Heritage Futures (Manchester Museum, 2018-19)
Heritage Futures
(Manchester Museum, 2018-19)
How can heritage resource alternative futures?
Heritage Futures was developed as an output of a major research project of the same name. The exhibition was co-curated with Prof. Rodney Harrison (UCL), who initiated the Heritage Futures research project. The exhibition proposed that heritage is not so much about materials that are inherited from the past, but materials and practices that we value in the present and that make different futures more or less possible. In working with heritage futures, we have to negotiate four challenges: how to collect in an era of mass production (profusion), how to collect when we are not sure what people[s] in the future will need or value (uncertainty), how to collect when we can’t represent all variety of people or interests (diversity), and how to collect when the future[s] will be different from the present (transformation).
Exhibition images © Hartland Design
The exhibition, designed by Hartland Design, was organised in four sections. A Herdwick Sheep, a Lynx, the Voyager Golden Record (replica), plastic waste swallowed by Albatrosses (borrowed from the British Antarctic Survey), extinct and still living Curlew species, mobile phones and Mesopotamian clay tablets (the tablets still work, the phones don’t), de-extinction, seed packets from the Svalbard Seed Vault, a Giant Tortoise from the Galapagos, all helped to present the project and its ideas.