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

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

Lunds Universitet, Sweden

Dr. Paul Graham Raven is (at time of writing) a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Lund University, Sweden, where he researches the narrative rhetorics of sociotechnical and climate imaginaries. His doctoral thesis proposed a novel model of sociotechnical change based on social practice theory, and a narrative prototyping methodology for infrastructure foresight. He’s also an author and critic of science fiction, an occasional journalist and essayist, a collaborator with designers and artists, and a (gratefully) lapsed consulting critical futurist. He currently lives in Malmö with a cat, some guitars, and sufficient books to constitute an insurance-invalidating fire hazard.

Find out more on his website and on Twitter @SkaneZero / @PaulGrahamRaven.