CLIMATE INHERITANCE

Design Earth

Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy

Introduction

World and Heritage in the Climate Crisis

Rania Ghosn

Sites

Galápagos Islands

Sagarmatha National Park

Ruins of Kilwa Kisiwani

Statue of Liberty

Venice and its Lagoon

Rapa Nui National Park

Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras

Ouadi Qadisha (the Holy Valley) and Forest of the Cedars of God

East Rennell

Ilulissat Icefjord

Essays

The New Inheritance Paradigm: Heritage in, of, and After the Anthropocene

Colin Sterling and Rodney Harrison

The Radical Life of a Landscape

David Gissen

Disaster as Experiment: Superstudio’s Radical Preservation

‘the damnable heritage’ of Roman bequests whose debts exceeded their assets.”42 An important emerging question for heritage management, thus, is whose heritage and which heritage is the legacy for future generations to inherit.

From Heritage to Inheritance

At a moment when the future itself is uncertain, brimming with anxieties of collapse and extinction, the concept of heritage requires revisiting critically and speculatively, to account for other values, affects, and stories.43 “What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics, become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether natural or social?” asks Donna Haraway, a feminist theorist and historian of science. She emphatically responds to her own question: “We need other kinds of stories.”44 In Staying with the Trouble, Haraway describes what she has come to call “speculative fabulation” as a “mode of attention, a theory of history, and a practice of worlding” for imagining future presents that are radically different than the world we inhabit now.45 For Haraway, the SF method disrupts habitual and binary ways of knowing to open up our Earth stories to urgent troubles and does that in a way that produces, in the thickness of contradiction, more fantastic accounts than the images and narratives of extractive modernity. Figuration becomes a crucial aesthetic method in this moment of crisis. Figures are “material-semiotic knots,” notes Haraway. They help us grapple inside the flesh of the world, making entanglements in which diverse clusters of meaning (narratives, discourses, precedents, imaginaries) shape one another through curating and “creating performative images that can be inhabited.”46

In a scene from the film Donna Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival, a playful exploration of her life and ideas, Haraway picks up a basket made by weavers from the Native American Navajo tribe. As she handles the basket, she explains that she also touches and interacts with the tangled histories of colonial conquest, exploitation, and violence that characterize the American past and present.47 Her existence at that specific moment and place in time as a white woman of Irish decent in Northern California in the twenty-first century and her ability to possess that artifact cannot be disentangled from these histories. We inherit, as she puts it, “the whole thing,” whether we want to or not. We are thrown into heritage. Inheritance, however, is never a given, it is always an open task actively taken on by those who inherit and placing them in relationship, perhaps under obligation, to those who have come before, as well as those who will come after.48 Inheritance necessarily entails learning how to “stay with the trouble” of what is inherited, to imagine a life worth living with the negative remains and afterlives of such inheritance.

41. Rodney Harrison and Colin Sterling, Deterritorializing the Future. Cornelius Holtorf and Anders Högberg, Cultural Heritage and the Future (London: Routledge, 2014); David Harvey and Jim Perry, eds., The Future of Heritage as Climates Change: Loss, Adaptation and Creativity (London: Routledge, 2015); Bjørnar Olsen and Þóra Pé tursd ó ttir “Unruly Heritage: Tracing Legacies in the Anthropocene,” Arkæologisk Forum 35 (2016): 38–46.

42. David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 40.

43. See Rodney Harrison, Caitlin DeSilvey, Cornelius Holtorf, Sharon Macdonald, Nadia Bartolini, Esther Breithoff, Harald Fredheim, Antony Lyons, Sarah May, Jennie Morgan, and Sefryn Penrose, Heritage Futures (London: University College London Press, 2020), https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/ eprint/10104405/1/Heritage -Futures.pdf.

44. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016), 30.

45. Ibid., 230.

46. Donna Haraway, Modest_ Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_ OncoMouseTM. Feminism and Technoscience (London: Routledge, 1997).

47. Fabrizio Terranova, Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival (Brussels: Icarus Films, 2016).

48. Jacques Derrida reminds us, “Inheritance is never a given; it is always a task. It remains before us.” Quoted in Ruth Müller, “A task that remains before us: Reconsidering inheritance as a biosocial phenomenon,” Seminars in Cell & Developmental Biology , vol. 97 (2020): 189–194.

For Haraway, inheritance begs the question of one’s ability to respond: how we inhabit the legacies of environmental destructions shapes our ability to respond, to figure out what is to be done.49 The where of inheritance matters. The work of inheriting responsibly, particularly when what needs to be inherited is a difficult history, is also a work of mourning and of bearing witness at sites of violence. This task requires the humility to dwell with traces of loathed history and the ghosts of wretched earths of the many worlds that have already come and ended and of the many people that have survived several apocalypses and myriad systems of dispossession, including colonialism, racism, sexism, classism, and ableism.50 The notion of inheritance provincializes the world and grounds it within specific sites in embodied encounters and situated histories. The focus on the past may seem odd given the deeply uncertain times ahead. Yet, inheritance only inhabits “the possibility of a future out of a haunted past.”51 The “what if” approach of speculative fabulation is to reconceive new symbolic values with the wreckages of the World. Inheritance provincializes the universality of heritage and the globality of climate change to situate destruction with-in the world, in all its messy entanglements.

Critical-Speculative Inheritance: A Politics of Evidence

Inheritance offers a conceptual tool to reconcile the valued aspects of heritage with the unjust processes on which they are predicated. To reflect on the consequences of the past, in a critical mode, requires new forms of historical attention and evidence. In the Venice Charter, the term “evidence” suggests how a preserved building becomes a material index of another time; for example, how the restoration of the Colosseum in Rome should provide evidence of the civilization that built it as an expression of human cultural value.52 The production of a heritage site, however, often entails the dispossession of people’s rights to their property, community, and culture to transform historical and geographical complexity into a representation of a particular moment in time in a scripted spatial experience, as author and designer David Gissen observes in the work by Leo von Klenze at the Acropolis in the 19th century and Henri Seyrig in Palmyra in the early 1930s.53 The term “evidence,” Gissen suggests, also holds the prospect for another politics of evidence, which, by holding together multiple temporalities, opens up the possibility of a critical engagement with some of the less-documented episodes or aspects of a monument’s history and enables monuments to retain the damage that they accrue over time or through violence.54

In the exhibition and essay “The Radical Life of a Landscape,” reprinted in this volume, Gissen brings historical reconstruction to bear on one episode of French history, when the Paris Commune in 1871 voted to demolish the Vendôme Column and all allusions to the Napoleonic era, only for the column to be reconstructed in 1874. Gissen retraces the history of

49. Donna Haraway, “Speculative Fabulations for Technoculture’s Generations: Taking Care of Unexpected Country,” Australian Humanities Review , 50 (2011).

Nicholas Gane, “When we Have Never Been Human, What is to be Done?: Interview with Donna Haraway,” Theory Culture Society 23 (2006): 145.

50. In their book, philosopher Déborah Danowski and anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro offer a bold overview and interpretation of these current discourses on “the end of the world,” reading them as thought experiments on the decline of the West’s anthropological adventure, that is, as attempts, though not necessarily intentional ones, at inventing a mythology that is adequate to the present.

51. Donna Haraway, “Donna Haraway in Conversation with Martha Kenney: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhucene,” Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies , ed. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities, 2015), 255–70.

52. Fitch Colloquium: Preservation and War, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=zRjNr21_An0

53. David Gissen, “The Rights of Monuments,” Future Anterior , vol. 14, no. 1 (Summer 2017): 71-77, 72. The U.S. National Park System as environmental heritage was produced through the displacement and genocide of indigenous people. See William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995), 69–90.

54. Gissen, The Rights of Monuments , 75.

Venice is an underground forest. The wealth of its architecture is built upon long wooden piles, the equivalent of 10 million tree trunks that are embedded into the solid clay underneath. St Mark’s Basilica floats on oak logs held up by stilts of elm. The roots of the seagrass consolidate the soil, holding the underground pillars in place and preventing them from sinking further into the clay subsoil. The excavation of deep canals to accommodate oil tankers irreparably harmed the lagoon’s ecosystem, increasing tidal patterns and causing erosion that effectively swept sediment out and depleted the seagrass population. The city is further subsiding with more frequent pumping from the aquifer beneath; all the while, Venice is being flooded by its highest tides to date as a result of rising sea levels.

Contributors

Lucia Allais

Lucia Allais is an architectural historian of the modern period. She is currently Associate Professor and Director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP). Allais’s first book, Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2018) describes the rise of a new definition of “the monument” through liberal internationalist organizations, who sought to protect and salvage buildings from the extensive destructions of the middle of the 20th century. Allais is editor of the journal Grey Room and founding member of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative.

David Gissen

David Gissen is an author and designer who works in the fields of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. He is currently Professor of Architecture and Urban History at the Parsons School of Design/New School University. David is the author of The Architecture of Disability (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) a work of history, theory, and memoir. His other books include a materialist exploration of architecture and urban environmental degradation, Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments (Princeton Architecture Press, 2009) and a history of New York City told through the design of the city’s air, Manhattan Atmospheres (University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

Rodney Harrison

Rodney Harrison is Professor of Heritage Studies at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, University College London. He has experience working in, teaching, and researching heritage and museums in North and South America, the UK, continental Europe, the Middle East, Australia and southeast Asia. His books include Heritage Futures (coauthored, UCL Press, 2020), Deterritorialising the Future: Heritage in, of an after the Anthropocene (coedited, Open Humanities Press, 2020), and Reimagining Museums for Climate Action (coedited, 2021).

Colin Sterling

Colin Sterling is Assistant Professor of Memory and Museums at the University of Amsterdam. He teaches across heritage studies, museum studies and artistic research, and is a member of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture. His research critically examines heritage and museums through the lens of art and ecology. Colin is the author of Heritage, Photography, and the Affective Past (Routledge, 2020) and coeditor of the journal Museums & Social Issues

Acknowledgments

Climate Inheritance is supported by the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST). Our gratitude goes to Leila Kinney (Executive Director of Arts Initiatives and CAST) and Evan Ziporyn (Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music and faculty director of CAST) for their trust in the project.

We also acknowledge the support from curators and editors who provided platforms for this work, including initially at Bauhaus Museum Dessau (Regina Bittner and Christin Irrgang), and at Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/ Architecture (Aric Chen and Jane Jia Weng), ETH Zurich gta Exhibitions (Sara Sherif), and Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal (Timon Covelli, Melinda Agron, Alexis Kandel, and David Langdon).

For the essays in this volume, we are thankful to Lucia Allais, David Gissen, Colin Sterling, and Rodney Harrison for their intellectual generosity and their kind permissions to reproduce the texts. We also give thanks to Patricia Baudoin, Lily Bartle, and Ross Lipton for their editorial work.

We are grateful for the support and inspiration of colleagues and mentors: Hashim Sarkis (Dean MIT SA+P), Nicholas de Monchaux (Head of MIT Architecture), Jonathan Massey (Dean of the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning), and McLain Clutter (Chair of the architecture program at Taubman College). The research benefited from the lively conversations with students in the MIT Architecture Spring 2022 Workshop “World Heritage, Climate Inheritance” and the Taubman College Spring 2021 Propositions Studio “Cautionary Tales for Climate Inheritance.”