This panel explores how we might tackle the expansive scale and affective overwhelm of future environmental temporalities by working with familiar, everyday objects. Rather than thinking of environmental crisis as a remote and impassable point in the future, we consider how environmental crisis is already weaved into the habits, routines, and practices of everyday life. By bringing critical attention to everyday routines that are often disregarded as trivial or prosaic, we will examine familiar, everyday objects (the freezer, the time capsule, and the hearing aid) to find out how they might make future temporalities tangible, familiar, and graspable. To do this, we strategically connect insights from Everyday Life Studies (the examination of everyday routines and habits within mass culture), Material/Cultural Object Studies, and the environmental humanities. In working across this theoretical terrain, we will ask: how might these everyday objects break with routine, make the familiar unfamiliar, challenge capitalist synchronicities, invent new ways of timekeeping, and push back on narratives of capture & containment? As such, this panel aims to rework and redefine ideas of 1) environmental apocalypse (in Sarah Bezan’s work on extinction and critical temporalities of cryo-conservation); and 2) aging and epochalization (in Jade French’s work on auditory senses and aging populations, and Antonia Thomas’s work on archaeological temporalities of the time capsule).
Antonia Thomas: Time capsules in art and in archaeology
In 2020, two surfers found a metal time capsule washed ashore in Donegal on the west coast of Ireland. It contained a collection of photographs, letters and ephemera which had been assembled by passengers of the 50 Years of Victory ship, a Russian nuclear powered ice-breaker used for luxury cruises. Unlike most time capsules however, this was not an assemblage from an unfamiliar past. The capsule had been placed at the North Pole just two years previously, but unexpected ice melt had led to it being washed out well before its time. This story was immediately picked up by news outlets across the world, unsurprisingly seen as a powerful allegory for the way in which the climate emergency is disrupting not only the present, but also the future.
Such a discovery invites the question, if there is to be no future, what is the point of capturing the present in a time capsule? Once designed to capture the quotidian, the disrupted chronologies of the Anthropocene make time capsules seem apocalyptic. Using examples of time capsules in visual art and in contemporary archaeology, I will explore how these contrived assemblages can be seen to bear witness to the failings of past futures and serve as politically engaged cultural critique on the present.
Bio. I am the Programme Leader for the MA Contemporary Art and Archaeology, and Lecturer in Archaeology, based at Orkney College, part of the University of the Highlands and Islands, Scotland, UK. My research explores Art and Archaeology in its broadest sense, from the interpretation of prehistoric visual culture to the intersections between contemporary art practice and the archaeological imagination. I am currently Co-Investigator on the Royal Society of Edinburghfunded International Network for Contemporary Archaeology in Scotland (INCAScot), which is developing inclusive, future-oriented approaches to cultural heritage management through interdisciplinary case studies linked to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Jade French: Ageing in a Surreal Apocalypse: Leonora Carrington’s 'The Hearing Trumpet' (1977)
This paper will examine climate change and the time of crisis in Leonora Carrington’s novella The Hearing Trumpet (1977). The novella follows 92-year-old Marian Leatherby as she liberates herself and her fellow residents from an ominous religious institution for older women by finding the Holy Grail to combat a New Ice Age. This paper uses a ‘material cultures of growing older’ framework (Lovatt, 2021; Höppner and Urban, 2019; Alftberg, 2018) to examine the more-than-human objects and spaces at play in Carrington’s novella in relation to her fantastical representations of older age and time. I examine how the material-spatial arrangements in the novella allow for a new perspective on how Marian, as narrator, circumvents the chronological life span. Older age becomes a building block for the future through a hybrid post-human perspective, reinscribing the older body with cultural power and social visibility in the face of crisis. Overall, I read the novella as a productive narrative from which to imagine new expectations of the future through the site of a surreal apocalypse
Bio: Dr Jade Elizabeth French works on ageing, care and intergenerationality. She is currently a Doctoral Prize Fellow at Loughborough University developing the project ‘Imagining the Care Home in Post War British Literature’. Previously, she was a research fellow as part of the ESRC-funded project ‘Reimagining the future in Older Age’. She has written on modernism and ageing in articles for Feminist Modernist Studies, Women: A Cultural Review and Modernism/modernity Print Plus.
Sarah Bezan: Everyday Apocalypse: Time, the Quotidian, and Mundane Narratives of Environmental Crisis
In a cryo-conservation age, the freezer is an everyday object that contains a wide range of potentialities for species preservation and revival. In this paper, I reflect on the freezer in relation to what Charlotte Kroløkke calls “CryoTime”: the conflation of somatic temporalities with institutional timelines (2019). Focusing particularly on the use of freezers by marine scientists in the Irish Cetacean Genetic Tissue Bank (a project that freezes samples of beached whales in Ireland for study and future revival) along with the Frozen Zoo and the Frozen Ark (members of the Cryo-Arks conservation group), I will explore how the simple technology of sub-zero temperatures can have an impact on how we think about mitigating the climate crisis. Central to this analysis is examining how the freezer serves as a site of inanimate suspension, where time and more importantly fluid habitats and marine bodies are frozen in time. Following Joanna Radin, who argues that the freezer functions as a site of “latent futurity” and “planned hindsight” (2017), I will investigate how the everyday phenomena of whale strandings roots cryotemporal narratives of crisis in the lived, routine present.
Bio: Sarah Bezan is Lecturer in Literature and the Environment in the School of English and Digital Humanities at University College Cork, Ireland. As a founding member of the Radical Humanities Lab, Sarah's interdisciplinary work intersects science and technology studies, environmental humanities, and ecofeminism. She is currently working on a project that explores species revival (de-extinction science) in settler colonial literatures and digital media/arts.