“Participation is the key”

The tower is a great venue where we’ll be able to do our work in the future. We’re getting entirely new rooms and a place inside the museum specifically dedicated to education and outreach. Of course, it’s also a theme that concerns the whole museum.

Naturally, educational measures will take place elsewhere in the museum, as well. Our exhibitions should aim to educate visitors in the same way our bauhaus_workshops do. Our programmes in all areas are developed and implemented for our visitors.

Digital formats will certainly play a central role in the new building. Right now, we’re planning a studio on the first floor of the tower which uses digital media and presents a general introduction to the Bauhaus. We plan to use the rooms on the second and third floors for workshops. And we want to create direct, thematic connections between all the floors.

The fact that the Bauhaus was a school is the starting point and especially relevant for our educational measures. Our activities focus strongly on teaching and instruction at the Bauhaus. Indeed, the collection of the Bauhaus-Archiv contains extensive teaching materials from which we draw inspiration and consciously integrate content for our own educational activities. Not every museum can invoke history as a school.

Many items in the collection are not artworks in a traditional sense, but rather class notes, studies and sketches which sometimes led to a dead-end. We work with a very eclectic range of materials. That leads us to ask what methods can be used today to adequately present these. This is where the topic of digital education comes into play. But what does this mean for us exactly? These are important aspects that we constantly have to consider due to the nature of our collection.

Participation is the key. We think a lot about how to work together with other people and jointly develop our programmes in mutual dialogue. We try lots of things out and receive feedback before sending the formats out into the world. We would like to reach our audience in a targeted way.

The Bauhaus-Archiv is a museum, but it’s also a research institute with a library and archive. In this respect, our outreach and educational activities can examine this dual role and cross-reference each other. How do people react to questions I pose to them? What answers do I get? How much resonance do I get? In this way, we don’t only look at a drawing on yellowed paper from 1923 and assess whether it’s an artwork or not. Instead, we ask: What was the assignment? What questions were asked? Why did someone draw this picture?

In the workshops, participants take on an active role which then enables them to experience and understand the tasks. Perhaps the history of the Bauhaus is not even the most important aspect, but rather the act of doing it yourself. Personally, I always try to understand things by doing them myself.

Friederike Holländer has worked at the Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung since 2016 and has headed the education and outreach department since 2020. She is particularly interested in the connection between modern educational techniques and architectural as well as design theory. She recently published the original bauhaus workbook together with curator Nina Wiedemeyer