Shared Heritage

Shared Heritage: Canonisation, Conflicted Legacies, Cultural Landscapes and Presentation of Cultural Heritage in the Baltic Sea Region

Cultural heritage is collectively determined and offers crucial points of departure for the examination of cultural concepts, identities, and constructions of history. Current political, socio-cultural, ecological, economic and media transformation processes entail far-reaching consequences for its concept. It can be seen, for example, in the Faro Convention of the Council of Europe (2005) or the Manifesto 2012 formulated by Critical Heritage Studies, in which cultural heritage is no longer determined nationally, but by different heritage communities. At the same time, debates about how to deal with objects from colonial contexts in museums in the global North trigger new understandings. Accordingly, the concept of cultural heritage is plural and diverse, both identity-forming as well as conflicting, exclusive, and participatory.

Therefore, our leading hypothesis is that we have to understand institutionalisation and contouring of cultural heritage as intersection of erratically transformation processes shaped by a permanent tension between tradition and innovation, persistent and change that lead to a new concept of cultural heritage. In this respect, cultural heritage is subject to continuous change determined by specific intertwined social, cultural, economic, and artistic dynamics and drivers. The concept of shared heritage serves as an approach to focus on what is common, what is shared, and thus on the ambiguous influences on the construction of heritage. In this context, the shared is understood also in terms of a material and medial process of splitting and decay that results from the oscillation between practices of preservation and dynamics of cultural production.

Therefore, we examine which the ways cultural heritage is being currently transformed as practice and artifact, and also as a notion, and, moreover, how this affects its understanding, or, acceptance, as well as its potential realignments for future generations.