On Threads and Knots: Reweaving Critical Heritage Studies
Magdalena Buchczyk
Cover of Weaving Europe, Crafting the Museum by Magdalena Buchczyk
When we think of museums, we often turn to metaphors: “cabinets” of curiosity, “infrastructures” of knowledge, “formations” of discourse, and “zones” of contact. These spatial images have long served critical heritage scholars as tools for grappling with the layered complexities of museums and collections. They reveal how meaning and value are produced, both through the objects displayed and the classificatory systems that underpin them. They also expose the violence and inequalities embedded in practices like collecting, cataloguing, conservation, and exhibition display.
Yet, the metaphors of “cabinets” or “zones” still confine museums to the logic of self-contained entities awaiting a reconnection to the present via tracing back to the “communities” of their collections. Efforts like provenance research, visual repatriation, and participatory museology have sought to remake these links as pathways to social justice and the reimagination of collections.
Scholars such as Boast (2011), Colwell (2016), Ranwa (2021), and Onciul (2015) caution that while heritage work involving “source communities” is essential, it can also reinforce unequal power dynamics, entrench marginalization, and fuel conflicts. This is particularly true when collections are linked to histories of violence or exile, which often complicate the notion of a fixed community.
Critical heritage studies, then, demands new frameworks of relationality—terms and concepts that can help untangle the complex histories and decolonial challenges museums must confront.
Beyond tracing the thread
My research in Poland and Romania—lands marked by histories of imperialism, dislocation, and radical social and material transformation in the 20th century—showed how attempts to trace collection histories and engage with “communities” often reopen unhealed wounds of dispossession or loss. What began as a search for knowledge became a tangle of contradictions - loose ends, overlooked histories, and layers of trauma - far from a clear thread one might hope to follow.
Textile artist Anni Albers (1974) described a thread not as a simple line, but as an event—a dynamic unfolding, a relationship in motion. What if we reimagined research with museum collections this way—not as linear paths tracing from the present to the past, or from the museum to the „source community“, but as eventful knots within a broader texture?
In Weaving Europe, Crafting the Museum, I reject the image of museums as “zones” or “cabinets“ with loose threads waiting to be reconnected. Instead, I see them as looms—devices (Lury and Wakeford 2012) that stretch threads, twist them into patterns of knowledge, and knot them into stories. The knot resists resolution; it demands engagement with its texture, density, weight, and layered contradictions. To begin with the knot is to confront the tangled pasts that museums inherit and perpetuate. It is to recognize museums as agents of power and aesthetics, where the bureaucratic rituals, institutional habits, and the craft of curation and care shape both what is known and how it is woven into relations.
Figure 1: Textile artefact from the Museum of European Cultures, showing evidence of war damage and subsequent conservation repairs. Photograph by Christian Krug. Courtesy of Museum of European Cultures, National Museums in Berlin – Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.
Museum as a weaving device
Reimagining museums as weaving devices challenges us to rethink critical heritage research —not as a process of simply retracing or resolving contradictions, but as one that acknowledges the complexities and tensions woven into the fabric of museum practice. Here, the loom is not just a tool of continuity, but a metaphor for the friction and productive tension between threads—the fraying, the ruptures, and the persistent effort to rebind them.
It is within this tension that structure, invention, and improvisation intertwine. Weaving, as a metaphor, exposes the craft of entanglement—the recognition that threads cannot be traced without unravelling the whole. Much like any craft, this is an act of creation and violence.
Museums are not inert; they are relational devices, knotting together objects, people, histories, and more-than-human worlds into precarious, provisional arrangements. To understand the museum as a weaving device is to recognize its motion—never fixed, always reconfiguring. The craft of museum practice is inseparable from what these institutions hold—and haunted by the histories of how they came to hold. The textures they weave - from violence, erasure, safeguarding and care—are embedded not only in the collections but also in the institutions themselves.
Donna Haraway (1994) invites us to inhabit the knot—to engage in a dense tangle of people, objects, institutions, and more-than-human worlds—tracing the forces that bind overlapping histories, materialities and livelihoods. Her vision of knowledge-making as a “cat’s cradle” resonates here: a game of twisting, knotting, and tangling together, where the threads do not trace back to „origins“ but knot themselves into unpredictable patterns.
To work within the cat’s cradle is to abandon the fantasy of untangling the knot. The task is not of resolution, but regeneration: of weaving new stories that hold the tension between the past and future, human and the non-human, the material and the immaterial. To take up this vision is to move beyond tracing. It is to dwell in the overlapping domains of care and rupture, where museums not only hold but haunt, where their material textures—of erasure, extraction, or safeguarding—extend beyond collections, reverberating throughout the institutions themselves.
Figure 2: Dwelling on knots at the Museum of European Cultures, Berlin. Photograph by Magdalena Buchczyk.
Inhabiting the knot
Reframing museums as weaving devices challenges us to rethink critical heritage research with collections. It invites us to inhabit the knot together — its tangled, dense, and intricate textures becoming the site of inquiry. Like a weaver handling delicate threads, the researcher must navigate fragile, shifting relations, caught in an ever-changing configuration. To weave is to resist resolution, to continually reshape, and to allow the frayed edges to speak. It foregrounds the process of becoming, where patterns shift and take shape through knowledge, attention and care. Research, then, is not a linear tracing but a shared exploration of relationality: slow, touching, and inherently fraught.
Susan Leigh Star’s notion of “spinning” captures this: research as a force that stretches what is known into what might be imagined (Bauchspies and Bellacasa 2009). This calls for an improvisational, prefigurative approach to knowledge - an unfolding that is as unpredictable and eventful as the thread and the knot. In this light, museums become devices of possibility, open to new patterns. These patterns are not fixed by the curator’s or researcher’s intent but unfold through the shared, open-ended acts of co-creation. As a weaving device, the museum resists closure and refuses to become a cabinet. It remains unfinished, alive with potential, crafting reparative futures in its unfolding.
Bibliography:
Albers, A., 1974. On Weaving: New Expanded Edition. London: Studio Vista.
Boast, R., 2011. Neocolonial collaboration: Museum as contact zone revisited. Museum Anthropology, 34(1), pp.56-70.
Bauchspies, W.K. and Bellacasa, M.P.D.L., 2009. Feminist science and technology studies: A patchwork of moving subjectivities. An interview with Geoffrey Bowker, Sandra Harding, Anne Marie Mol, Susan Leigh Star and Banu Subramaniam. Subjectivity, 28, pp.334-344.
Buchczyk, M., 2023. “Airing Out the Carpet.” Anthropology News website, January 17, 2023. Available at: https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/airing-out-the-carpet/
Buchczyk, M., 2023. Weaving Europe, Crafting the Museum: Textiles, History and Ethnography at the Museum of European Cultures, Berlin. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Colwell, C., 2016. Collaborative archaeologies and descendant communities. Annual Review of Anthropology, 45(1), pp.113-127.
Haraway, D.J., 1994. A game of cat's cradle: Science studies, feminist theory, cultural studies. Configurations, 2(1), pp.59-71.
Lury, C. and Wakeford, N., 2012. Inventive Methods. N. Wakeford (Ed.). London: Routledge.
Onciul, B., 2015. Museums, Heritage and Indigenous Voice: Decolonizing Engagement. London and New York: Routledge.
Ranwa, R., 2021. Heritage, community participation and the state: Case of the Kalbeliya dance of India. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 27(10), pp.1038-1050.
Magdalena Buchczyk is a Junior Professor of Social Anthropology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research focuses on anthropological approaches to material and visual culture, as well as critical heritage studies in Eastern and Southern Europe. Her monograph, Weaving Europe, Crafting the Museum, is now available in paperback from Bloomsbury. With a long-standing interest in weaving, she is currently developing a new research project titled Weaving Ecologies: Intangible Heritage Between Social and Environmental Justice, which focuses on wetland heritage.
Buchczyk serves as vice-chair of the TRACTS COST Action, a network dedicated to exploring traces as a research agenda for climate change, technology studies, and social justice. As part of this initiative, she co-authored Practising Collection Ethics: A Toolkit for Museum and Archive Professionals and co-edited the forthcoming volume Unearthing Collections: Archives, Time, and Ethics (UCL Press).
Buchczyk’s work bridges academic and curatorial practices. She has collaborated with a variety of institutions, including the Horniman Museum and Constance Howard Gallery in London, Coexist Gallery in Bristol, the Museum of European Cultures and Ethnological Museum in Berlin, the German Hygiene Museum Dresden (DHMD), and the Weltmuseum in Vienna.