Date : Sep 26, 2025

Time : 19:15 - 21:15 PM

Abstract
Cultural heritage is often imagined as something fixed: artifacts behind glass, recipes preserved unchanged, stories repeated word for word. Yet around the world, memory is alive—adapted, reinterpreted, and reborn every day through craft, food, performance, and storytelling. In a time of ecological crisis and social change, this living heritage is not just about preservation; it is a resource for resilience, creativity, and sustainable futures.

Join MOFAD during Climate Week for a multidisciplinary panel that explores what it means to treat heritage as a catalyst rather than a relic. How can culinary traditions, textiles, music, architecture, and oral histories be reimagined to strengthen local economies, address climate challenges, and spark civic engagement? How can museums and cultural institutions move beyond collecting static objects to supporting dynamic, community-led practices? And how can memory itself evolve from an archive of the past into a tool for imagining the future?

Bringing together artists, architects, chefs, scholars, and cultural organizers, the conversation will highlight concrete examples—from reviving indigenous foodways and regenerative craft practices to creating digital storytelling platforms and participatory exhibitions. Together, we will ask: What is the potential of tangible and intangible heritage to inspire new meanings and more sustainable ways of living? And how can institutions help steward—not fossilize—these evolving traditions?

Join us on Governor’s Island during Climate Week for a conversation that celebrates memory not as something we inherit unchanged, but as something we shape, share, and transform.

Main questions for discussion

1. Storytelling, memory, and sustainability
   How can museums, cultural institutions, and artistic practices use storytelling to transform memory into a living resource that supports sustainability, community resilience, and the revitalization of traditional knowledge (crafts, foodways, agricultural practices)—while adapting them to contemporary challenges without losing their essence?
2. Museums as dynamic and participatory spaces
   How can museums move from being static collectors of objects to becoming incubators of living and sustainable practices (e.g., test kitchens, seed libraries, maker spaces), sharing authority with communities and integrating marginalized or diasporic stories into the cultural narrative?
3. Art, architecture, and new forms of heritage
   How can artists and architects, through their projects and collaborations with museums or communities, reinterpret cultural traditions and identities in contemporary ways—creating participatory experiences that weave together memory, innovation, and environmental awareness?