Previously disregarded as background noise information, natural elements such as trees, plants, seeds, and soil are today recognized and studied as archaeological evidence. These natural-cultural archaeological sites, “earthly memorial landscapes” as we are calling them, may look pristine, but are in fact spatial products of long-term social designs with nature.

On the other hand, and in an interrelated manner, this shift can be attributed to the critical questioning of the binary logic of the nature-culture divide that sustains Western epistemologies and imaginaries, as well as to the critical questioning of the ways in which archaeological evidence – and, by extension, heritage and preservation – played a seminal role in shaping racialized narratives of human progress and civilization that historically sustained imperial power and colonialism.

This special issue of Future Anterior invites writers and practitioners to present papers or visual projects that research, map, describe, and narrate “earthly memorial landscapes” which – like the Amazon rainforest or the ǂKhomani sand formations in southern Africa – are the product of social design entangled with nature. These natural-cultural landscapes have been historically shaped by Indigenous modes of inhabitation, land management systems, and spatial technologies. Acknowledging their historic, constructed, and memorial dimension means not only giving voice to other stories that need to be told in the field of heritage and preservation, but also preserving and learning from ecologically-sound knowledge-practices that have become central to contemporary design on a planet approaching ecological collapse.

Addressing practices and theories across architecture, archaeology, environmental science, visual culture, and advocacy, Future Anterior will explore the frontiers of heritage and preservation across human/non-human domains and counter-colonial positions. We seek contributions from historical, conceptual, legal, technological, activist, or artistic perspectives, cutting through disciplinary fields in challenging established visions of nature through heritage and its sometimes fraught historic and epistemic foundations.

Arguably, learning from ruins is the foundational epistemic act of architecture and its politics. What we are naming “earthly memorial landscapes” embraces forms of spatial knowledge and technologies where nature is not a passive object for human appropriation, but a living and acting being on equal footing with humans – a member of the polis to whom even rights ought to be granted.

This issue will theorize and demonstrate a new operative field that considers how architecture, fragments, and building materials are distributed, appropriated, altered, reinvented and evaluated according to various settings, ideals and ethics. We encourage the reconsideration of core cultural and aesthetic concepts such as: origins, authorship, ownership, legitimacy, copyright, authenticity, authentication, patina, collective memory, crises, uses, and abuses. We also aim to recharge the temporality of the concept: architectural provenance can be a dynamic phenomenon, a forward-bound, creative instrument for change, applicable to understanding lost, present, and future potentials of buildings. We invite contributions that consider architectural provenance within a circular economy and re-examine topics spanning from material procurement and real estate to historical reconceptualization and practical transformation work. 

Topics to explore can include, but are not limited to historical or contemporary processes of construction or adaptation; the provenance of an idea or material; reflections on the aesthetic traditions of provenance in regard to architecture; monuments, landscapes, real estate, property; provenance as a tool in the validation of particular objects/histories and the rejection of others.