FUNFUG FORUM Mit den Regeln spielen / Playing with the rules [2024-2025]

created by Patrick Blenkarn + Milton Lim with the students at Thomas Mann Gymnasium

curation for Humboldting! by Darren O’Donnell and Alice Flemming
selected artists for October 2024-February 2025: Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim

FUNFUG Photos by Frank Sperling, Humboldt Forum

Project Description:

FUNFUG transforms the Humboldt Forum into a game-filled spectacle. Mixing escape rooms, scavenger hunts, and sports, FUNFUG reinterprets the Forum’s house rules as frameworks for play.
During each show, the public only has one hour to work and play together to solve challenges spread throughout the building. The task: Win all the games and create as much FUNFUG as possible before the time runs out!
Mischievous, nonsensical, and very (very) serious, this event plays with the rules, questioning how institutions shape the possibilities of social and cultural interaction.

By solving puzzles and challenges spread throughout the building designed by the students from Thomas Mann Gymnasium, this event will get play with the rules and question:
Can knowledge be won? Is culture something quantifiable? And what room is there for fun and nonsense in a museum?
Can a museum contain, preserve, and foster the act of play? What types of play are permitted and which types are not permitted in a museum?
Is it possible for a museum itself to contain different kinds of play?
If so, who gets to play and what are the rules, if any?

By designing new games inspired by the people, life, architecture, and collections of the Humboldt Forum, the project aims to uncover the ludic potential of the museum and how gameful acts of play might reveal new perspectives on its place within Berlin.

Humboldting! Description:

Inspired by Alexander von Humboldt’s five-year expedition to America, 30 school pupils from Berlin’s Märkisches Viertel are setting off on a five-year voyage of discovery around the Humboldt Forum. Their journey will be completely in the spirit of the Humboldt brothers: courageous, creative and full of the joy of discovery. 10 international artists/groups for 6-months at a time work closely with the students from the age of 13 to the age of 18—all while they engage in large-scale research and creation at Berlin’s Humboldt Forum.

This ambitious project is the most recent advocacy for the kind of work that Darren and Alice have been leading since 2006 wherein the agency and political interests of young people are placed at the core of the conversation. How can we expect adults to be critical and politically-engaged citizens and community members when they’ve been deprived of that which would give them power from an early age?

During the 10 day introductory residency in June 2022, the visiting artists conducted preliminary research into the Humboldts, the museums inside the Forum, spent time with the students, and prototyped ideas: Students sold found-ephemera in the Forum gift shop, modified relief drawings, interviewed the upper management of the institution, and played a massive game of capture the flag through the building while avoiding priceless artefacts (this was our doing).

The Humboldt Forum:

Opened in December 2020, the Humboldt Forum is one of Europe’s most expensive cultural projects. Located in the Berlin Palace in the historic centre of Berlin and named in honour of Prussian scholars, the Humboldt Forum houses four distinct museums dedicated to human history, art and culture, including the non-European collections of the Berlin State Museums, temporary exhibitions, and public events.

For more information about the project, visit The Humboldt Forum.