Dimensions of sustainability in the everyday operations

The Workshop at Lenbachhaus Munich in February 2025 focused on current discussion and practices around sustainability and conflicts.

Sustainability emerged as a multifaceted, more-than-ecological concern that cuts across a museum’s organizational structures and processes, to be recognized and addressed also on financial, social, institutional and political levels. Topics included the re-use of exhibition materials and architectures, the development of roadmaps towards the reduction of CO2 emissions or the improvement of energy efficiency of museums venues (ecological sustainability); the challenge of holding on to ways of working under constant political and social media pressure and the danger of overstretching the capacity and resilience of those working in art museums (institutional sustainability); the often contradictory relationship between desired practices of sustainability calling for a more localized approach and a globalized, energy-intensive exhibition circuit and its international engagements (political sustainability).

Understood as infrastructural condition of contemporary museum organization, sustainability guides, enables but also limits and restricts what an art museum can and cannot do, and what it endeavours to be and become.