Funding projects

Museums are still often perceived by the public as places to which access is difficult, whether due to origin, education, physical and/or mental impairments. The Zeppelin Museum strives to break down these barriers. This is the only way to enable everyone to participate equally in culture. The multi-year program accompanies the Zeppelin Museum on this path. On the one hand, specific sub-projects such as audio descriptions of technology and art objects are being implemented, while on the other, external expertise is being provided to initiate processes of organizational development towards greater inclusion.

The podcast project is funded by the Center for Cultural Participation - an institution of the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts.

Is this looted art? This is the question the Zeppelin Museum is asking itself for its own collection. Through meticulous provenance research, the object histories of almost 400 works of art and the biographies of relevant art dealers have been investigated for the first time. With over 40 works, the exhibition discusses both controversial and harmless cases, both solved and unsolved, and makes the actual scope and hurdles of the research work tangible. In this way, the exhibition sheds light on a still underestimated chapter of the consequences of Nazi art theft as well as the gigantic relocation of cultural assets in the 20th century.

Supported by the German Lost Art Foundation Magdeburg

After ten years as a branch of the Zeppelin Museum, the permanent exhibition at the Schauhaus has been redesigned. The aim of the new concept is to transform the place of remembrance into a living house full of history(ies), which for the first time focuses on the city's workers' history, which has been underrepresented in the exhibition to date. We are pursuing a participatory-explorative approach in which visitors are actively involved and trace the changes that the house, the village and its inhabitants have experienced over the past 100 years.

With the interdisciplinary exhibition Into the deep. Mines of the Future, the Zeppelin Museum took a critical look at the raw material aluminum, the metal of flight, based on the industrial history of the city of Friedrichshafen, as well as the complex interrelationships of raw material extraction in deep sea and asteroid mining. In addition to the consequences of environmental destruction and colonialism associated with the increased extraction of raw materials, resistance and activism against the exploitation of people and the environment were explored in the climate-neutral exhibition. The exhibition, funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation's Fund Zero, aimed to be climate-neutral in all areas.

Supported by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, Fund Zero

In order to meet the changing needs of a society in transition, to strengthen the identification of Friedrichshafen's urban society with the museum and to achieve a diversification of the dialog groups, this project was intended to create an active opportunity for co-design. The city's population will be given the opportunity to decide on the spatial and content-related design of the "CoLab" open space, which will be part of every temporary exhibition in the future, with the help of an analog voting tool that can later also be used digitally. Through this participatory approach, the Zeppelin Museum hopes to break down barriers and strengthen the dialog with urban society, which is an essential component of mediation work at eye level.

Supported by the Kulturstiftung der Länder

"Tell me what you see" is a podcast format from the Zeppelin Museum with and for visually impaired people and anyone who wants to look at art and technology from a new perspective. The podcast deals with fundamental, relevant questions of museum work, such as how viewers look at an object and how it can be adequately described. The first season of the podcast comprises six episodes, which have been published on the Zeppelin Museum's channels.

Supported by the Center for Cultural Participation Baden-Württemberg

As part of an interdisciplinary research network, the Zeppelin Museum has developed the first CGI-based digital sign language avatar in the German-speaking cultural sector: AVATASI. The avatar translates text information into 3D animated signs, making text-based content accessible to hearing-impaired and deaf people.

Supported by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, dive.in

Under the motto "Zeppelin History - Under Construction!", the political dimensions of the Zeppelin Museum's technology collection are critically reflected upon and examined in a differentiated way in dialog with the urban society. After all, zeppelins were not only a means of travel and transportation, but were also used as a propaganda tool under National Socialism and for war purposes. In cooperation with experts, the collection will first be re-read with a focus on the culture of remembrance and industrial history, before a strategy for the critical handling of the collection is developed in a second step and new formats are tested, whereby the citizens are also constitutively involved.

Supported by the Center for Cultural Participation Baden-Württemberg

Some were bored, others enjoyed themselves, others found their own soul in Lake Constance. Whether Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Hermann Hesse and Hans Purrmann, Martin Walser and André Ficus or Henry van de Velde and René Schickele: numerous artists and writers who lived on Lake Constance cultivated close connections. The interdisciplinary exhibition focused on Lake Constance as a creative location and examined the reciprocal relationships between literature and art. Participation was an essential part of the exhibition. With a call for participation on nextmuseum.io, artists and writers were able to submit their own contributions on the topic of "Art and Literature on Lake Constance". The winners were selected by public voting and then became part of the exhibition.

Supported by the Baden-Württemberg Foundation