Museums and the Implicit Anthropocene: Witnessing in the Science Museum’s Energy Hall*

Abstract The Anthropocene – our mooted new geological epoch defined by the unequalled and irreversible impact made by the human species on the Earth’s systems – remains hidden in plain sight in the London Science Museum’s Energy Hall. The staging of an explicit cultural remembrance of modern national progress, driven by the fossil-fuelled, steam-engine technology of the Industrial Revolution, is predicated upon an “implicit” (Erll, 2022), potential memory of the Anthropocene, which is sufficiently framed and mediated as to remain inert. This is particularly conspicuous in an era when museums have generally become more self-reflexive in reckoning with the socio-environmental effects and legacies of their historical complicity with colonialism and extractive capitalism. In eliciting the implicit, this article engages with concepts of more-than-human witnessing and testimony in museum spaces that might help us remember the Anthropocene, in this museum and across other sites of industrial heritage, and in doing so considers what kinds of historical and memory actors emerge from such a conceptualisation, and what degrees of historical agency (and culpability) are accorded to the nonhuman and human.