ABSTRACT
This book springs from the convictions that climate change demands urgent transformations in the ways we think about ourselves and our world, and that museums are effective places for supporting conversation about and action on this issue. This book also responds to the perception that museums need to develop new modes of thinking and practice in order to fully embrace this role. Curating the Future considers how contemporary museums are reshaping some of the conceptual, material and organizational structures that have historically underpinned their own institutions and, more broadly, modes of living in the world that have produced climate change. It explores how diverse museums are engaging with attitudes and practices of ‘relationality’, tracing how these institutions are, along four key trajectories, building bridges across deep-seated separations between colonized and colonizer, Nature and Culture, local and global, authority and uncertainty. Curating the Future brings together perspectives from many parts of the world, celebrating
how museums can function as spaces that enable the ‘coming together’ across time and geo - graphy of peoples, ideas and stories. The book explores museums as places that foster learning of many different kinds, including through congregation and sharing and in emotional and embodied, as well as analytical, modes. Moreover, it gains impetus from the ways in which museums, despite decades of critical re-evaluation, remain for many of their publics trusted sources of information.1These traditions suggest that museums are well placed to enable new forms of collaboration and community through which innovative responses to the frequently highly politicized issue of climate change might be nurtured. The chapters that follow discuss
a variety of initiatives in this vein, reflecting on interpreting collections in collaboration with communities, engaging diverse visitors with climate-change science, and experimenting with exhibitions and performances that excite people’s hearts, as well as minds. Reflecting their centrality to museums, Curating the Future focuses strongly on objects and
collections. Many of this book’s chapters investigate how collections of diverse types, media and locations, including those held outside museums proper, can be understood as materializing processes of climate change. Short “Object in View” studies sketch out how individual objects can prompt imaginative engagements with this issue. In a sense, this book presents an assemblage of texts through which collections emerge as inter-generational carriers of stories – things that dramatize experiences of cultural-ecological crises and have the capacity to foster cohesion and resilience in the face of them. We hope that it will stimulate museums to consider more fully how they might build new collections, interpretations and collaborations that engage communities and develop their capacities to respond to climate change.
