What does it mean for a museum to be alive? This intensive four-week field course uses Barcelona and Berlin as living laboratories for that question. In Barcelona, we encounter institutions animated by modernist art, civic identity, and community memory. In Berlin, we confront museums built around absence, trauma, and contested ownership. Moving between them, students develop a critical vocabulary for analysing how museums come alive — or fail to — for different publics, in different political moments, and with different kinds of objects.