Climate justice is hampered by a lack of awareness and consensus on actions. Offering imaginative scenarios and unconventional approaches, Art & Artistic Research enhance awareness and empower people to move from awareness to action. JUST ART mobilises this potential for a climate just future in the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

In the face of widespread environmental degradation there is an urgent need for new cultural practices that bridge the divide between humans and nature. Many museums have recently foregrounded ecological approaches and perspectives through exhibitions and public programming. This project goes beyond such initiatives to consider the impact and politics of ecological thinking on fundamental museum practices, from cleaning and conservation to governance and exhibition design. The aim is to identify and cultivate radical new strategies that demonstrate how museums – always embedded in their own cultural-ecological worlds – can promote more-than-human flourishing.

The research project seeks to investigate continuing colonial frameworks of knowledge about cultural objects and their histories and explore new frameworks to research and knowledge of cultural objects collected in colonial situations. Objects looted as war booty from the Cakranegara palace in Lombok, Indonesia, in 1894 serves to investigate the dynamics of the existing historical framework through an analysis of language, discourse, and historiography in both countries. The research will explore objects of the Lombok war booty as windows through which memories and histories of their original values and meanings can be viewed.

In the HAICu-project, AI researchers, Digital-Humanities researchers, heritage professionals, journalists and engaged citizens work together to realize scientific breakthroughs in accessibility and contextualization of massive multimodal digital heritage collections. The challenges of these collections offer a unique opportunity to bring AI to the next level. Future AI technologies should be applicable outside of laboratories and be able to learn from sparse examples, at the same time learning continuously from users. The technology of HAICu pays attention to present-day societal demands with respect to responsible and explainable methods to the construct multimodal narratives from the Netherlands’ rich cultural heritage collections.

Conflict and war are commonly understood to seriously impact cultural collections, but the current challenge is how to map this process effectively. In this project, national radio collections in Europe - during and after World War II - are used to trace how cultural objects can become transnational conflict heritage.