UNESCO

Chair on Heritage Futures

Embracing Change

2024-04-18

I presented a keynote lecture entitled “Embracing Change: Cultural Heritage and Regeneration” for the 2024 International Forum on Cultural Heritage: Sustainability and Resilience hosted by the Asian Network of Industrial Heritage in Taiwan.

The event was part of the 2024 International Day of Monuments and Sites on 18 April, this year dedicated to the theme “Disasters and Conflicts through the Lens of the Venice Charter”. The forum aimed to explore sustainable practices and the resilience and adaptability of cultural heritage in the face of contemporary challenges.

The audience comprised 55 participants on site and additional 70 participating online via Facebook on Youtube.

My talk in the session on Sustainability and Futures focused on the following issues:

“Disasters and conflicts are the outcome of societal failures to take sufficient precautions, respond adequately to emerging events, or behave appropriately peacefully towards each other. Their impact is perceived as worse if acceptance of change is low. I argue that all this can be improved by an updated perception of (world) cultural heritage that is based on concepts of renewal and regeneration rather than conservation and restoration, as it is, for example, still advocated in the 1964 Venice Charter. Narratives of change over time, exemplified by ever-changing cultural heritage, are likely able to improve resilience and preparedness for transformations in future societies. They can also facilitate a new more pan-human or indeed post-human understanding of our shared world. As Tim Ingold (2024) wrote recently, cultural heritage should not be seen as an inheritance to be transmitted from one generation to the next but as a living and perduring process of continuous renewal generating social life under varying circumstances over time.“

The Bamiyan Buddhas – what next?

2020-12-11

In 2001, the Taliban blew the Bamiyan Buddha statues to pieces. Since then, UNESCO and others have been deliberating whether they ought to be reconstructed.

Now the current state of the discussion has been published by Springer in a volume entitled The Future of the Bamiyan Buddha Statues, summarising the outcomes of a UNESCO conference held in Tokyo in 2017. The book contains a chapter by Cornelius Holtorf entitled “Destruction and Reconstruction of Cultural Heritage as Future-Making“. He argues that before any specific reconstructions of the Buddha statues are commissioned, we should consider several alternative futures for the past:

  • will there be new audiences for heritage among the growing populations of Asia?
  • Will digital and interactive ways of presentation reduce the significance of genuine artefacts?
  • Will the preference for dark and painful heritage grow and perhaps increasingly demand stories about the Taliban rather than about Buddhism?
  • Or will heritage tourism come to an end altogether? 

Managing Heritage in Times of Crisis

2020-10-17

The ICOMOS 6ISCs Joint Meeting “Advancing Risk Management for the Shared Future” was held virtually on 17 October 2020, assembling ca 100 participants from around the world, with more being able to watch the recording afterwards. The aim of the meeting was to develop risk management for cultural heritage.

Cornelius Holtorf contributed with a paper on “The Significance of Managing Heritage Processes in Times of Crisis” in which he argued that risk management strategies should give more attention to managing processes and practices of heritage.

The paper is available as an oral presentation and in written form as part of the meeting’s proceedings.

Authenticity and Reconstruction

2020-10-05

Authenticity and the reconstruction of cultural heritage are today on the top of the agenda of heritage studies. They reemerged in the aftermath of natural disasters and human conflicts resulting in destructions of cultural heritage, such as the recent military conflicts in Syria.

Can, and, indeed, should, destruction be undone? Does the reconstruction of cultural heritage always lie in the best interests of the local population? How can heritage best contribute to future-making? What is the relationship between the values of a given heritage and the circumstances of its creation or re-creation?

The articles in a new special issue on Authenticity and Reconstruction of the International Journal of Cultural Property, edited by Cornelius Holtorf, explore some of these issues:

The papers are combining current thinking in different disciplines (psychology, architecture, urban planning, historic preservation, and archaeology) with practical examples from around the world. They derive from the pilot workshop of the ICOMOS University Forum, titled “A Contemporary Provocation: Reconstructions as Tools of Future-making“. Held on 13–15 March 2017 at ICOMOS’s international head- quarters in Paris, France, the workshop was co-organized by Cornelius Holtorf (Linnaeus University, Sweden), Loughlin Kealy (University College Dublin, Ireland), Toshiyuki Kono (ICOMOS/Kyushu University, Japan), and Marie-Laure Lavenir (ICOMOS, France). As an event of the ICOMOS University Forum, its aim was to stimulate dialogue between professional heritage consultants and academic heritage experts.