Critical Heritage Ecologies is a research initiative based at the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (University of Amsterdam). The project takes an ecological approach to Critical Heritage Studies, an emerging field that explores the cultural, social and political dimensions of heritage ideas and practices in a global context.
Art and heritage are deeply entangled with major societal concerns. Under threat from environmental breakdown, funding cuts, and the resurgence of far right politics, art and heritage also still have to face a full reckoning with their coloniality (the ongoing legacies and practices of western imperialism and colonialism). At the same time, art and heritage have proven potential to engage, inspire and motivate, helping individuals and communities to address urgent contemporary challenges, from the Sixth Mass Extinction to the ongoing violences of modernity.
Critical Heritage Studies (CHS) addresses such issues by emphasising the political, cultural, and social dimensions of heritage, a broad field that embraces museums, archives, historic architecture, community art practices, intangible heritage and environmental conservation, alongside other forms of official and unofficial memory making. CHS is particularly concerned with the different ways the past is mobilised in the present to shape diverse futures. The term ecology, meanwhile, is understood to emphasize interrelationships and interactions between more-than-human actors within and beyond specific environments. Taking an ecological approach to heritage therefore means acknowledging and working with human and other-than-human agencies and processes in a way that transcends the traditional nature-culture divide.[1]
The Critical Heritage Ecologies team aim to shed light on the different ways in which heritage ideas and processes have shaped interactions between humans and their environments (and vice versa) in the past and the present. They understand all forms of heritage – including that qualified as art and/or displayed in museums – as fully entangled with material-ecological worlds. Critical Heritage Ecologies seeks to reimagine the messy realities of heritage praxis. To this end, it will map and analyse heritage ideas and practices with an eye to the other-than-human processes and presences manifest in all heritage work. The project has a specific thematic interest in processes of repair and reparations; in environmental museology; and in collection histories and the nature-culture divide.
[1] Bangstad and Pétursdottir, 5: ‘ecology of heritage should attempt to exfoliate the binaries of culture and nature, human and non-human and make room for the appreciation that heritage phenomena are entangled in more-than-human material and environmental processes’.
Critical Heritage Ecologies 