A Rhetoric of Preservation: Artistic Interventions in a Damaged World
A Rhetoric of Preservation: Artistic Interventions in a Damaged World

Summary/Abstract: Rereading Walter Benjamin’s often overlooked theme of preservation in his work, we offer an interpretation of an art installation that appeared in the winter of 2018 in The Heidelberg Project in Detroit, Michigan, USA. By interpreting this installation and Benjamin’s insights on preservation, we make recommendations on how to make readable rhetoric that might be used to positively shape digitally disseminated climate change activist media. We examine three types of preservation: 1. preservation that makes inaccessible, 2. dialectical preservation, and 3. the preservation of the collected. In so doing, we show how performative acts of publicly available art might directly respond to the environmental crisis and how the legibility of that art might offer hope for survival in the age of climate change.

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