The Speculative and the Profane Reimagining Heritage and Museums for Climate Action

This chapter outlines some of the main concepts and principles underpinning the Reimagining Museums for Climate Action project: an international design and ideas competition and associated exhibition curated by the authors in 2021. The competition specifically invited radical new thinking about heritage and museums in the climate change era. If heritage is to matter in a world beset by pandemics, extinction, rising seas, mass migrations, and biodiversity loss, then it must do two things simultaneously: it must recognise its own complicity in many of the forces that have brought the planet to the brink of ecological collapse (modernity, capitalism, colonialism, nationalism, extractivism), and it must focus critical and creative attention on the urgent task of shaping more just and sustainable futures. Reimagining Museums for Climate Action offers one model for how this work might unfold over the coming years.