Living matters
Encounters with Deep Time environments

Curating time
Christina Fredengren & Caroline Owman
Curating time explore time and temporality in curatorial and environmental strategies. With a base in critical feminist posthumanism this project further problematizes the anthropocentric focus in many heritage policies and strategies (Fredengren 2015) and probes into the technocratic handling of the long-term for example in museums. Here, it focuses on the use of heritage in sustainable development (also critiqued in Alaimo 2012 and problematized in Fredengren 2012, Fredengren & Åsberg 2020) as it deals with range of naturalized others as if they have no agency and leaves the stage open for appropriation and exploitation. Furthermore, such actions often underarticulates the notion of intra-generational ethics and care and promotes chrono-linear time keeping. This is also evident in museum activities that risk downplaying materiality, but also a number of human and non-human others, driving wedges between nature and culture, it also risks transplanting, such binaries into museum collections, curatorship and exhibition-making. Whereas critical heritage studies (Smith 2006, 2016) has pointed out many injustices of who gets under-represented in the heritage repertoire, this project will not stop at critiquing the powers involved in heritage-editing, but explore and intervene in material and temporal trajectories and agencies in emerging museum ecologies (hereby extending reasoning on media ecologies (cf Hörl 2018) onto museums/exhibitions/curatorship).
The project has 3 modules
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An analysis of various curatorial & temporal strategies and their role in museum ecologies
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Online exhibition of counterclocks
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A series of citizen humanities events focused on the challenging temporalities of the Anthropocene
Recent publications:
Fredengren, C. & Owman, C. In manus. Museumecologies
Fredengren, C. & Owman, C. In manus.
Fredengren, C. & Karlsson, J. 2019. Mossberga Mosse: Excavating the Archives and Tracing Museum Ecologies. Journal of Wetland Archaeology, 19:1-2, 115-130.
The project is supported by the Seedbox - an environmental humanities collaboratory
Presentations:
Curating Time - Museum Ecologies presented at the (Post) Anthropocene Museologies Symposium on November 30, 2021. Framed Framed hosted a hybrid symposium, co-organised by Colin Sterling (University of Amsterdam) and Blake Ewing (University of Oxford). The event accounted for Anthropocene related projects in the museum sector over the past decade and begin to sketch out the contribution museums might make to a post-Anthropocene world.
See the presentations here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi9bsThu8l8
Curating time & Humus Economicus at the National Historical Museums
Miljöhumaniora, Konst och Forskning
Seminar and workshop online
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Lecture Miljöhumaniora
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Lecture Humus Economicus
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Lecture Curating Time - Museiting som mot-klockor i en klimatutmanad tid
Workshops on
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temporal relations iand
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intragenerational justice and care
See more here: