Future Heritage Residency

Together, IAS and Allard Pierson have created the Future Heritage Residency as a space where research and science meet art, where heritage helps us imagine the future, and where UvA’s research community and collections meet the public. In this lunch session, Matthew and Emilia will share their research practices that employ cinema to prototype worlds – whether extrapolated forward from emerging techno-cultural developments in the present, or traced through alternative historical pathways. Through an iterative and collaborative process, they are drawn to the question of how alternative worlds evoke new subjectivities and ‘sensorial paradigms’. The session will be structured around presentation, dialogue, and screening film excerpts.

Residency project: ‘As Messengers’

It has become commonly appreciated that when a human language goes extinct, a world is lost. It has also been noted that just as there is a high degree of correlation between linguistic diversity and biological diversity, there is also a correspondence between the disappearance of language and the disappearance of species. If a world is lost when a language disappears, what is lost when a species goes extinct? In this project, we propose that here too an entire world is lost when a species goes extinct.

The project ‘As Messengers’ aims to explore the intricate relationship between social imaginaries and biodiversity loss, using the concept of 'historical forks' as critical junctures where alternative trajectories could have been pursued. By examining pivotal moments in scientific inquiry into biology and ecology, materialized in texts and artifacts archived in the Allard Pierson collection and Artis Library in Amsterdam, we will seek not only to explore alternative ways of being and perceiving (‘umwelts’) that could have developed from the historical past, but also propose the present as yet another fork which implies agency in the making of possible futures.

Programme