UNESCO

Chair on Heritage Futures

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.

Post-corona archaeology

2020-11-13

My recent Keynote “Post-Corona Archaeology: Creating a New Normal?” at the 2020 EAA Annual Meeting’s Opening Ceremony is now available online in written form in the new issue 66 of The European Archaeologist.

I propose three lessons for post-corona archaeology:

  1. Let’s take the future seriously and do our best to ensure that archaeology actually contributes to sustainable development that will benefit future generations in concrete ways.
  2. Let’s go beyond the notion of cultural diversity and focus on what people shared and indeed share, promoting trust, solidarity and collaboration between human beings on this planet.
  3. Let’s realise more often the value of culture, cultural heritage and archaeological practice to be inclusive and bring people together, promoting peace among humans both in society and between societies.

The recorded presentation is available on youtube (starts at 48:30)

Progress in high-level nuclear waste management?

2020-11-12

Cornelius Holtorf attended an international expert roundtable on progress in high-level radioactive waste management and the sustainability of nuclear energy, chaired by William Magwood, Director-General of the Nuclear Energy Agency of the OECD.
The top global decision-makers attending the meeting (including Rita Baranwal, the Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy at the US Dept of Energy) seem to agree that the biggest problem the sector is facing does not relate to the technical solutions available but to public and stakeholder confidence in solutions applying across extreme timescales.

What they have not yet considered sufficiently is that future people’s behaviour may undo even the most well-intended technical solutions. That is where the humanities need to come in for gaining a better understanding of what people (might) do and why…

World heritage futures in Karlskrona

2020-11-05

Cornelius Holtorf held a full-day World Heritage Workshop in Karlskrona. Joining up with the Director of the Museum of Blekinge region, two Heads of Department and two education professionals, they discussed in detail development prospects and possibilities for a planned World Heritage Museum and its many associated activities in the light of global trends in the cultural heritage sector.

From left to right: Ola Palmgren (pedagogue), Christoffer Sandahl (Head of Collections), Maja Heuer (Head of Public Unit), Marcus Sandekjer (Director), Cornelius Holtorf, Charlotte Nordheim (Project coordinator and pedagogue). The two old guys in the background remained silent during the day.

SDG 11 – week in Sweden!

2020-10-20

This week, Ulrika Söderström and Cornelius Holtorf attend the national SDG 11-week organised by FORMAS, the Swedish research council for sustainable development.

Sustainable Development Goal 11 is about Sustainable Cities and Communities. Within this goal, Target 11.4 aims to “strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage”. 

In one session (on 20 October), National Architect Helena Bjarnegård discussed the significance of urban planning by reminding us that a building may stand for a hundred years but an urban environment may survive for as much as a millennium. This is where heritage futures become important – how do we plan the cultural heritage for hundreds of years into the future?

Managing Heritage in Times of Crisis

2020-10-17

The ICOMOS 6ISCs Joint Meeting “Advancing Risk Management for the Shared Future” was held virtually on 17 October 2020, assembling ca 100 participants from around the world, with more being able to watch the recording afterwards. The aim of the meeting was to develop risk management for cultural heritage.

Cornelius Holtorf contributed with a paper on “The Significance of Managing Heritage Processes in Times of Crisis” in which he argued that risk management strategies should give more attention to managing processes and practices of heritage.

The paper is available as an oral presentation and in written form as part of the meeting’s proceedings.

Message in a bottle to the future?

2020-10-09

Johan Joelsson and Jonatan Jacobsson published a beautiful book of illustrated essays entitled “Message in a bottle to the future: how we preserve our traces for 100,000 years“.

Surprisingly many of the texts and images engage with cultural and natural heritage that is directly relevant to heritage futures. There are essays about the Memory of Mankind, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the use of DNA Storage to preserve digital data, the remains of the city of Pripyat near Chernobyl, the destroyed Kiruna Town Hall which recently had to give way to the city’s mining operations,  and – not the least – the question of long-term memory of repositories of nuclear waste (which includes interviews with Anders and Cornelius).

Authenticity and Reconstruction

2020-10-05

Authenticity and the reconstruction of cultural heritage are today on the top of the agenda of heritage studies. They reemerged in the aftermath of natural disasters and human conflicts resulting in destructions of cultural heritage, such as the recent military conflicts in Syria.

Can, and, indeed, should, destruction be undone? Does the reconstruction of cultural heritage always lie in the best interests of the local population? How can heritage best contribute to future-making? What is the relationship between the values of a given heritage and the circumstances of its creation or re-creation?

The articles in a new special issue on Authenticity and Reconstruction of the International Journal of Cultural Property, edited by Cornelius Holtorf, explore some of these issues:

The papers are combining current thinking in different disciplines (psychology, architecture, urban planning, historic preservation, and archaeology) with practical examples from around the world. They derive from the pilot workshop of the ICOMOS University Forum, titled “A Contemporary Provocation: Reconstructions as Tools of Future-making“. Held on 13–15 March 2017 at ICOMOS’s international head- quarters in Paris, France, the workshop was co-organized by Cornelius Holtorf (Linnaeus University, Sweden), Loughlin Kealy (University College Dublin, Ireland), Toshiyuki Kono (ICOMOS/Kyushu University, Japan), and Marie-Laure Lavenir (ICOMOS, France). As an event of the ICOMOS University Forum, its aim was to stimulate dialogue between professional heritage consultants and academic heritage experts.