The Finnish Heritage Agency is the first operator from Finland to join The Climate Heritage Network, founded in 2018. It focuses on the potential of cultural heritage to promote ecological sustainability and climate actions through art, culture and cultural heritage. The 225 member organisations of the network include national agencies for cultural heritage, research institutes, NGOs and cultural operators from around the world.
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From the creative perspective of artists and designers, we can see the value of our contribution in facilitating the ability of groups and communities long reliant on traditional and local ecological knowledge as a means to manage their livelihoods in a responsible manner so as to pass it down to their children.
So much knowledge is experiential or embodied – for example, the farmer’s ability to feel the soil between their fingers and know signals about the health of the land and the harvest – and this makes it hard to be documented in a respectful manner that represents and respects the sources of this knowledge, even if it is from outside the traditional academic disciplines of natural science.
Visual artistic practices and creative collaboration techniques from Scandinavian participatory traditions of design may offer alternative means to capture and disseminate this embedded place-based and community-centric knowledge rather than the traditional scientific modes of words and numbers.
