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The deep-time thinking of the ‘Fossils from Another World’ project involves projecting ourselves into the far future, and imagining how remnants of our lives might be discovered as a future fossil.  We did this by conducting online curatorial sessions, with insitu fabrication workshops to cast plaster of Paris from sand moulds, which  were finished with acrylic paints, and object labels.

 

In November 2022 and February 2023, at UCL Institute of Archaeology Conservation lab,  as part of the ‘Objects of the Misanthropocene’ exhibition project and “'Cheswick House’ an 'illegal' reconstruction in a speculative future”, we imprinted personal narratives into the geological archive, and played with the misunderstanding and mistranslation associated in describing the lives of others in different times and places.

 

In May 2024, we made future fossils for display in the UCL IoA MA Museum Studies Exhibition Project ‘Future Thinking and Fantasies’.

 

In March 2025 in the Conservation Workshops at West Dean College,  we made ‘Fossils from Another World', to demonstrate the application of speculative practice in understanding  conservation objects . This helped to consider conservation work as the making  of the conservation object rather than conserving  objects, in a future world rather than a past world,  in geological timescales rather than human time frames. This forms part of an attempt to extend an understanding of the making and remaking of heritage objects beyond human exceptionalism, in order to amplify otherwise muted registers, and make visible more diverse agencies in co-created heritage worlds.

 

This exhibition contains a small selection of ‘Fossils from Another World’, please follow the links below for more information on particular fossils. We will continue to refresh the exhibition by adding other fossil specimens from other worlds, when they arrive on loan from the Illegal Museum of Beyond’s extensive archive of Not-Fossils.