UNESCO

Chair on Heritage Futures

Nuclear Sanctuary

2021-03-30

Today, members of the Chair met with Sam Collins and Sho Murayama who recently completed their Masters Thesis in the Political Architecture: Critical Sustainability Programme at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architectur in Copenhagen.

Collins and Murayama describe their thesis Nuclear Sanctuary as “a pilgrimage through the complex culture of Nuclear France”:

The project looks to re-articulate the nuclear story through architectural narrative, becoming a cognitive tool to speculate on how nuclear culture will be perceived in the future. Reactivating the decomissioned power plant Chooz A to stand as a monumental marker in time, the Nuclear Sanctuary presents a window into the future through the past, situated in the present.

Maybe French nuclear culture in 50 years from now will be perceived predominantly as the foundation of the environmental movement and a powerful inspiration for the arts. Maybe there will be a movement to keep the energy alive…

Dossier on Nuclear Energy in Die Presse

2021-03-10

Cornelius Holtorf was interviewed by Konradin Schuchter about long-term memory regarding nuclear waste disposal sites for an article published as part of a Dossier on Nuclear Energy in the Austrian daily national newspaper Die Presse (9 March 2021).

Another interview partner was our collaborator Martin Kunze of the Memory of Mankind initiative.

Schuchter wrote, among others:

Der Archäologe Cornelius Holtorf von der schwedischen Linné-Universität ist der Meinung, dass es unmöglich ist, vernünftig vorauszusagen, welche Bedeutung unser atomares Erbe für zukünftige Generationen haben wird. Holtorf verfolgt die Debatte rund um die Atommüll-Endlagerung schon seit einiger Zeit und ist auch in unterschiedlichen Expertengremien zu dem Thema vertreten. Er betont, dass die Bedeutung nicht im radioaktiven Material selbst liege, sondern, dass sich diese immer erst durch den interpretativen Rahmen des Rezipienten konstituiere.

Cultural heritage and the Future – the book is out!

2020-12-07

Now published with Routledge:

Cornelius Holtorf and Anders Högberg (eds) 2021, Cultural Heritage and the Future. London and New York: Routledge. 290 pp. eBook/pbk/hbk

Preview and table of content available here.

Cultural heritage and the future is a field of research and practice that has been developing over the past few years. The present volume was originally devised in 2012, related to a session on the same topic which we co-organized for the First Conference of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies in Gothenburg, Sweden.

The volume contains a wide range of contributions discussing examples from many parts of the world that raise important issues about the interrelations between cultural heritage and the future. Taken as a whole, we believe that the book will contribute significantly to building capacity in futures thinking and futures literacy among researchers and practitioners throughout the heritage sector.

Memory across generations

2020-11-17

Our work concerning memory across generations has found its way into the 2020 Report of the Swedish Nuclear Waste Council to the Swedish Government (Swedish Government Inquiries, SOU 2020:9). The report was first published earlier this year in Swedish but is now also available in English.

The report contains in chapter 7 over several pages a summary of the results of our Workshop “Information and memory for future decision making – radioactive waste and beyond” held in May 2019 in Stockholm.