ZfL INFO 62/2025: Natural-Cultural Memory in the Anthropocene. Tracing – Archiving – Remembering
Natural-Cultural Memory in the Anthropocene. Tracing – Archiving – Remembering
Memorials for human and nonhuman victims of the climate crisis, funerals for glaciers as rituals of ecological mourning, and literary memoirs that combine personal biographies, family remembrance and planetary history—all those phenomena are mnemonic responses to the immense consequences of climate crisis. They mark the emergence of a specific Anthropocenic culture of remembrance.
Human activities have been irreversibly changing the basic conditions of life on Earth since colonization and industrialization at the latest. The geological concept of the Anthropocene expresses this (Earth-)historical insight and identifies humans as a planetary geophysical force. To understand the crisis-ridden present, it is necessary to reflect on the temporal dimension of geology and the history of modernity as part of a general history of life. Against this background, the Anthropocene has been established as a cultural concept since around 2010. By bringing together human and Earth history, it contributes to a fundamental re-conceptualization of the relations between nature and culture.
This reconceptualization includes an expansion of cultural memory, which reaches out to deep-time entanglements in the more-than-human world. This emerging natural-cultural memory of the Anthropocene is based on natural archives as a first-order storage memory. These are stocks of, for example, climate history in the ice and deep-sea sediments long before science has started to systematically collect weather data (second-order storage memory). They are key to understand environmental long-term effects of human activities. These material records contain information about the history of the planet and constitute an archival basis for narratives of human history in the horizon of geological deep time. At the same time, they mark the beginning of a new chapter in the media history of cultural memory.
Addressing these developments, the conference contributes to a growing field of research on memory studies in the Anthropocene and seeks to expand the traditional humanist lens of cultural memory studies. To understand the role of Earth history and natural archives in public communication and political discourses requires a broader conceptualization of cultural memory. Following the work of Aleida Assmann and others, the conference asks how the information, stored in natural archives, enters the functional memory, actively shaping a culture’s identity, its stories and ideas of past, present, and the future.
With keynotes by Sverker Sörlin and Kate Rigby and a reading by Judith Schalansky.
The conference is organized by the University of Vechta in cooperation with the ZfL.
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Program
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Wednesday, 17 Sep 2025
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14.00
- Gabriele Dürbeck (University of Vechta), Simon Probst (University of Vechta), Georg Toepfer (ZfL): Introduction
14.30
Keynote
Moderation: Gabriele Dürbeck (University of Vechta)
- Sverker Sörlin (Environmental Humanities Laboratory [&] Center for Anthropocene History, KTH Stockholm): What Cryo-archives Tell Us. Elemental Environing in a Melting World
Panel 1: Traces and Material Witnesses
16.00
Moderation: Simon Probst (University of Vechta)
- Claire Colebrook (Monash University, Australia): The Counter-Anthropocene
- Susan Schuppli (Goldsmiths University of London): Just Ice (online)
18.00
Moderation: Georg Toepfer (ZfL)
- Knut Ebeling (Weißensee Art College, Berlin), Hanna Hennenkemper (Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stuttgart): Cones, Gazes. A Dialogue between Art and Theory
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Thursday, 18 Sep 2025
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Panel 2: Natural Archives and the Archival Turn
Moderation: Georg Toepfer (ZfL)
9.00
- Zachary Nowak (The Umbra Institute, Perugia): Matters of Justice. Critical Perspectives on Natural Archives
- David Sepkoski (University of Illinois): Inscribing the Fossil Record: Cultural Assumptions in the Reconstruction of Life’s History
Panel 3: Seeds and Fossils. Artistic Perspectives on Natural Archives
Moderation: Ann-Sophie Balzer (University of Augsburg)
11.00
- Fern Wickson (UiT the Arctic University of Norway), Sara Schneckloth (University of South Carolina): Conserving the Biocultural Diversity of Agricultural Seeds: Planting an archive of artworks alongside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (online)
- Maarten Vanden Eynde (Drogenbos, Belgium): Ars Memoriae. The Art to Remember
14.00
Roundtable: Museums in the Anthropocene
Moderation: Alexandra Böhm (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg) and Simon Probst (University of Vechta)
- Rick Crownshaw (Goldsmiths University of London), Elisabeth Heyne (Natural History Museum, Berlin), Mira Shah (Bernisches Historisches Museum), Anne MacKinney (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Panel 4: Rocks and Corals. Literary Perspectives on Natural Archives
Moderation: Patrick Stoffel (Leuphana University Lüneburg)
16.00
- Oliver Völker (Goethe University, Frankfurt): Reading Rocks. The Readability of the Geological Past in Romanticism
- Michele Navakas (Miami University): Coral Temporalities: Literary Studies and Natural Archives
18.30
Reading
Moderation: Gabriele Dürbeck (University of Vechta)
- Judith Schalansky: Natural Archives in the Anthropocene
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Friday, 19 Sep 2025
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9.00
Keynote
Moderation: Gesa Mackenthun (University of Rostock)
- Kate Rigby (MESH, University of Cologne): Intercultural Memory for Catastrophic Times
Panel 5: Cultural Memory in the Anthropocene
Moderation: Gesa Mackenthun (University of Rostock)
10.30
- Stef Craps (Ghent University, Belgium): Ecological Apologies. Reckoning with Extinction and Repair
- Jessica Rapson (King’s College, London): Natural-Cultural Memory and Environmental Justice
13.15
Final discussion
Moderation: Gabriele Dürbeck (University of Vechta), Simon Probst (University of Vechta), Georg Toepfer (ZfL)
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