Call for Papers - Earthly Memorial Landscapes, Future Anterior Journal

For example, there is now substantive evidence, and increasingly so after archaeologists began using large-scale territorial laser scanning to map underneath the canopy, that vast swaths of the Amazon rainforest, the quintessential representation of pristine nature in Western colonial-modern imaginary, sheltered complex civilizations and urban networks before the European invasion. The forest – its soil, plants, and trees – as long recognized by Indigenous knowledge, is a landscape saturated with human history and social memory, an archaeological heritage material in its own right.

This shift in perspective can be in part attributed to the development of new sensing and spatial technologies. From the wide-range perspective provided by global positioning systems, air-borne laser scans, and satellite remote sensing; to the microscopic vision of material and genetic analysis – new technologies allow reading and interpreting the earth in much more complex and sophisticated ways, freeing up the conceptual as well as the material notion of evidence from the traditions of nineteenth-century archaeology (and its colonial racist views on human civilization and progress).

Previously disregarded as background noise information, natural elements such as trees, plants, seeds, and soil are today recognized and studied as archaeological evidence. These natural-cultural archaeological sites, “earthly memorial landscapes” as we are calling them, may look pristine, but are in fact spatial products of long-term social designs with nature.

On the other hand, and in an interrelated manner, this shift can be attributed to the critical questioning of the binary logic of the nature-culture divide that sustains Western epistemologies and imaginaries, as well as to the critical questioning of the ways in which archaeological evidence – and, by extension, heritage and preservation – played a seminal role in shaping racialized narratives of human progress and civilization that historically sustained imperial power and colonialism.

This special issue of Future Anterior invites writers and practitioners to present papers or visual projects that research, map, describe, and narrate “earthly memorial landscapes” which – like the Amazon rainforest or the ǂKhomani sand formations in southern Africa – are the product of social design entangled with nature. These natural-cultural landscapes have been historically shaped by Indigenous modes of inhabitation, land management systems, and spatial technologies. Acknowledging their historic, constructed, and memorial dimension means not only giving voice to other stories that need to be told in the field of heritage and preservation, but also preserving and learning from ecologically-sound knowledge-practices that have become central to contemporary design on a planet approaching ecological collapse.

Addressing practices and theories across architecture, archaeology, environmental science, visual culture, and advocacy, Future Anterior will explore the frontiers of heritage and preservation across human/non-human domains and counter-colonial positions. We seek contributions from historical, conceptual, legal, technological, activist, or artistic perspectives, cutting through disciplinary fields in challenging established visions of nature through heritage and its fraught historic and epistemic foundations.

Arguably, learning from ruins is the foundational epistemic act of architecture and its politics. What we are naming “earthly memorial landscapes” embraces forms of spatial knowledge and technologies where nature is not a passive object for human appropriation, but a living and acting being on equal footing with humans – a member of the polis to whom even rights ought to be granted.

The deadline for submissions is October 1, 2024.