A Museum of Carbon Ruins? Ethical and political challenges in historicising an unevenly distributed decarbonisation

With its grand opening scheduled for 2053, the new Swedish museum FOSSIL will be dedicated to documenting the Fossil Era, now considered to be a part of Swedish history, if not yet the history of all nations. In this talk, members of the curatorial team will discuss their work-in-progress on the museum’s debut exhibition, “Carbon Ruins”, and their approach to the selection, acquisition and framing of potential exhibits. They will also address the ethics of celebrating the completion of the Swedish decarbonisation programme in the context of a world where not all such programmes have yet succeeded.

Plans for the museum reach back to the early 2020s: https://www.climaginaries.org/carbon-ruins

Johannes Stripple presents his work on day 1 of T2051MCC. On this day it is assumed that global heating has surpassed 2°C.

Dept. of Political Science, Lund University, Sweden

Prof. Dr. Johannes Stripple is an Associate Professor in Political Science at Lund University, Sweden. His research has traced the governance of climate change through a range of sites, from the UN to the everyday, from the economy, the urban, and the low carbon self. He has edited Governing the Climate: New Approaches to Rationality, Power and Politics (2014) and Towards a Cultural Politics of Climate Change (2016), both at Cambridge University Press. Johannes has in the last years worked on a set of initiatives that through experimentation, narratives and speculative design unlock imagination and portray the possibilities of meaningful life in a fossil-free future. Examples of these are the low carbon mobile laboratory, a tourist guide to a fictional decarbonized European city, the Carbon Ruins exhibition, Memories of the Transition. Years (A soundwalk set in Malmö), and a climate fiction writing contest.

Find out more on Climaginaries and Climate Futures or on social media @stripple @climaginaries.