and even institutions trying to work in that way today. That’s why I still have an interest in the art world. I think institutions that have the intellectual capacity to transition from being a museum with objects to being a museum without objects could open up an incredibly fertile period. That’s a really exciting challenge.

Adam, you are currently working on an extension to the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, whose original building was designed by Philip Johnson in 1968, and which has this almost temple-like presence. Bielefeld is following an institutional ambition found in many European and American cities: enlarging an established museum’s original footprint. Do you think preserving and expanding the inheritance like that is a good thing, or do we need entirely new institutions?

AC: I’m not ready to give up on our existing institutions, like the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, which has had a series of good directors and excellent shows, and which holds an interesting collection. It’s not in any way old-fashioned, despite the fact it’s in a very medium-sized city, not particularly close to anything. So, with this project, our job is about supporting the institution to be able to do what they feel they have to do in order to be a relevant, contemporary Kunsthalle. For sure there’s room for new institutions, but I don’t think new institutions need new buildings. There are so many empty or underused buildings from the past 70 years. I think new institutions would gain a kind of frisson and relevance if part of their remit was to inhabit existing buildings. The idea that, in 2024, you can make a new building in Zürich, for instance, that’s going to represent anything intelligent — I find that very difficult, but there still exists this dated mindset that if you found a new institution you need a new building. Politicians, I guess, are still thinking in terms of the ideas that architects fed them 20 years ago. As architects, we have a responsibility to emphasize that using an existing building will make their work more radical, not less.

MI: In Europe, you could argue there’s an overabundance of buildings. There’s a lot of waste, we don’t need new ones. I feel like that should be the conversation in Europe and America. Where other parts of the world are concerned, you can argue that there is room for more buildings in certain instances. There isn’t enough housing, there aren’t enough cultural amenities. Both situations are an opportunity for architecture to operate in a sensitive way that’s rooted in common sense.

Is there a museum that’s an important part of your biography?

MI: No. I didn’t grow up in a Western context, so museums were not part of my intellectual DNA, and I don’t put them on a pedestal.

AC: I remember going to a Jackson Pollock show at MoMA when I was about four. I remember particular shows that I saw at different times in my life, at Montreal’s Musée d’art contemporain, back when it was in a shitty building, or the Tate in London. Now that I live in Glarus, Switzerland, I go to the town’s Kunsthaus much more often than I used to. It’s always interesting to go to museums habitually because then you start to have a relationship with them. I was in London when Tate Modern opened, the year my son turned two. His earliest memories include trips to the Tate, and he still goes there, and tells me about all the shows he sees. And when I’m in London, we go to Tate Modern together. It’s something he’s been doing his whole life. He used to be interested only in contemporary shows — he would accuse us of torturing him if we took him to an old painting show. Now he happily goes to them on his own.

MI: I think this is one of the most beautiful examples of how a place can nurture and nourish your imagination, and expand your world. At the end of the day, this is what we want, right? It’s not about saying that museums shouldn’t exist or that they don’t have value. It’s about creating spaces that nurture and feed the human spirit, and that allow us to transcend our reality, our lives, or ourselves as humans. I just wish we could find a different word for that than “museum.” Although ultimately, whether we call it a museum or something else doesn’t matter. Thank you for this example, Adam, which perfectly captures what we should be making.