Heritage Unbound: Curatorial Practice for Reimagining Spain’s Heritage
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Patrimonio sin límites: Práctica curatorial para reimaginar el patrimonio en España
Governments, museums, UNESCO, monuments insist that heritage is authenticated and authentic. Origins are traced through "factual evidence."
Yet, heritage is storied. And when nation-states or "global" institutions have all the power to narrate it, the stories tend to be predictably... exclusive.
Spain’s heritage regime arbiters for an "authentic" Spanishness bound to whiteness, Catholicism, and imperial nostalgia…
This platform makes a curatorial proposition beyond the logics of authenticity, provenance, and preservation that have historically governed heritage.
Ivy Wilson just said, "We shouldn't memorialize the past but mobilize it." IMAGINE THE FUTURE.
What do I want people to take away? What are my principles of engagement?
Heritage Unbound invites multi- and inter-sensory attunement through affective encounters with multimedia sources.
- close reading, feeling, listening, and looking as ways of cultivating greater sensory literacy
The platform abandons temporal linearity in order to show how past, present, and future are connected and overlapping.
It also abandons linear thinking. Visitors are invited to explore waywardly, opening the polydimensional perspectival field necessary to plumb the occlusions of the archive in order to narrate histories that attend to subjectivities and stories inconvenient to persistent master narratives. In doing so, the project opens new pathways of inquiry into one of Spain’s heritage regime and beyond.
Who is it for?
Heritage Unbound is for publics interested in heritage as a field of contestation.
For teachers of Spanish culture, and more broadly of heritage, the constellations can function as models of close reading and as resources for curating syllabi and classroom conversations.
Why does it matter?
The platform helps unsettle the ways in which heritage has become bound to a fetish for authenticity and to conservation as a means of exclusion and stabilizing meaning.
The [speculative fabulation] mode is ... a mode of attention, a theory of history, and a practice of worlding
La Cordobayangue
Agnes Essonti
Linaje
Quan Zhou
Madrid negro
Yeison García López
Shanshui Pixel Scenes
Paloma Chen
Cosas que me explica mi madre
Berna Wang
Blackface y otras vergüenzas
Silvia Albert Sepal
El concepto de herencia resulta intrínsecamente relacionado a la genealogía: tanto por la transmisión de capital(es)—elemento ligado a la economía y a la política españolas—como por la transmisión de recuerdos … Quien no hereda, no puede formar parte de la casta ni de la escritura de las leyes. Quien no hereda, no puede participar del movimiento memorialístico. Quien no hereda no es, siguiendo una violenta lógica que nos podría parecer aristocrática, pero que también permea el supuesto éxito neoliberal.
Authenticity is the sine qua non of heritage formations in our time. Both historical artefacts and immaterial historical legacies (traditions, rituals, performances, crafts) have to be ‘authenticated’ to qualify for the heritage label. Part of this authentication is realized through scientific research, which verifies whether (or to what extent) the heritage item is ‘really’ what claimants have made of it in their narrations. In these inquiries, technical, historical and anthropological knowledges are mobilized to make clear-cut distinctions between ‘factual evidence’ and ‘mere fabulation’.