UNESCO

Chair on Heritage Futures

Futuro House

2024-08-07

The Futuro House, designed by Matti Suuronen, is an icon of pop culture. It reflects the 1960s faith in technology, linked to space exploration, and the post-War experience of increasing leisure and constant economic groth. This particular house was used 1968-1986 as a restaurant on the esplanade of La Dèfense, the most futuristic part of Paris.

The future implied by the Futuro House marked a particular strong belief in progress and utopia – a past future we have trouble relating to, today.

Apparently, according to Wikipedia, a Futuro House was recently found to be biodegrading due to cyanobacteria and archaea. So today, the building no longer evokes a bright future but is gradually fading away and presents challenges of conservation…

Maybe it was no coincidence that we came across this particular Futuro House in Marché Dauphine located in Saint-Ouen, the largest assemblage of antiques and flea markets in Paris? It seemed to fit in there rather well…

The Heritage-Climate Paradox

2022-01-26

In my presentation on “Risks for Peace Due to Promotion of Heritage”, given on 26 January 2022 at the global ICCROM conference Climate.Culture.Peace in a session on Culture, Climate and Drivers of Conflict, I introduced the Heritage-Climate Paradox in its two dimensions:

  1. Whereas heritage is often about conservation and timeless values, the climate crisis is about change and the transformation of our lives and many people’s livelihoods.
  2. Whereas heritage is about making cultural distinctions in space, contrasting US with THEM (often in terms of nations or ethnic groups), the climate crisis requires us to find global solutions and to promote global solidarity.

Here is the full abstract of my paper:

As the significance of culture and cultural heritage is gradually entering high-level discussions concerning sustainable development, I am cautioning against generalizing the view that culture and heritage necessarily benefit mitigation and adaptation related to climate change. Promoting seemingly timeless heritage derived from the past can make necessary transformations of inherited ways of life and livelihoods more difficult. At the same time, perceptions of exclusive cultural heritage may support ethnic pride and social exclusion. Both recent and historical examples show how perceptions and uses of cultural heritage can inflame violent conflicts between different cultural groups over power and territory. Promoting heritage can thus threaten peace and human rights, reduce socio-cultural cohesion and resilience, and effectively become a hinder for global human adaptation.

 

 

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?