About

Humanity is witnessing a crisis of tragic proportion as war, displacement, and increasing poverty sequester the rise of cultural divisions, spread nationalism, and destroy cultural heritage within conflict zones. The MIT Future Heritage Lab invents creative responses to conflict and crisis. We develop and implement projects and alternative educational formats at the intersection of art, culture, and preservation technology to address the emotional, cultural, and practical needs of communities in threat. We believe that culture is an essential human need, and a powerful tool to address conflicts and injustice. We build on our experience in Art, Design, and Cultural Preservation and leverage the MIT expertise in new technologies to collaborate with a global and diverse network of partners and ensure the quality and a wide reach of our work. We build future heritage by creating cultural projects on a civic scale that translate traditional crafts into new technologies, advance knowledge transfer across borders, and have a positive impact on threatened communities.

METHODS

The Future Heritage Lab collaborates with communities affected by conflict and crisis to collect and preserve histories of transcultural exchange and histories of threatened monuments, artefacts, textiles, and crafts. We design and implement civic-scale participatory ART projects that function as carriers of collective memory and as mediums to disseminate them. The sourcing of stories takes place in transcultural workshops, which also aim to promote social cohesion and coexistence through knowledge exchange and co-creation. Accordingly, our workshops provide a framework for EDUCATION focused on art and cultural heritage, in which participants contribute as tutors, listeners, and creators. The artistic creation and the transdisciplinary education together form our third pillar of work: cultural PRESERVATION. Linking art, culture, and technology, the Future Heritage Lab regenerates relevance of cultural heritage for contemporary conditions and for the future.