TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

“The climate is changing and so must heritage,” stated Professor Toshiyuku Kono, President of ICOMOS in regard to the 2019 report Future of Our Pasts prepared by the Climate Change and Cultural Heritage Working Group of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS Releases “Future of Our Pasts” Report to Increase Engagement of Cultural Heritage in Climate Action, 2019). Indeed, notions and professional practices of heritage preservation have been significantly challenged by the current environmental conditions: rising sea levels, increasing water and atmospheric temperatures, floods, fires, and hurricanes threaten numerous heritage sites and further species extinctions. As a response to this situation, researchers in heritage conservation, among many others, raise such questions as “[h]ow to Inherit World (and) Heritage in the Anthropocene?” (Ghosn, 2023, p. 16) and “how does heritage affect climate change?” (Harvey & Perry, 2015, p. 6, emphasis in original). Similarly, environmental humanities scholar Tom van Dooren asks: “in a time of ongoing extinction and colonization, a time in many ways characterized by interwoven patterns of biological and cultural loss, what does it mean to inherit responsibly?” (Van Dooren, 2019, p. 21). In light of the actual and potential loss of things, beings, and ways of living due to climate derangement, this paper discusses the concepts of heritage and inheritance via recent art practices developed with the application of fungal microbes called yeasts. Situating the artworks in the context of critical heritage discourses, the article examines how artistic projects with yeasts suggest some of the avenues of approaching heritage not only as highly institutionalized practice of preservation but as a part of a broader responsibility of everyone to actively engage in relationships with what has been before us and what will be after.