Transforming Collections, Preserving Futures: 2030 at the Museum für Naturkunde

Over time, collections are reorganized, moved, repaired, and otherwise changed. This paper considers how conceptions of museum collections can be transformed by storage plans themselves. Taking the Berlin Museum für Naturkunde (MfN) 2018 "Future Plan" as a point of reflection reveals some of the ways that tensions between accumulation and preservation have shifted the development and framing of collection infrastructures. With more than 30 million specimens, MfN possesses the largest natural history collection in Germany. Using the 660 million euros promised in the Future Plan, a new museum is intended to emerge fully from the ruins of the old by 2030, more capable of protecting, preserving, and displaying artifacts. While displays often (and rightfully) receive academic and activist attention, this paper joins recent scholarship in paying critical attention to what is stored behind the scenes, which appears to the public often only as a relatively undifferentiated accumulation—or not at all. Using the spatial and temporal potential of storage, projects like the Future Plan explicitly suggest that specimens themselves can be integrated into ever-more modern infrastructures. Large-scale accumulation, in this context, functions as a marker of authority and value that can be leveraged at a scale beyond the individual collection contexts of specimens. Understanding how natural history storerooms become enduring sites of scientific, cultural, and economic value requires creative engagement with infrastructures that prefigure and maintain specific kinds of specimen potential.