With the growing impact of human activities on climate and ecosystems, and the processes of environmental degradation, which threaten the lives of several species, including our own, disciplinary boundaries and between different fields of knowledge are breaking down and being redefined. The Anthropocene ends the distinction, fundamental to modern epistemologies and ontologies, between the cosmological and anthropological order, between nature and humanity (Latour 1994, 2017; Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, 2015; Tsing, 2019).

Climate and environmental catastrophes (droughts, floods, fires, biological extinctions, contaminated water) intrude on the human world and other more-than-human entities (forests, rivers, plants, animals, rocks, atmospheric agents) become historical actors and political subjects, which the social sciences and humanities can no longer ignore (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, 2015; Tsing, 2015, 2019; Descola, 2022). Geopolitics and geophysics, human histories and natural histories articulate themselves. 

This IN2PAST Meeting aims to convene and provoke multiple dialogues between the humanities and natural sciences, between the sciences, arts and architecture, between knowledge generated in academia and outside it, on more-than-human landscapes, in different times and places.

Following studies in the 1980s and 1990s on landscape as text, image, representation, and symbol, the materiality of landscape has been recovered with the so-called ‘ontological turn,’ which questions human exceptionalism and the Great Divide between the domains of nature and culture (Latour, 1994).

New studies on landscape open space for more-than-human socialities and show how animals, plants, rocks, and atmospheric agents are our companions in the process of inhabiting and making worlds. Landscapes are formed by multispecies assemblies and non-living materials, by intentional and unintentional human and non-human actions, by historical intertwining, presenting themselves, according to Anna Tsing, as ‘concrete sediments of vital flows, atmospheric conditions, dreams, memories, and representations’ (Cardoso and Devos, 219: 9).

For Tsing, despite or because of the modern dream of human control over ‘nature,’ new feral ecologies emerge in the Anthropocene, ecologies formed by non-human’ unintended reactions to human infrastructures, mostly socially, culturally, and ecologically destructive, but also those that present themselves as avenues of hope, forms of resistance, of humans and non-humans, and ways of imagining other possible futures for landscapes in ruins.

It is through this challenging conceptual overview, within the realm of the more-than-human, that we propose to reflect. The concept of heritage is thus problematised from other perspectives that not only decentre it from exclusively human, social and cultural legacies and appropriations, past and present, but also force us to think about an idea of a shared future constituted and constitutive of multiple biotic and abiotic connections. We are referring to a heritage that is common to all, albeit with territorial and cultural inscriptions that are administratively and politically managed.

The sky, the atmosphere, the sea, water, the earth, soil, wind, air, mountains and stones, among so many other elements on which we all depend and whose appropriation in terms of heritage (possession and ownership) can endanger human lives and the ecological balances, necessary for the planet’s existence, without caring for it as a common heritage (belonging to everyone, including everyone else and everything else beyond humans).

The programme for the Meeting includes communications and presentations of research projects, a workshop, installations, performative lectures and the presentation of a multimedia platform.