Naslov
Ethics and Politics in Conservation of Post-1945 European Heritage

Autori
Špikić, Marko

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, pp prezentacija, znanstveni

Skup
Výzvy současné evropské památkové péče / Challenges of Contemporary European Heritage Care

Mjesto i datum
Prag, Češka Republika, 9-11.11.2022

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Pozvano predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Nije recenziran

Ključne riječi
Central and Eastern Europe, conservation, Socialist monuments, vandalism, intentional monuments

Sažetak
A new cult of monuments, devised a quarter a century ago, was redirected to complex, formerly celebrated and suddenly disputed or rejected inheritance. Its complexity lays in its formal and functional variety, its integration in the spaces of everyday life and in its inscribed, repressed or re-recognized values and meanings. The concept of heritage refers here to physically and publicly visible, often omnipresent – therefore irritant, carelessly tolerated, or adopted – architecture, urban planning and sculptural monuments, whose initial task was to convey socially relevant messages or to help fulfill utopian and normalizing programs in traumatized and radically reformed societies of the divided Europe. Few years before the collapse of the Soviet Block, Norbert Huse initiated the discussion on uncomfortable architectural monuments, developing Willibald Sauerländer’s research on extension of the concept of monuments. It seems natural that these discursive anticipations emerged in West Germany, not only because of the decades-long confronting the collective guilt exemplified by ubiquitous, warning ruins and alienating modernist forms, but also due to conservation tradition that since 1900 insisted on the values of the aged, wounded and derelict monumental forms. Huse’s discussion was soon accompanied by another “western” initiative, the establishment of DOCOMOMO, which tended to transform aesthetically recognized architectural forms of Modernism (not rarely used as provisory tools of social reform) into heritage worthy of permanent care. It seems safe to say that this generally wasn’t the case in most of the emancipated nations of the post-communist Europe, where the obsolete ideological substrate endangered the matter and form of monument in the eyes and hands of the democratizing and renascent national communities. It is still hard to provide a comprehensive (and comparative) international diagnosis on the magnitude of these transformations – ranging from careless adaptation, indolence, vandalism and dereliction to removal and destruction – happening in this part of Europe in the aftermath of 1989. As time passes, it seems natural not only to document, comparatively research and publicly present the consequences of this increasingly distant yet still resounding inclinatio Imperii, but to create a synchronic, post-traumatic, critical and edifying diagnosis that could help define our sense of contemporaneity, collective memory and social responsibility. It should cover diverse social responses to central political change, but it should also strive to apply long acquired instruments of the conservation movement to this complex artistic, architectural or just prosaic inheritance, that is increasingly considered a valuable heritage. The inherent aim of the analysis of the phenomena prevailing after the fall of the Berlin Wall would be to unite the professional initiatives in wider post-communist European perspective. This presentation therefore tends to study the origins of the aforementioned cult, its development, accomplishments, limitations and problems that transcend the boundaries of the conservation profession. Due to the fact that transformation of public spaces in post-communist Europe gained immense social and political importance, equally by applying the principles of subtraction and addition, interdisciplinary comparative analysis of these processes should become questions of professional ethos and social responsibility.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Arhitektura i urbanizam, Povijest, Povijest umjetnosti

POVEZANOST RADA