intergovernmental Convention on Wetlands before. One of the underlying aims
of the Ramsar Culture Network is to create interaction between the issues,
policies, monitoring and practices associated with Biodiversity (the
primary driver of the Convention) and Cultural aspects including UNESCO'
Convention on Intangible Heritage.
Of course we know that science and environment maanagement can specifically
benefit from the knowledge and application of traditional/ indigenous and
vernacular knowledge and practice. We know that bringing these up is
political and also raises ethical issues. Fundamentally it is about power.
Some of the practices which are shared across 'new media', socially engaged
art, co-design and social practices in architecture are very important for
bringing into question singular narratives of management (whether social,
economic or environmental) and this needs to also meet up with 'vital
materialism' and 'the agency of all things' referenced above.
My colleague Dave Borthwick's short piece for the Ramsar newsletter alludes
to some of these issues - of migration and nationality, of mythic stories
and geographies.
http://www.ramsar.org/on-the-migration-of-water-and-the-flow-of-birds-in-the-upper-solway-ramsar-site-uk
Contexts such as Ramsar where two major policy areas are brought into
interaction provide interesting and fertile ground for bringing these
issues onto the ground.
Chris
On 19 May 2017 10:09, "roberta buiani" <rbuiani@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello folks,
since I received the request to engage with the topics of History and
cultural heritage, like Katerina, I have been thinking about cultural
heritage as a problematic term. I completely agree with her. we can think
of cultural heritage as a mummified item, but we can also think of it as
something dynamic, constantly changing, crisscrossed by all sorts of odd,
subtle and definitely oppressive relations of power, and definitely
multilayered.
She is right when she mentions the implication of cultural heritage and the
political.
However, I also have other items in mind. for instance, how do we define
cultural heritage? what stands for it? and who gets to call it cultural
heritage?
very briefly: when I think of cultural heritage, I don't necessarily think
of big monuments and landmarks. by themselves, those are, to say it
bluntly, pieces of stone. what makes them monuments though is the fact that
there is an entire city living in their proximity, and a bunch of people
assigning significance to them. this significance can be historical,
geographical, but also very personal. there are sounds around these
buildings and stones, and those are very different from the sounds that
used to define the area in the past. Also, I think cultural heritage is not
merely defined by architecture and iconic places, but also by the animals
living in the interstices of the city, the plants that are being planted,
chopped or moved to make space to these building, or the people who live
there, or used to live there, pushed away by gentrification, or, worse,
were kicked by evictions or wars and cultural genocide?
I think cultural heritage should be understood as a bundle of layers some
defined by the political and economic forces whose voice is very loud, but
some defined by individuals, plants and animals whose voice is not that
loud.
I guess this comes from my experience as a person originally coming from
Italy who is now based in North America.
North America has a huge cultural heritage: however, it has been
threatened and often successfully (sigh!) deleted through centuries of
colonization and cultural genocide.
But this is also true in the Mediterranean region. I will be visiting
Athens in the next few weeks (talking about political and economic forces
...after all the polemics, I will be checking out Documenta) and Venice
(mmmmm…Biennale, and the big boats in the luna, and the environmental
threat coming from the sea etc…) and I bet lots can be said about these two
places alone.
Therefore, in thinking about what innovation and new technologies can do
for cultural heritage, we can take the usual cartographies, the visible
histories, the official documents as reference points and present them as
sleek augmented reality apps , but we can also combine the tech approach
with strategies involving real face to face interactions, performative
gestures, use technologies as storage for intimate stories or have story
telling sessions etc…, in other words, an approach that is not just from
above, but also and especially from below. I am a big fan of hybrid
approaches, because they are more inclusive (they are multigenerational,
they span class, culture and why not? personal preferences).
also, I am wondering how the multi sensorial can be recorded and/or
featured. I have been paying a lot of attention to smell and sounds of
machinery recently. these items, more than specific melodies (the humming
of the tram cables for instance) can really evoke many memories. I am not
sure these items can be reproduced, but they are very site specific and are
still part of the cultural heritage.
my two cents
Roberta
> On May 17, 2017, at 6:10 AM, Katerna Karoussos <kkaroussos@gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
>
>
> Initially, I think that we should clarify the predicates: i. Cultural
> Heritage and ii. Mediterranean Rim.
>
> i. What is the type of cultural asset that we are
> discussing? A large number of cultural asset has been processed by
political
> and/or economical activities. From the moment that is extracted from its
> spatiotemporal environment, it has been blended with numerous
associations,
> not all purposeful.
>
> Hence by implementing computational and other contemporary practices, are
we
> looking to reveal what was that which the cultural asset once expressed
and
> served, or we simply add more associations, dissociating it from its
> particular context?
>
> ii. The geography of Mediterranean Rim has been radically
> changed. On which map one can rely on when talking about cultural
heritage?
> Because if we take for granted that we are viewing the cultural heritage
> from a European perspective, we admit, a priori, all the associations of a
> cultural asset.
>
> To find a new dislocation process and a new field that could treat the
> cultural asset not as a mummified object, subject to our convenience, but
as
> a self-sustained, living organism, it would be preferable to remain
critical
> both to the cultural asset's associations and to its geography.
>
>
>
> Katerina Karoussos
>
>
>
> ---
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