Lantern Lectures 2025: Goodbye to Heritage: Svalbard’s Past Beyond Conservation

By Anatolijs Venovcevs

This event was recorded live at Svalbard Museum on 11 December 2025 as part of the Lantern Lectures series.

Everything we know will one day disappear. While societies have long developed systems and rituals for letting go — from waste management to funerals — heritage has often been treated as something that should last forever. In this talk, Anatolijs Venovcevs examines why this assumption is becoming increasingly unrealistic in the face of climate change, limited resources, and the sheer volume of heritage sites under protection, a challenge that is particularly acute in Svalbard.

Drawing on recent ideas in heritage studies, Anatolijs explores how we might responsibly say goodbye to heritage: what such processes could look like, and what kinds of meaningful conversations they might open up. He argues that Svalbard, with its small community, close proximity to local and national authorities, and highly educated and creative population, is uniquely positioned to lead experimental approaches to heritage management in an age of unprecedented loss.

About the Speaker

Anatolijs Venovcevs is a researcher in historical archaeology at Svalbard Museum. Previously, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oulu in Finland, researching fungal ecologies in World War II ruins. He received his PhD in contemporary archaeology from UiT: The Arctic University of Norway, where his research focused on the ongoing, involuntary legacies of single-industry mining towns in Norway, Canada, and Russia. His interests include mushrooms, fermentation, forms of heritage that resist normative categorisation, and long walks through landscapes shaped — and often damaged — by modernity.

About Lantern Lectures

This event is part of the Lantern Lectures series, a collaboration between Artica Svalbard and Svalbard Museum. Inspired by the 19th-century magic lantern lectures, the series invites local voices and visiting experts to share stories, images, and reflections on life in the Arctic.

Held during the dark season, these talks create space for community, conversation, and deeper understanding of the rapid changes shaping the region today.