What have we done?

We were able to begin work on our Award project in January 2020. See our first post that outlined our hypothesis and why we were focusing on extractivism. The aim of our award project was to scope how we might develop a distributed digital collection, encouraging a more commons-based approach to digital museum practices. We had the idea of creating a portal onto digital cultural collections (nationwide and beyond), opening with the theme of extractivism.

We identified four dimensions of extractivism, and invited people to write blogposts in response to this, perhaps exploring how particular museums or collections could be better interpreted in relation to the following:

We created this model to understand the acceleration and scope of extractivism.

We set up this Medium platform and sent out some invitations to associates to write articles. Several were enthusiastic but were soon stymied by Covid-19 and work pressures. One guest post here is by Justine Boussard, asking ‘Whose normal is it anyway? Looking for the origins’. And three more guest posts are due to come. We will keep this publication alive, and you are invited to respond to the question of how extractivism can be represented in museums.

Other posts you can find here include: ‘The Possible Path’ not ‘Build Back Better’; Maskbook — Art of Change 21; Thinking about an ecocentric worldview; Cultural organisations for Regenerative Culture; and Museums & Bioregionalism.

How can we collect in a way that is non-extractive, or commons-based, and that will allow us to tackle extractivism and the Earth crisis?

In February we issued a survey to cultural heritage professionals, asking their views on a hypothetical project, in which asset-holders would ‘donate’ relevant objects into a digital repository and encourage participatory interpretation of them, illuminating their relevance to climate and ecology. By donating, the asset-holder would keep the object but point to the repository with a digital label (e.g. QR code on a gallery label), and actively invite diverse interpretations of the object which can be added to metadata directly by participants or by the asset-holding organisation.

By the time this survey was out, the Covid-19 pandemic was peaking, and museum staff were being furloughed. We received (only) nine responses, but at least 70% said they were extremely interested in contributing! About half would be able to contribute fully by donating, inviting interpretations, doing talks/events, and supporting/promoting the project.

Because the survey responses were underwhelming, we organised a Zoom meeting in August. You can read the outcomes of the discussion here, after which we revised the idea for an ideal digital project. This ideal project would really focus on activists as users of digital collections — a user group that has been largely ignored. It would embody digital collections powering activism to tackle the big challenges of social and environmental justice.

The enquiry led to members of our team doing several spin-off projects. For example, I compiled a massive article (a collection of views & articles) capturing all the links between the Earth crisis, extractivism and the Covid-19 pandemic. I took this further by creating a large collage to illustrate these connections.

Writer Alara Adali has been working on a collection of voices of people affected by climate change, and thinking about how contemporary digital collecting is a form of journalism. How do we respectfully collect people’s stories? How does this help them in their predicaments?

Together with the two other Activist Museum Award winners, the International Museum of Slavery and Museum as Muck, we had some conversations and decided to do an open event about being an activist museum worker. This asked: What challenges arise, what changes have you made happen, and what tensions arise in facing intersecting issues? Often we are fighting the same battles under different banners, so how can activists work together on common aims?

We (Climate Museum UK) led on the organisation of this event, and the recording can be downloaded from here.

We expect to be carrying on with this enquiry, at least until January to make it a round year. You can still share posts with us to be published here. It has been a bit of a mixed pot of themes, so they will split off into different projects. These include:

#EverydayEcocide — a continuation of this collecting project, which we offer up as a research project for students interested to examine the different types of Everyday Ecocide that have been surfaced since 2016.

#MyClimateMuseum — encouraging people to create climate museums in their own homes, schools, outdoor sites or museums. Sharing their artworks, objects, digital resources, even their recycling or mending projects, to engage people with climate and ecology issues. Our prompts will borrow from museum practice to encourage putting objects into groups, displaying them well, creating interpretations and cherishing things for the future.

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