Descrizione del progetto
In che modo l’espropriazione e la violenza nell’arte plasmano la produzione di conoscenza sul patrimonio culturale
Sullo sfondo degli attuali dibattiti incentrati sul desiderio di decolonizzare i musei, il progetto BEYONDREST, finanziato dall’UE, tenterà di comprendere se la restituzione delle proprietà culturali possa essere considerata una rimarginazione delle ferite storiche. L’ipotesi alla base del lavoro è che l’espropriazione del patrimonio artistico e culturale sia una precondizione per le modalità di circolazione dei beni artistici e culturali. Il progetto indagherà il tipo di perdita generata dall’espropriazione dell’arte e come questa perdita abbia plasmato la produzione delle conoscenze in materia di patrimonio culturale. L’attenzione verrà rivolta alle interconnessioni tra l’Europa occidentale, il Vicino e Medio Oriente e il Nord Africa, a partire dalla metà del XIX secolo, quando una quantità innumerevole di oggetti entrò nelle collezioni internazionali attraverso saccheggi, furti e vendite sotto coercizione.
Obiettivo
On the backdrop of ongoing debates to decolonialize museums, BEYONDREST asks if the return of looted art can be regarded as a closure of historical wounds. The project probes the focus on restitution that inadvertently casts dispossessed art in terms of contested property. Instead, BEYONDREST explores what kind of loss dispossessed art engenders, and how this loss has shaped the knowledge production on heritage. It focuses on the interlocution between Western Europe, the Near and Middle East, and North Africa, mapping relationships between people and “things” that have largely been left out of current debates. The project starts in the mid-19th century, which witnessed the rise of the museum in its modern form as well as violence unleashed by imperial and colonial projects and dispossession. Innumerable objects made their way into international collections, categorized mostly as “Islamic art,” or as the “universal heritage of humankind” that nonetheless symbolically and proprietarily belongs to the “West.” BEYONDREST tackles dispossession not as a loss to be mended but a means to transform knowledge through inquiries into absence. The interdisciplinary research group will employ a wide methodologically matrix, including ethnographic interviews, visual analysis of exhibitions, archival research, and textual analysis of the laws governing cultural assets to capture the proprietary stakes in the interplay of epistemic remembering and forgetting. BEYONDREST takes risks by centering on what is absent, rather than present, on what is lost, rather than found. It argues that the dispossession of art is not merely a problematic of colonialism or empire, that is of the past, but an ongoing process that is constitutive for the governance of heritage in its national and transnational formations. BEYONDREST’s working hypothesis is that the dispossession of art and cultural heritage is not an aberration, but a precondition for the ways in which art and cultural assets circulate.
Campo scientifico
Programma(i)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
HORIZON-AG - HORIZON Action Grant Budget-BasedIstituzione ospitante
14193 BERLIN
Germania