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- Convenors:
-
Lucy Bond
(University of Westminster)
Aaron Bryant (Smithsonian Institution)
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- Stream:
- Archives and Museums
- Sessions:
- Friday 18 September, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Convened by scholars from the University of Westminster and the Smithsonian Institution, this panel considers the role that cultural heritage institutions play in revealing and resisting past, present, and future forms of environmental racism.
Long Abstract:
Kathryn Yusoff traces the origins of the Anthropocene to slave economies that fuelled European imperialism and American expansion to argue that the concept of the Anthropocene conceals a long history of colonialism and racialized violence. Similarly, today's economic environment of industrial expansion through carbon economies disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color. Yet, the nexus between industrialization, race, environmentalism, and social and economic justice remain under-discussed issues. There are many reasons for this. Low-income communities and communities of color, for example, often lack access to the social capital, political networks, and economic resources needed to make the impact of environmental injustice in their lives visible. Forging a dialogue between curatorial and academic specialists from the United Kingdom and the United States, this panel facilitates a discussion on the role that cultural heritage institutions might play in revealing and resisting past, present, and future forms of environmental racism.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 18 September, 2020, -clara de Massol (King's College London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at the New York-based Climate Museum, founded in 2014 by former social justice lawyer Miranda Massie. In particular it looks at its politics of representation through the exhibition Taking Action.
Paper long abstract:
Located in New York City, the Climate Museum is one of the world's first comprehensive museum dedicated to discussing and displaying anthropogenic climate change. Founded in 2014 by former social justice litigator Miranda Massie, the not-for-profit initiative, '[a] new museum for the path ahead' according to its vision statement, formulates modes of practice engaging visitors in the realities of global warming. The Climate Museum as it is being designed is a public-facing mission-driven institution responding to the belief that museums have the social power and responsibility to engage and inform the public on significant subject-matters. As climate change threatens planetary material and intangible culture and heritage, it compels us to imagine what Claire Colebrook defines as a 'proleptic' memory (2016), which is looking back to record and remember what is being lost in the present and future. Drawing on the Climate Museum's latest exhibition Taking Action, the analysis traces the museum's politics of representation, particularly paying attention to the ways in which the institution performs neoliberal and universalist practices seeking to produce empowered visitors 'solving' climate change. The paper as such outlines the leftist solutionism of the exhibition, examining the museum's narratives that are built on a neoliberal fantasy of empowered communities, while failing to address the multidirectional, historical and structural inequalities of the crisis. This presentation attempts to reflect on the incredible cultural magnitude that is asked of museal structures as anthropogenic climate change determines past, present and future cultural and mnemonic engagements with the planet.
Lucy Bond (University of Westminster) Jessica Rapson (King's College London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how the celebration of Texan heritage involves the strategic construction of savage 'others'. This disavowal of the multicultural complexion of Texas past and present echoes the current economic and environmental injustice to which Texans of colour are routinely exposed.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines how pioneering processes of independence and extraction underpin the official narrative of Texas history and memory in museums and heritage sites. We contrast this narrative with counter-memories that expose the state's continuing history of environmental racism. The celebration of rugged independence remains a crucial part of the master-narrative of Texan history, and the notion of the pioneer spirit is often exemplified by the discovery and extraction of oil on Texan land. However, museums and heritage sites typically ignore the racialised forms of environmental injustice upon which processes are premised. In a heritage landscape which celebrates oil as essential to American life, TEJAS, run by Juan and Ana Parras, provide an alternative experience via toxic tours of Houston's marginalised neighbourhoods. This paper analyses a tour taken with Juan Parras, revealing the extent of big oil's social, economic and political influence in the area and the impact of this on local Latino and African American communities living in the shadow of extraction infrastructure. Such impact includes increased respiratory, neurological, immune, and reproductive health issues and higher risk of cancer. Tours also provide an alternative reading of the San Jacinto Battleground State Historical Site, home to the Shell sponsored exhibit Big Energy. For TEJAS, this site functions as a paradigm of structural racism and environmental injustice propped up by big oil. Overall, we suggest, TEJAS's tours provide an important corrective to revisionist memory-making and offer an embodied experience of living and dying unevenly in one of America's most polluted cities.
Aaron Bryant (Smithsonian Institution)
Paper short abstract:
Global communities responded to George Floyd's death with protests, as cities made efforts to redefine themselves as spheres for civic engagement. This paper will offer curatorial reflections on rapid response collecting on this moment and its relevance to history, race, and social justice.
Paper long abstract:
Focusing on George Floyd Black Lives Matter protests at Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., this paper will offer an overview of my role, as a curator of contemporary history and social justice, in preserving objects that represent select memories and voices of this present moment. Lafayette Square is the public park in front of the United States (U.S.) White House. It became ground zero for major protests in the U.S., including physical confrontations between law enforcement and demonstrators, which prompted Washington's mayor to rename the site Black Lives Matter Plaza.
Starting with the importance of collecting the massive Greenpeace Black Lives Matter banner, which became a symbol and call to action for protesters, this paper will offer reflections on rapid response collecting and this moment's relevance to history. As demonstrators across the U.S. and around the world responded with protests over George Floyd's death, cities made efforts to redefine themselves as public spheres for civic engagement on democracy, race, and social justice.
Peter Ride (University of Westminster)
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers how museums contexualise Aboriginal artwork through gallery text, and how they articulate issues around landscape, environmental responsibility and race relations.
Paper long abstract:
Australian Aboriginal painting came to prominence in the 1980s and was quickly celebrated and became widely collected, partly because it used western art practice to represent the Aboriginal spiritual knowledge of 'Dreamtime/Dreamings' (Myers,2002; Caruna,2012). Australian Aboriginal art is unusual because it is held by ethnographic museums and contemporary art museums. Similar language is often used to describe work in both contexts, emphasising sacred knowledge and traditions and placing the art as part of the relationship between indigenous people, their ancestors and the land (Andrews,2018; Tavendale,2019).
The catastrophic climate emergency in Australia, and heightened debates about deforestation and mining, have involved cultural and heritage organisations in discussions about environmental responsibility. However, traditional museums often present aboriginal art in a manner suggesting that the relationship with the land is primarily historical or mythological when aboriginal artwork also portrays a continuing, contemporary relationship with the land—including traditional land management methods such as controlled burning (Gosford,2015). Work can also allude to white Australian destruction of landscape, dispossession, encroachment on native settlements and acts of racism (Myers,2013).
This paper considers how museums contexualise Aboriginal artwork through gallery text, and how they articulate issues around landscape and race relations. It questions the language that museum displays employ to distance the work from the contemporary issues. This language also tends to diminish the complex spirituality expressed by the paintings, partly because Western languages do not have the vocabulary or cultural access to translate the richness of meaning.
Catherine Ince (Victoria and Albert Museum)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will explore the benefits and challenges of urban transformation at East Bank, a new cultural and academic district planned to open in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in 2023.
Paper long abstract:
The London 2012 Olympic Games brought dramatic change to the communities of Stratford and neighbouring boroughs in east London. Rapid urban transformation across this part of the city is not new and has, over the past century, resulted in both positive change, and problematic disruption and displacement. The public corporation established to deliver the promised sustainable legacy of the Games and reinvent Olympic Park infrastructure for long-term public use, conceived of East Bank, a billion-pound investment project adding cultural and academic organisations to an existing framework of housing and business development. In 2014 the V&A accepted the invitation to join the East Bank campus and will build a new museum and a collection research centre across two sites in the Olympic Park. This paper will consider the role the V&A and other East Bank partners play in the development and gentrification of these east London boroughs, where ethnic and socio-economic demographies are some of the most diverse and starkly contrasted in the UK. It will ask how new public cultural infrastructure can, and should, serve fractured and increasingly divided communities to create equitable spaces, experiences and opportunities for everyone; and will discuss the opportunity the V&A has to document, display and engage people in discourses around the challenges and benefits of urban transformation.