TY - JOUR
T1 - Making heritage of modernity : provoking Atlantis as a catalyst for change
AU - Picken, Felicity
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - At first glance, the terms heritage and climate change appear to travel in opposite directions. Heritage is concerned with conserving the past, while climate change is about conserving the future. This paper tackles this temporal cross-roads by examining a tourist attraction that transforms modern, consumer culture into heritage in the form of a fast-tracked lost civilisation beneath the sea. Museo Subaquatico De Arte is a sunken sculpture museum in the Caribbean Sea that inaugurates a unique way of restoring the distressed habitats of the Meso-American Reef System, while offering a sobering glimpse into a world that asks tourists to consider ‘what have we done?’ Visitors are invited to examine their own way of life as both precarious and implicated in climate changed futures by confronting them with an Atlantis-like eeriness that both reflects and portends the closure of the tumultuous Anthropocene. The experience promotes the immediacy of the present by concretising life-sized caricatures of consumer culture beneath the sea, bequeathing these to an aquatic environment that soon transforms them into a state of decaying modernity. This promotes a theatre for radical change as these caricatures, and by extension we, are overtaken by this environment and destined to a diminutive state.
AB - At first glance, the terms heritage and climate change appear to travel in opposite directions. Heritage is concerned with conserving the past, while climate change is about conserving the future. This paper tackles this temporal cross-roads by examining a tourist attraction that transforms modern, consumer culture into heritage in the form of a fast-tracked lost civilisation beneath the sea. Museo Subaquatico De Arte is a sunken sculpture museum in the Caribbean Sea that inaugurates a unique way of restoring the distressed habitats of the Meso-American Reef System, while offering a sobering glimpse into a world that asks tourists to consider ‘what have we done?’ Visitors are invited to examine their own way of life as both precarious and implicated in climate changed futures by confronting them with an Atlantis-like eeriness that both reflects and portends the closure of the tumultuous Anthropocene. The experience promotes the immediacy of the present by concretising life-sized caricatures of consumer culture beneath the sea, bequeathing these to an aquatic environment that soon transforms them into a state of decaying modernity. This promotes a theatre for radical change as these caricatures, and by extension we, are overtaken by this environment and destined to a diminutive state.
KW - art
KW - culture
KW - heritage
KW - museums
UR - http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/uws:34236
U2 - 10.1080/1743873X.2015.1082575
DO - 10.1080/1743873X.2015.1082575
M3 - Article
SN - 1747-6631
SN - 1743-873X
VL - 11
SP - 58
EP - 70
JO - Journal of Heritage Tourism
JF - Journal of Heritage Tourism
IS - 1
ER -