This paper adapts Pierre Nora's (1989) notion of lieux de mémoire and develops the idea of lieux de futur, or sites of future. The paper uses the case of the Svalbard Global Seed Bank, an NGO-run Arctic archive of the world's seed biodiversity (75% of which was lost in the 20th century alone), to examine the entanglement of media and memory in spaces designed to function as infrastructures for visions of the future against the backdrop of climate change.
The paper proceeds in three parts. First, I utilize recent theories of history (Hartog, 2015; Koselleck, 2004) to outline broad, albeit Western, orientations to the future. This history culminates in risk society, which, though not by name, Nora characterizes as being defined by archival memory. Here, I use Derrida's (1995) notion of the archive as a promise, as future-enabling, an attempt to structure a planned future (futur) in calendar time against the threat of an unknowable future that blindsides (l'avenir) to set the foundation for lieux de futur.
Second, I build on the relationship of memory and futurity in Derrida's archive to distinguish sites of memory from sites of future. Certainly, memory and future are entangled in non-linear ways (i.e., beyond past-present-future) in lieux de mémoire. For example, the timing of the construction of Confederate monuments, like those found in Charlottesville, Virginia, illustrates that their function in the first instance is not to commemorate or preserve. Rather, they work to taper the future, reduce it to a known racial calendar of tomorrow. Nevertheless, this paper produces a useful distinction between sites of memory and future. Sites of memory, pace Nora, involve an intention to remember and their relationship to the future is often reduced to notions of posterity and preservation. Sites of future, on the other hand, showcase intentions to prophesize, prognosticate, predict, envision, and so on. Also, while sites of memory are mise-en-abîmes, their future counterparts are telescopic and teleporting.
Third, both the past and the future are mediated phenomena. This paper uses Peters' (2015) broad definition of media-"ensembles of natural element and human craft" that order civilization-to examine how the envisioned future at Svalbard is made material. At Svalbard, futures-past of cryogenic suspension are applied to the world's agricultural memory. Simultaneously, contemporary practices of digital memory, storage, and back-up found in Google and Facebook Arctic server farms are replicated in the seed bank as it acts as a backup to others. Both future and memory here depend on ice (an archive of carbon and an archiving medium) for their operation in perpetuity. Against the political economy of the Vault-one that envisions the continued existence of nation-states and extractive capitalism-I argue that the entanglements that structure the Vault illustrate the limits of contemporary visions of resilience, itself a particular amalgam of past and future, in the face of global climate change.
