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Curating the Future
Curating the Museums, Communities and Climate Change explores the way museums tackle the broad global issue of climate change. It explores the power of real objects and collections to stir hearts and minds, to engage communities affected by change. Museums work through exhibitions, events, and specific collection projects to reach different communities in different ways. The book emphasises the moral responsibilities of museums to address climate change, not just by communicating science but also by enabling people already affected by changes to find their own ways of living with global warming. There are museums of natural history, of art and of social history. The focus of this book is the museum communities, like those in the Pacific, who have to find new ways to express their culture in a new place. The book considers how collections in museums might help future generations stay in touch with their culture, even where they have left their place. It asks what should the people of the present be collecting for museums in a climate-changed future? The book is rich with practical museum experience and detailed projects, as well as critical and philosophical analyses about where a museum can intervene to speak to this great conundrum of our times. Curating the Future is essential reading for all those working in museums and grappling with how to talk about climate change. It also has academic applications in courses of museology and museum studies, cultural studies, heritage studies, digital humanities, design, anthropology, and environmental humanities.
298 pages, Paperback
Published August 11, 2016
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May 23, 2023
As any edited volume is like, there were some chapters I enjoyed more than others. But overall, an interesting book, edited by Jennifer Newell, who teaches Museum Anthropology at Columbia and is the curator of Pacific Ethnography at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
The book is divided up into four sections or ‘trajectories’.
The first, called “Welcoming new voices: opening museums” is about projects of decolonization, climate justice, and the authorization of diverse forms of knowledge including subaltern voices and communities resisting injustice. There are chapters here written by residents of islands that will soon be submerged because of climate change, stories about how artifacts have revived cultural practices lost in Indigenous communities, exhibits on climate migration, and so on. Perhaps my favourite chapter in both this section and the whole book was Rob Nixon’s.
One dichotomy that often exists in both conservation and environmental discourse more broadly is the one that asks whether conservation is done to fulfill ‘self-interested’ human goals or ‘altruistically’ ecological goals – whether it is cultural or natural. Rob Nixon’s text challenges this dichotomy by emphasizing the heterogeneity of human interests. Nixon identifies two framings of environmental interpretation in tension with one another: environmental justice and the Anthropocene. Nixon thinks about these two issues through the artifact of the chainsaw – originally a medical instrument of the Scottish Enlightenment that was taken up by the Industrial Revolution and later facilitated widespread deforestation. He compares two videos about the chainsaw. The first is a David Attenborough BBC clip of the lyrebird, shown mimicking the sounds of other birds, tourist cameras, car alarms, and then most notably, the sound of chainsaws. Nixon argues the chainsaws in this video remain abstract; the viewer does not know who is holding the chainsaw. Rather the chainsaw stands in for a monolithic humanity that is encroaching on a nonhuman world. The second video is of an Israeli Defense Force soldier holding a chainsaw a cutting down a Palestinian family’s olive trees to the shouts of protest and despair from local Palestinian residents. Here, there is no unified species actor representing a monolithic humanity. The chainsaw does not merely represent human encroachment of the non-human, but it is also a settler technology that enables forceful seizure of territory by way of felling trees.
The second part of this book is called “Reuniting nature and culture.” It challenges human exceptionalism, proposes things like “ecological museology”, highlights exhibits on bicycles, water, and food security, approaches sea history from the perspective of a turtle, displays a tracking collar worn by a dog who saved people from a climate-induced flood, and also a chapter on extinction focused on a snail which is the last of its species.
The third part is called “Focusing on the future” and it has chapters on coral collections and ocean acidification, food security and agriculture under a changing climate, a chapter by Sharon Willoughby a curator of sorts at a royal botanic gardens that describes the strange garden tool of a cucumber straightener, and finally some ways that art galleries have been theming exhibits around the Anthropocene.
The fourth part is entitled “Representing change and uncertainty” and it focuses on the shift away from absolute and universal truths. The first chapter in this section examines an Inuit artifact made from a seal gut as well as an art project that stretched an animal gut over a car as commentary on unequal global exchanges driven by fossil fuels. There is another chapter on how Swedish museums have been engaging in environmental change, and another chapter on a fish museum exhibit on climate change that imagines New York under water. Finally there is a piece on climate change in the media beyond museums and its relation to slow media like museums. The final chapter is about how the Anthropocene is engaged with in museum exhibitions and how an old coal-mining village has become both a tourist site for both cultural heritage and as a resource for climate science research.
The book is divided up into four sections or ‘trajectories’.
The first, called “Welcoming new voices: opening museums” is about projects of decolonization, climate justice, and the authorization of diverse forms of knowledge including subaltern voices and communities resisting injustice. There are chapters here written by residents of islands that will soon be submerged because of climate change, stories about how artifacts have revived cultural practices lost in Indigenous communities, exhibits on climate migration, and so on. Perhaps my favourite chapter in both this section and the whole book was Rob Nixon’s.
One dichotomy that often exists in both conservation and environmental discourse more broadly is the one that asks whether conservation is done to fulfill ‘self-interested’ human goals or ‘altruistically’ ecological goals – whether it is cultural or natural. Rob Nixon’s text challenges this dichotomy by emphasizing the heterogeneity of human interests. Nixon identifies two framings of environmental interpretation in tension with one another: environmental justice and the Anthropocene. Nixon thinks about these two issues through the artifact of the chainsaw – originally a medical instrument of the Scottish Enlightenment that was taken up by the Industrial Revolution and later facilitated widespread deforestation. He compares two videos about the chainsaw. The first is a David Attenborough BBC clip of the lyrebird, shown mimicking the sounds of other birds, tourist cameras, car alarms, and then most notably, the sound of chainsaws. Nixon argues the chainsaws in this video remain abstract; the viewer does not know who is holding the chainsaw. Rather the chainsaw stands in for a monolithic humanity that is encroaching on a nonhuman world. The second video is of an Israeli Defense Force soldier holding a chainsaw a cutting down a Palestinian family’s olive trees to the shouts of protest and despair from local Palestinian residents. Here, there is no unified species actor representing a monolithic humanity. The chainsaw does not merely represent human encroachment of the non-human, but it is also a settler technology that enables forceful seizure of territory by way of felling trees.
The second part of this book is called “Reuniting nature and culture.” It challenges human exceptionalism, proposes things like “ecological museology”, highlights exhibits on bicycles, water, and food security, approaches sea history from the perspective of a turtle, displays a tracking collar worn by a dog who saved people from a climate-induced flood, and also a chapter on extinction focused on a snail which is the last of its species.
The third part is called “Focusing on the future” and it has chapters on coral collections and ocean acidification, food security and agriculture under a changing climate, a chapter by Sharon Willoughby a curator of sorts at a royal botanic gardens that describes the strange garden tool of a cucumber straightener, and finally some ways that art galleries have been theming exhibits around the Anthropocene.
The fourth part is entitled “Representing change and uncertainty” and it focuses on the shift away from absolute and universal truths. The first chapter in this section examines an Inuit artifact made from a seal gut as well as an art project that stretched an animal gut over a car as commentary on unequal global exchanges driven by fossil fuels. There is another chapter on how Swedish museums have been engaging in environmental change, and another chapter on a fish museum exhibit on climate change that imagines New York under water. Finally there is a piece on climate change in the media beyond museums and its relation to slow media like museums. The final chapter is about how the Anthropocene is engaged with in museum exhibitions and how an old coal-mining village has become both a tourist site for both cultural heritage and as a resource for climate science research.
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