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

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.