European Commission - 7th Framework Programme European Museums and Libraries in/of the age of migrations last updated: February 2015


Conference: Identity and heritage

7 - 9 July 2011

Berlin, Germany | TU Berlin, Main Building, Lecture Hall 2036

 

Monuments and cultural heritage were mobile in the past two centuries - and still is - made in theory and practice effective as media of social homogenization, usually with the explicit aim of the consolidation of a characteristic unit of statehood, territoriality, ethnicity and multiculturalism.
For some time, the so sought and eventually achieved union with the term "identity" combined. This would thus be the result of a complex construction, the personal, so subjective "perceived" character of a person and their membership in state, territory, people and culture founded. Heritage would therefore be an immediately effective medium of identity construction. Consider this as a direct dependency - the more the stronger the heritage identity of sensation? Or do we see identity and heritage as a dialectical pair in the relationship of mutual contingency, which makes paradoxical reversals of cause and effect possible?
Specifically, we ask: How, when and where and by which actors were affirmed by unit constructs interpretation and enhancement of monuments, collections and museum installations? Has the desire to integrate the force in such heritage structures created in terms of internal stability and external division of the society over time and proven to a certain extent, these become facts? How have they contributed to cultural antagonisms and military confrontations between neighboring nation states? Are suppressed or eliminated people in history and in the memorial and museum landscape in the way actually been dislocated or more? And they take out the resistance, or are there, who takes his part in historical buildings, places, artifacts, reference?
The national and particular enslavement of cultural goods are faced with new trends in historical value theory. New concepts and manifestos of the international organizations dealing with cultural heritage, take away from the assertion of the unity of cultural heritage, ethnicity and multiculturalism and suggest other social patterns of socialization of cultural heritage. But there is always a step forward if the state and nation from the binding force and obligation to be dismissed and communities to take the place? If this rule is necessary and also more democratic? This opens up another, to present and future directing research field that can be asked in the importance of monuments and mobile cultural assets for the detection and possible treatment of social and cultural hegemony and conflict can have the past and how an analysis of cultural heritage of Moderation could be used by conflicts of todays. 

 

Organized by: Institute for Urban and Regional Planning, Department of Conservation, Prof Dr. Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper

 

» link to the Conference (in German)