Making heritage of modernity: provoking Atlantis as a catalyst for change

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• art
• heritage
• culture
• environment
• museums

Notes on contributor

Felicity Picken's research develops and explores the phenomenon she calls blue tourism and leisure including diving, undersea hotels, museums and art galleries as well as the domesticating of oceanic life to land in aquaria and through mythology. Her work seeks to develop relational materialist methodologies in understanding the role of pleasurable encounters in relations with the blue planet.