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

Información del proyecto

PITCH

Identificador del acuerdo de subvención: 101132385

DOI

10.3030/101132385

Fecha de la firma de la CE 6 Noviembre 2023

Fecha de inicio 1 Diciembre 2023

Fecha de finalización 30 Noviembre 2027

Financiado con arreglo a

• Culture, creativity and inclusive society

Coste total

€ 2 737 165,00

Aportación de la UE

€ 2 737 164,00

Coordinado por

UNIVERSITETET I STAVANGER
Norway

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

Período documentado: 2024-12-01 hasta 2026-02-28

Resumen del contexto y de los objetivos generales del proyecto

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.

Trabajo realizado desde el comienzo del proyecto hasta el final del período abarcado por el informe y los principales resultados hasta la fecha

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.

Avances que van más allá del estado de la técnica e impacto potencial esperado (incluida la repercusión socioeconómica y las implicaciones sociales más amplias del proyecto hasta la fecha)

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.