Europa Nostra/European Heritage Hub Forum: Reimagining the Anthropocene: Putting Culture and Heritage at the Heart of Climate Action
Speech given by: Višnja Kisić, Forest University, Fruška Gora, Serbia
It is always a special thing to be in Venice, the place so potent and vulnerable at the same time. And being in it, I see it each time anew. I’m deeply touched by its beauty, its decaying melting of salt and moist on the facades. I’m connected with the islets and ways in which they navigate where to make a street, a passage, a canal… I cannot walk through its meandering streets without connecting to the Istrian landscape, from where the stones that adorn walls and pave the streets were dug from. I cannot look at the palaces without feeling with their foundations – the former forests along the east Adriatic coast, cut, pulled and shipped here. Mountains left scared in Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro. More than million trees just for Santa Maria della Salute. Feeling the imperial project Venice once was, and the devastation it left in some other places. But I also cannot cross its canals, without feel the sea. Inhaling and exhaling with its tides. These waters connecting Venice to all the shores, across all continents, to all the rivers and rains on this Earth. Inhaling and exhaling, connecting all life.
With these feelings of interconnectedness, for better or worse, I am asking today: How do we refuse our old ways? How do we undermine imperial projects of today? How do we fall in love with the Earth again? How do we serve regenerative life forces?
Our current crisis is not about climate change as such, but about a broken relationship with life on this planet. We are poisoning the soils on which we walk, and which feed us. Exploiting and exterminating our human, as well as more-than-human relatives. Taking and piling more than was ever intended for us. building the perverse habit of referring to life of forests as carbon sinks. Welcoming cruiseships and yachts more than precarious boats that carry those who cannot survive in places where they were born. Measuring the value of all life on Earth by its utility to serve our own comfort. Turning abundance of life into a landfill.
Such broken, such perverted relationship is a deeply cultural issue. And we all know that culture is not a given. It is a product of complex historic struggles over whose ways of being, relating and acting are desirable. In this struggle, one strand of culture won supremacy, often by force. Making it clear, in both messages and actions that other ways of being are not good enough, not “enlightened” enough, not “cultured” enough, not “developed” enough.
The roots of such culture are in this continent. Its appealing side of the coin – beautiful buildings, rich museum collections, asphalt roads, endless development and technological innovation – are intricately connected to its ugly side – colonial extraction, white supremacy, anthropocentric domination, patriarchal structures and capitalist relations, all producing ravaging inequalities and suffering across the Earth. And increasingly beyond the Earth. A culture unleashed to its extreme with a help of fossil fuels. A culture wanting to assure us, even today, that this level of comfort, growth and development should be a role model for the entire world. Only if we invent “greener” technology. And rely on “cleaner” energy.
At this moment in history, this is the culture we should refuse. This is the heritage we should not cherish. This is the culture and heritage that has place as a part of climate action, but as a source to learn how we have got here, and what not to repeat. And that is a hard bit, because it is the culture we are immersed in, the culture we are schooled in, the culture we exported all around the globe with quite a success, a culture we reproduce without thinking.
How do we refuse our old ways? How do we fall in love with the Earth again? How do we serve regenerative life forces?
The current planetary crises asks us to go beyond the hegemonic. To look beneath, under and on all possible sides. To seek for what has been before us, for what has been hidden, for what has been marginalised. When we begin to listen and search, we will realize there are so many knowledges and practices worth reviving.
Today, more than ever, we need to recall those aspects of heritage and culture that are caring, compassionate and life-nurturing. But also, those that are dissentfull, transformative and experimental. Heritage and culture of imagining and fighting for a more just world. Heritage and culture of non-violent protest and creative dissent. Heritage and culture of relating intimately to the web-of-life – knowing how to build and repair a home, how to plant a seed and care for the soil, how to read the clouds. Heritage and culture of conviviality – of enjoying life with frugality and sharing.
We often find such practices in places where communities are acting against the dominant culture, against development, destruction and exploitation – be it in the Amazon, in Alaska, in Rosia Montana, Old Mountain in Serbia, Marinaleda in Spain, or numerous other places across all continents. Looking at them carefully, we see that they are good in understanding culture as intrinsically connected to all web-of-life. That they see heritage as embedded knowledges related to the territory and all its inhabitants. That they are relying on local materials and techniques, which is why they take care to nurture the soils, waters, and all the creatures they live with. That they learn from others and strive towards equality and mutual aid in their actions. These are the heritages and cultures we need as inspiration, while keeping our hearts and minds open.
We need heritage and culture not as institution in the city centre, but as a way of being, creating and thriving in a place.
Not just as messages, values and proclamations, but as practices we can enact. Not just as an archival material, but as embodied knowledge for the future.
Not as a tourist destination, but as a thriving healthy place for all its inhabitants and guests. Not as a universal blueprint, but as an invitation for plural, situated and experimental futures.
We need heritage and cultures that are truly just and caring – in their modes of production, in relations they create, in values they promote and in practices they enact. Heritage and culture that are not trying to sustain our positions, sector, or privileges, but strive to transform themselves and open paths for repairing the world.
The ones in which words we use to describe our professions take on their real meaning.
Cu-rare – to heal, to care for.
Con-servare – to serve with, to serve together.
Re-parare – to repair, time and time again, without wasting.
In moments when I feel hopeless, I try to listen with my heart and feel-with the Earth. Sometimes, somewhere, beyond the sounds of bulldoggers, machineguns, MTV music, and racing cars, I hear the humming of a different song. The song of a radically different world, of radically caring existence, of radically symbiotic futures. Somewhere beyond the sounds and horrors of the Anthropocene, I feel the pulsating force of the Symbiocene. Symbiocene. A new age. An age in which principles of symbiosis, mutual aid and care found across species, serve as our ethical and existential compass for living in this common home. An age that might come, only if we fall in love with the Earth again.