Heritage Lens | In this time of loss, we need to imagine

HERITAGE LENS
In this time of loss, we need to imagine

What connects the drying lands of the Po Delta, the sand on the Curonian Spit, the algae on the shores of southern Spain, the sounds of birds in Friesland, the deforestation in Slovakia, the urban changes in Helsinki, and the flood in Valencia?

The answer is ecological awareness, which allows us to better understand how the human-induced climate catastrophe affects not only the natural environment, but also cultural artifacts, language, traditions, and ways of life cultivated for thousands of years.

Heritage Lens, Michaela Nagyidaiová.

12 artists have tackled the subject of the impact of climate change on Europe’s cultural heritage, unraveling the connections between human and non-human actors in the Earth’s ecosystem, and simultaneously weaving new narratives.

In the world of philosopher Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology, the sum of the individual parts is greater than the whole. That is why, together with the artists, we will look at locality, traditions, and history, observing and listening, and sometimes speculating about the future of a world that is slowly fading away. This slowness, however, is not constant, but depends on the temporal perspective. Observing the climate catastrophe from a human perspective, we will see something different than from the perspective of a bird, a stone, or an ocean. These different temporalities encourage us to step outside the anthropocentric perspective and look sometimes from very close up, and sometimes from afar. Our guides on this journey will be the multithreaded and multisensory projects presented at the exhibition In this time of loss, we need to imagine.