Colin says:
"My point of departure for this talk will be the oldest purpose-built museum in Amsterdam: ARTIS-Groote Museum. Originally constructed between 1850 and 1855 to house the collections of the Natura Artis Magistra Zoological Society, the museum closed in 1947, its collections distributed to other institutions across the Netherlands. The museum re-opened in 2022 with a display that explicitly aims to decentre humans and highlight the threads connecting all living things in the web of life. While ostensibly subverting modern frameworks that divide nature and culture, I want to argue that the historical formation and recent redesign of the ARTIS-Groote Museum in fact speaks to the contradictions implicit in thinking “ecologically” through museums. In particular, I am interested in the problem of undoing or even repairing the ruptures caused by certain museological imaginaries through longstanding colonial infrastructures. To this end, the talk will focus on a small display of tree trunks in the basement of the museum, titled Pillars of Life. These trunks are exhibited as an example of the foundation piles on which the museum – and much of the city of Amsterdam – rests. Increasingly such foundations are being undermined by climate change, as prolonged periods of dry weather have caused the city’s water table to drop, leading some piles to dry out and disintegrate. Closing the gap between the museum’s modern Enlightenment origins and its current status as a space of multispecies encounter, this talk critically examines the multiple injustices sedimented into modern cultural infrastructures."
Colin Sterling is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, educator, and (occasional) curator based in Amsterdam. His work explores the social, political and ecological dimensions of heritage and museums in the past and the present. He is the author of Heritage, Photography and the Affective Past and co-editor of four scholarly collections, including Deterritorializing the Future: Heritage in, of and after the Anthropocene and Aesthetics of Geopower: Contested Planetary Imaginaries. He has published over fifty articles, essays, book chapters, reviews and other texts in peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes, exhibition catalogues and magazines. In 2021 Colin co-curated the international design competition Reimagining Museums for Climate Action, which culminated in an exhibition at COP26 in Glasgow. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Heritage, Museums and the Environment at the University of Amsterdam, where he leads the BA programme Global Arts, Culture and Politics. Prior to joining the University of Amsterdam Colin was a post-doctoral researcher and early career leadership fellow at University College London. His research has been funded by – amongst others – the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, Horizon Europe, the British Academy, and the Dutch Research Council. He is editor-in-chief of the international journal Museums & Social Issues.