Petroculture’s Intersections with The Cultural Heritage sector in the context of green transitions

Project Information

PITCH

Grant agreement ID: 101132385

DOI

10.3030/101132385

EC signature date 6 November 2023

Start date 1 December 2023

End date 30 November 2027

Funded under

• Culture, creativity and inclusive society

Total cost

€ 2 737 165,00

EU contribution

€ 2 737 164,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITETET I STAVANGER
Norway

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - PITCH (Petroculture’s Intersections with The Cultural Heritage sector in the context of green transitions)

Reporting period: 2024-12-01 to 2026-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The PITCH project illuminates how cultural heritage can engage with the societal impact of carbon cultures. Carbon cultures refer to societies and cultures deeply intertwined with the extraction, production, and consumption of carbon-based fuels, particularly fossil fuels. Although the word “petrocultures” appears in the full project name of PITCH, the project has moved beyond existing scholarly conceptions of petrocultures, which is limited to cultural entanglement with oil and gas, because of Europe’s long history of coal extraction. Understanding carbon cultures is crucial for engaging European citizens and fostering environmentally transformative shifts in behaviours and perspectives. Cultural heritage, whether in the form of objects, sites, or landscapes, can be mobilised directly in imagining alternative sustainable futures. Through collaborative pilot interventions with cultural heritage institutions and a comprehensive Carbon Matters toolkit, PITCH equips heritage practitioners and policymakers to navigate green transitions confidently, ensuring a lasting imprint on Europe’s diverse landscape.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Through the end of the second reporting period (01/12/2023-28/02/2026), the beneficiaries have mapped the intersections of cultural heritage with petrocultures/carbon cultures and created interventions to test our approach. To map the intersections, the team defined carbon cultures and critical heritage studies as concepts. Through an intensive annual team workshop meetings, the team came to consensus on our working approaches to both cultural heritage and petrocultures. This has included the scientific decision as a team that carbon cultures was a more appropriate analytical framework than petrocultures for our work going forward. We have established intervention methods for generating new kinds of insights for the role of heritage practices in communicating carbon cultures. We installed a museum intervention at the Deutsches Technikmuseum (Berlin, Germany) and ran a series of heritage site activities at E-WERK (Luckenwalde, Germany). We are well underway with the intervention planning for our landscape intervention in Groningen (the Netherlands) and the museum intervention at LUSTO (Finland). Participatory workshops with stakeholders have been held in these locations to develop the interventions. All of these activities are currently being evaluated to determine how they have worked to foster citizen confidence in green transitions and to develop innovative practice guidelines for the cultural heritage sector.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project has produced a number of key documents to establish a baseline understanding of the intersection of carbon culture and cultural heritage moving beyond the state of the art: a glossary, an extensive annotated biography, and a survey of carbon cultural heritage styles across Europe. Team members have published several peer-reviewed journal articles analyzing aspects of carbon culture heritage, with case studies ranging from mining heritage sites in Portugal and the UK to history of technology museums in Germany and South Korea. We developed and delivered a summer school explored how energy infrastructures operate and how they might be reinterpreted through heritage and artistic practices energy literacies. These results have demonstrated the need for museums and heritage sites to confront the difficult histories of fossil fuel use and extraction. These activities have created models for how cultural heritage institutions can help their publics understand how dissemination techniques, media forms and narrative techniques shape how people understand energy relations.