Role of Creative Practice in Heritage Process: Speculative Pasts from Certain Futures. Past, Present and Future, Which Comes First?

Abstract

In partnership with Dean Sully, Associate Professor in Conservation at UCL’s Institute of Archaeology, we look beyond human-centered heritage practice and seek to engage with more destabilized ideas of temporality and the more-than-human. The intriguing contradictions and deep timeframes of the Anthropocene potentially help to free us from a human-centered focus, and allow us to step outside of current constraints in comprehending problems and taking action. In the workshop we build a participatory thought experiment, in which participants are invited to propose their own Department of the MPIWG situated at the far edges of the Anthropocene, on the end of a semi-fiction Pier. This provides a speculative exploration of heritage care for living as well as possible in more-equitable, more-than- human worlds