Research through collections has been supported by science policy in Germany for over 10 years. As a result, a university museum was founded in Göttingen and my professorship for the materiality of knowledge was established, where I am trying to expand the curriculum across disciplines with object-based teaching. For this purpose, the material environments of the sciences (usually in the form of collections) are used as cognitive spaces, so that students are able to develop new research questions in interaction with the material. The talk will be about the promises that this expansion of the academic understanding of historical sources brings with it, as well as the resistances and questionable points that arise in the process. The activist discourse that I have to face here is decolonization, on the one hand in the sense of returning colonially acquired museum holdings and on the other hand in the sense of the required reinterpretations of these holdings. What is particularly special is that artistic activism plays a formative role in this context.