99 Questions

99 Questions is a para-institutional initiative at the Humboldt Forum, dedicated to a long-term, non-object-based curatorial practice. It operates in cycles and centers around Research Nodes – localized gatherings that bring together diverse, situated knowledge from different regions, creating a rich, reciprocal exchange. These nodes are not just sites of research, but living laboratories where ideas, practices, and perspectives from different contexts are woven together, resisting the extractive tendencies of conventional museology.
 

This 'refusal to settle,' this nomadic approach, is radical because it challenges the very idea of stability and control. It stands in direct contradiction to the logic of institutions that, for centuries, have sorted knowledge, objects, histories, and people, locking them into the vitrines of time and fixing them onto linear timelines. It refuses the hierarchies that come with collecting and archiving – the structures that not only organize but also evaluate, placing the ordered above the unordered, the fixed above the fluid.

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The Research Nodes are the beating heart of 99 Questions. They create temporary, experimental spaces for collaboration, where knowledge is not extracted but shared, transformed, and returned. These nodes are places where different temporalities, geographies, and epistemologies meet – where the unexpected can emerge, and where reciprocal relationships can be formed. Rather than imposing a singular, fixed narrative, these nodes allow for the emergence of multiple, often contradictory, perspectives that resist easy classification.

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But perhaps this is exactly what we need: a practice that does not classify but weaves, that surrenders to intuition and flow, that does not always know where it is going, and precisely through this opens new forms of thinking, remembering, and connecting.

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In this sense, the Research Nodes embody a form of radical hospitality – a commitment to listening, to making space for others, and to creating connections that are not pre-determined but discovered in the process of working together. They are places that refuse the fixed, the static, the pre-formed, and instead embrace the messy, the fluid, the in-between.

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This para-institutional practice is a form of world-building – a future-oriented thought that influences the present, expanding epistemological horizons beyond established systems of order. It is an experiment in radical openness and resonance, imagining the institution as a living organism that breathes, listens, and constantly transforms.

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