Natural-Cultural Memory in the Anthropocene
Gabriele Dürbeck, University of Vechta
April 28th, 2025, 12:15-1.45PM EDT
The lecture will take a look at natural archives (e.g. fossils, glacier, tree rings) as unintentional earth-historical traces and their role in the natural-cultural memory and their practices of reading, collecting, preserving, interpreting and affecting cultural narratives of climate change. The first part gives insight into the theory of a natural-cultural memory with respect to the dimensions of materiality, multiscalarity of different time scales, multispecies entanglements, and mediality. The longer second part applies these findings to examples of contemporary narrations, such as Robert Macfarlane's renowned book Underland. A Deep Time Journey (2019) that represent glaciers as Earth memory, and Susan Schuppli's ethnographic and meditative film Ice Cores (2020).
For more information on the project, see: https://www.uni-vechta.de/en/natural-cultural-memory-in-the-anthropocene/natural-cultural-memory
Registration Link: https://osu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_RqsavswzTmqxUMV-q5vc-Q