Cultural Heritage as an Eventalization of Space: Memory, Experience, Meaning

As said by so many, the experience of cultural heritage is crucial to its social meaning. Meaning is of body and mind and includes immaterial forces like affect, desire, situation and circumstances. The meaning of cultural heritage, in other words, also depends on presence and atmosphere or Stimmung  and those kinds of aesthetic forces are more “expected” than reflected within spatial studies. This includes studies on the effect of cultural heritage in lived space. Seeing cultural heritage as influenced by memory is not only making the objects and spaces to a matter of representation, but also a matter of performativity and (ways of) experience. The English word “experience” lacks the German divide between Erlebnis and Erfahrung (in short, situated experience and lived experience), but experiencing cultural heritage objects or spaces is a never-ending meaning making oscillating between presence and meaning. The word meaning thus connotes the sensible, signification, affective, atmosphere and Stimmung. Regarding cultural heritage not only as representative, but performative, this paper will discuss the in principle intangible body-mind experience of cultural heritage. The paper will first discuss cultural heritage as memory and experience followed by a focus on the sense of place of heritage and the place as a performative space, and its effect as atmosphere and Stimmung. Using cases that show cultural heritage changed to event-spaces of some kind—for instance, digital or “live” heritage, bazars, neighbourhood or city public spaces, cultural houses—the analysis will reflect on if and how cultural heritage affects people when heritage is put into an event-space.