Sterling, Colin & Rodney Harrison. 2023. The New Inheritance Paradigm: Heritage in, of and after the Anthropocene. In: DESIGN EARTH: Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy (eds.) Climate Inheritance. New York & Barcelona: Actar, 128-135
This chapter in Climate Inheritance explores the shifting patterns and flows of inheritance that define heritage in, of and after the Anthropocene. Many thanks to Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy (DESIGN EARTH) for the invitation to rework our introduction to Deterritorializing the Future for this volume. The book builds on an exhibition of the same name shown at Bauhaus Dessau in 2021.
Book description
Climate Inheritance is a speculative design research publication that reckons with the complexity of world and heritage in the Anthropocene. The impacts of climate change on heritage sites—from Venice flooding to extinction in the Galápagos Islands—have garnered empathetic media attention in a landscape that has otherwise failed to communicate the urgency of the climate crisis. In a strategic subversion of the media aura of heritage, DESIGN EARTH casts ten World Heritage sites as narrative figures to visualize pervasive climate risks—rising sea levels, extinction, droughts, air pollution, melting glaciers, material vulnerability, unchecked tourism, and the massive displacement of communities and cultural artifacts—all while situating the present emergency within the wreckages of other ends of world, replete with the salvages of extractivism, racism, and settler colonialism. The possibilities of such climate inheritances are narrated in drawing triptychs and mythologies that bequeath other worlds and values.
Available to buy from Actar Publishers
Colin Sterling 