Three Key Questions on Culture, Cultural Heritage and Climate Change

37 DISCUSSION ON THE “LOSS AND DAMAGE” APPROACH of change as inevitable, as one must in taking this longer-term perspective, preservation defined as an attempt to arrest long term changes might be seen to be quite wasteful and unsustainable. Heritage Futures raised two issues: First, we need to find ways of working with, rather than against natural processes that bring about change. In other words, we need to come up with better ways of losing things. My colleague Caitlin DeSilvey has been leading a related project, Landscape Futures and the Challenge of Change: Towards Integrated Cultural/Natural Heritage Decision Making*, with the National Trust, Historic England and Natural England. The project aims to consider how certain kinds of natural and cultural heritage and landscapes might be managed in a way that facilitates their dynamic transformation – which might involve processes previously conceptualised as ruination or decline. We have been writing about this as a form of “adaptive release,” a concept which we hope will help provide heritage practitioners with a language to acknowledge the creative potential of loss and change. Indeed, loss and change has always been integral to what we understand as heritage and what we define as such: heritage is something that we perceive to be somehow rare or at risk or in danger, as Fernando Vidal and Nélia Dias make clear in their book Endangerment, Biodiversity and Culture. Secondly, we need to find new ways of acknowledging and celebrating the values of the things that we hold on to from the past, which is really what preservation is about – it is a kind of culturally appropriate mode of valuing or attributing values to things. The Climate Emergency forces us to consider how we might embrace new ways of appropriately mourning objects, places and practices that will inevitably be lost. I think there is one great example of this, which is a project called Foghorn Requiem, developed by the artists Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway: it is a piece of music that was written to mourn the loss of the sound of the foghorn from the British coastal landscape. It was performed by three brass bands, plus lighthouses and the foghorns of 50 boats: all these appear in a wonderful film that captured the foghorn music performance, marking this loss in an appropriate way. I think that finding appropriate ways to mourn and getting better at losing are issues that the cultural heritage sector needs to engage urgently, as my colleague Caitlin DeSilvey argued in her book Curated Decay. Marco Scotini I have worked with an Indian group called U-ra-mi-li (from the Nagaland region in India), which has tried for years to record not only noises and sounds directly derived from work dynamics, but also work songs, all belonging to disappearing work practices. If these songs in the terraced rice fields had been lost, it would have meant the loss of the key to access that world. This way to conceive an ecosystem – where people try to create a new relationship with the environment through the interrelation and the mutuality of relationships – becomes crucial to rethinking culture. Referring to the chance to overcome the fundamental gap discussed earlier, I believe that if we go on thinking in traditional ways, we will not tackle this gap or choose between loss and the possibility of preservation. We need to remember that there are crucial modes of interconnection, modes that relate to us and that are transdisciplinary and transcultural. We need to identify the means of preservation that do not necessarily

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