UNESCO

Chair on Heritage Futures

Welcome to UNESCO Day in Växjö!

2020-03-09

UPDATE 17 March: due to the Covid-19 pandemic we will hold this event during the autumn instead.

Welcome to a UNESCO Day on 1 April 2020 at Linnaeus University in Växjö. On this unique day, the Swedish UNESCO Chairs together with representatives of the Swedish National Commission for UNESCO will report about their current activities and priorities for the future.

The program includes a Welcome by Peter Aronsson after which Lena Sommestad, Chairperson of the Swedish National Commission for UNESCO, and the Swedish UNESCO Chairs will present their current work.

In the afternoon, two open lectures will take place where the Chairs are given the opportunity to meet colleagues and students in their respective fields. See here for the full programm.

The programme is open to staff and students at Linnaeus University. Participation is free of charge, but signing up is compulsory to the programme in the morning. Sign up by March 25!

Preserved for the future

2020-03-08

Cornelius Holtorf contributed with Martin Kunze to the art project “Ineligible” which is currently displayed as part of the exhibition “Creative (Un)makings: Dispruptions in Art/Archaeology” that is curated by Doug Bailey and Sara Navarro and held at the International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture in Santo Tirso, Portugal (6 March – 14 June 2020). Ineligible removed archaeological artefacts from the context of an excavation in San Francisco, disarticulates and repurposes them as raw materials in order to address contemporary political and social issues.

Holtorf and Kunze´s work is entitled “Preserved for the future”, and it addresses the global politics of loss and preservation. A shoe from San Francisco was burned reducing it to small fragments of minerals. The ceramic tile contains the photograph of a shadow of the shoe together with some of its tangible remains. A duplicate was deposited in the Memory of Mankind storage facility at Hallstatt in Austria where it may survive for hundreds of thousands of years.

In an ultimate act of preservation, the shoe of one human who lived a century ago has thus become part of the memory of humankind. To allow this prospect of preservation for the future, the shoe was translated into ashes and a shadow of itself. Ironically, this tile may be the only thing to survive from the excavation in San Francisco in the distant future.

So: has the shoe been lost through the process or preserved?

What will future generations make of this and other legacies of our time?

 

Archaeology Today

2020-03-05

In this colouring book we illustrate how archaeologists are working today applying new approaches. The authors are Cornelius Holtorf (text) and Daniel Lindskog (drawings). Thank you Riksbanken Jubileumsfond for support!

Download the colouring book here.

Heritage Futures – the book

2020-03-03

To be published in July 2020:

Heritage Futures Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices. By Rodney Harrison, Caitlin DeSilvey, Cornelius Holtorf, Sharon Macdonald, Nadia Bartolini, Esther Breithoff, Harald Fredheim, Antony Lyons, Sarah May, Jennie Morgan, and Sefryn Penrose. UCL Press 2020.

Preservation of natural and cultural heritage is often said to be something that is done for the future, or on behalf of future generations, but the precise relationship of such practices to the future is rarely reflected upon. Heritage Futures draws on research undertaken over four years by an interdisciplinary, international team of 16 researchers and more than 25 partner organisations to explore the role of heritage and heritage-like practices in building future worlds.

Impact of our work on memory across generations

2020-02-21

Our work concerning memory across generations has found its way into the 2020 Report of the Swedish Nuclear Waste Council to the Swedish Government (SOU 2020:9, in Swedish).

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. An English translation of the report will be published later this spring.

 

Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage

2020-02-20

Cornelius Holtorf was invited to contribute a critical epilogue to a new study on Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage edited by Veysel Apaydin and available in open access. After reading the other contributions he concluded, among others, that

“There is a risk that certain ways of discussing, conceptualising and indeed managing cultural heritage could ultimately cause more harm than benefit for future societies. For that reason it is paramount to think carefully and critically about how what we are doing today could have significant impact on the future.”

Shaping Sustainable Futures through Heritage…

2020-02-14

… was the topic of this years’s Spring Conference of the Nordic Centre of Heritage Learning and Creativity (NCK) held on 12-13 February 2020 in Östersund, Sweden.

The conference brought together more than 60 participants from several countries lively discussing what futures thinking and sustainable development can mean in the context of museums, archives and heritage sites. In his keynote lecture entitled Sustainable Futures for Heritage?, Cornelius Holtorf argued that cultural heritage will have a future to the extent that it can contribute to sustainable societies. But what does that mean?

Staffan Appelgren from the University of Göteborg gave one possible answer when he asked at the end of his lecture on re-use and the circular economy: “why do museums have collections? Why do they not borrow things as needed?” Other unusual ideas were explored in a time travel to the year 2070 that was organised by Kalmar County Museum and concluded the conference. Clearly, with methods developed in reference to the past we can travel to the future too.

For the heritage sector to be able to work towards the Sustainable Development Goals in a concrete way much similar innovation will be needed, both in thinking and in practice. To make a real difference for future generations it will not be good enough for heritage experts to campaign against losing a few coastal heritage sites to rising sea levels… 

Creative (un)makings: disruptions in art/archaeology

2020-02-05

An exhibition at Santo Tirso International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture in northern Portugal, 6 March – 21 June 2020.

Art/archaeology argues that writing and thinking about the past should move beyond existing boundaries of both disciplines, and that creative work should replace written texts and lectures. Art/archaeology opens a new space where creative work, thought, and debate expand in unexpected directions, and where we find innovative potentials for objects from the past.

Cornelius Holtorf (with Martin Kunze) prepared a contribution to this exhibition entitled “Preserved for the Future”. This work illustrates the creativity in all preservation and challenges the widespread preservation paradigm according to which the cultural heritage is constantly at risk and must be saved from loss.

“Preserved for the Future” is part of the larger installation called Ineligible which takes artefacts from an excavation in San Francisco and uses them as raw materials in order to make new artistic work that stimulates museum viewers’ thoughts about a variety of contemporary issues. More here.

Futures of Education and cultural resilience

2020-01-28

Among the 50 think pieces in UNESCO’s new volume on the futures of education is a short essay by Cornelius Holtorf on Enhancing cultural resilience by learning to appreciate change and transformation. The volume is part of UNESCO’s new Futures of Education initiative.

In the contribution, Holtorf argues, among others, that shifting the narrative on cultural heritage from one of conservation and loss to a continuous process of change and transformation can build cultural resilience, i.e. the ability of cultural systems to absorb adversity. Cultural heritage in all its rich variety manifests change over time. Learning to understand cultural heritage increasingly in those terms will facilitate our capability of adapting legacies of the past to changing circumstances both today and in the future.

The article and the volume in its entirety are accessible here. A French version is available here. The project is supported by the Swedish government through its development agency SIDA.