UNESCO

Archaeologist Paul Graves-Brown published some interesting thoughts on predicting and periodising the future. Although insurance companies and materials engineers are happy to define distinct periods in the future, historians and archaeologists are not. Isn’t it odd!

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.

… 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… 

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.

A mix of committed individuals from different countries, with different specialisms and at different stages in their careers.

All seven members of the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures met on 21-22 January 2020 at Linnaeus University in Kalmar to exchange views and experiences on relevant issues and to launch the second phase of their work for which they will intensify joint discussions.

Photograph by Johannes Rydström/LNU.

On 15 and 16 January, Anders Högberg participated in the kick-off meeting of the Working Party on Information, Data and Knowledge Management (WP-IDKM) at the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) in Paris.

The focus of this new OECD-initiative is on issues related to the keeping of information and knowledge required to inform future generations about the location and content of nuclear waste repositories. Together with delegates from several European countries, Japan and the US, he contributed to defining the directions for the coming three years of work within this initiative.

Here for an interesting project that promises to store all of our data for an unlimited future by drawing on organic technology.

The method draws on principles of natural heritage and saves data (including cultural heritage) by emitting O2 while cutting down on CO2, thus contributing to saving the planet ….

Curious? You should be! More information is available here.

When Trump recently threatened to target cultural sites in Iran in future military attacks, the outcry of heritage organizations around the world was enormous.

Attacking cultural targets is not only against international law but also against deeply felt values that separate the realm of culture from the realm of legitimate military action. It has been pointed out that the US government does not have major disagreements with the Iranian people (and their culture) but merely with the politics of the Iranian government.

Similar sentiments have been rehearsed many times before, for example when the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan in 2001 and, more recently, when the Islamic State destroyed various ancient structures of Palmyra in Syria in 2015.

When cultural sites are targeted in military conflicts their sustainability is threatened. Hence the opposition of all the many organizations that agree on the importance of culture and cultural sites for people in Iran as elsewhere. But the question is whether the dominant understandings of culture that are reflected in the widespread criticism of Trump’s threat are sustainable either.

There are two problems in particular with the campaign to safeguard Iranian cultural sites. The first problem is that it essentializes the Iranian people. It assumes that there is only one culture in Iran uniting all its citizens. However, in reality people have different cultural preferences in Iran as much as anywhere else. It is not appropriate to assume that all 80 million Iranians share the same (one assumes traditional) culture when this is neither empirically likely to be the case nor what many Iranians themselves may want. Clearly, we need to recognize and indeed promote that people in Iran live their lives with different cultural preferences. But it is unclear whether in practice we are campaigning to safeguard all cultural preferences in Iran or only some.

The second problem is defending cultural sites in Iran essentializes Iranian culture. It assumes that culture in Iran is necessarily distinct from culture in the US or anywhere else. In reality however, very many people anywhere in the world share by now much more culture with each other than what divides them. They may have different mother tongues and live in different homes but they like to watch many of the same movies, listen to much of the same music, enjoy many of the same video games, tv programs, and sports, even consume some of the same food and beverages, etc. So those who insist that Iranian cultural sites must be saved, what do they mean: Iranian digital infrastructure? Iranian movie theaters? Iranian sports arenas and shopping malls? Even the biggest religions have global distributions.

When Trump threatened to target cultural sites, he intended to provoke Iranian politicians and presumably the entire world. In doing so he also meant to reaffirm the belief that Iranians are culturally distinct from Americans (and others), and that all Iranians share one joint culture. These are not sustainable assumptions if you have faith in cultural freedom for everybody and if you are aware of the many cultural preferences that today unite so many people in the world with each other.

Trump may not like to see that most Iranians really are in many ways like all of us. Let us be free to disagree with him on this point, too.