Le patrimoine, ça change quoi ? Ou plutôt, qu'est-ce que c'est ? Et pour qui ? Ces questions sont à l'origine de cette exposition conçue par les étudiants à la maîtrise en muséologie UQAM-UdeM. L'opinion de la communauté uqamienne y est confrontée à des citations de chercheurs, avec comme résultat une mise en perspective originale du discours sur le patrimoine. __ How is heritage important? Or rather, what is heritage? And for whom? Those questions are at the core of this e...

Le 19e siècle aura été celui de l’invention européenne des monuments, historiques et de nature. Le 20e, plus spécifiquement sans sa seconde moitié, aura été celui du patrimoine, en particulier dans sa version mondiale, telle que soutenue par les États-Unis des années 1970. Or, en ce début de 21e siècle, de nouvelles formes de mobilisations mémorielles émergent: de la rue Champlain de Québec au quartier Xintiandi de Shanghai, de Bercy-Village à Paris à South Bank de Londres, ou bien encore aux...

This session explores the different ways late modern states control and translate heritage, both their own and that of others. While modern governments have always played a role in the production and authorization of heritage, late modern states have unprecedented command over the heritage landscape. Coinciding with the postwar economic boom, globalization, and most recently neoliberalism, the state has come to dominate the most vital aspects of heritage, ranging from research (heritage produ...

Industrial heritage in Britain has tended to be romanticised in museum ‘cathedrals’ and ‘theme parks’ (like Beamish), with workers’ lived experience subordinated to the machines, buildings and physical artefacts that dominate these spaces. Here workers’ lives are more often than not celebrated rather than critically reconstructed and interpreted. The politics, class relations and struggle, violence, poverty and murkier side of working life is increasingly being neglected as the past is san...

Heritagization (the various means by which cultural features—either material or immaterial—are turned into a people’s heritage) has recently become, for Amerindian groups, a major means to gain visibility and recognition in the new Latin American social and political landscapes where cultural diversity is endowed with an increasingly critical role. Different forms of cultural heritagization have largely been studied elsewhere, particularly in North America. However, they are far less known in...

Heritage practices often lead to social exclusion. As an "Authorized Heritage Discourse" (AHD) (Smith 2006) may define what is considered to be heritage, a certain set of social values can come to exclude other values. By formulating heritage policies which reproduce the existing AHD government may further such exclusion. Every now and then AHDs are challenged, leading to what political scientists like Ross (2007; 2009) call "cultural contestations" between groups. These are surrounded ...

This session explores artist-history exchanges in the context of heritage sites, venues and spaces, and considers recent curatorial and artistic interventions and performative strategies, such as decolonial methodologies. Drawing on disciplinary art history, this session approaches heritage sites as strategically re-deployed historic structures that function as representational signs – artifactual objects furnished with other objects that cumulatively and, by virtue of their provenance, pr...

Much is being made of the perceived breakdown of the nation-state, which was historically configured as a “container” of heritage formations, adopting and perusing local traditions where possible but oppressing them where deemed unsuitable. Migration is seen as eroding the rigid boundaries of this configuration, potentially liberating identities and heritages in the process. This session addresses the relationship between critical heritage and redefinitions of self, other, community and place...

The notion of heritage is closely linked to processes of change. In the Western context, the definition of heritage as "a contemporary product shaped from history" (Harvey 2010) highlights the extent to which our relationship with the past is being continually re-configured. However, there is a future dimension implied in this relationship that is often neglected; to paraphrase William Morris, the sense in which heritage testifies to the hopes and aspirations of those now passed away. Making ...

Le patrimoine n’est pas un donné, c’est un construit culturel et social, dynamique et itératif (Gravari-Barbas). La construction patrimoniale est la construction d’une croyance à partager/imposer. Le statut d’objet patrimonial que l’«on» (experts, élites, décideurs…) donne à un objet suppose de le saisir comme spécifique. C’est aussi l’occasion d’une saisie de la dynamique qui amène la spécificité patrimoniale, cette même dynamique qui est le terrain d’action des politiques, des prises en cha...

Since the beginning of the 19th century religious buildings and artefacts of the West have been involved in a continuous process of musealization. In the time-period subsequent to the Second World War, the general forces of secularisation increasingly turned religious buildings, most of them churches, into heritage and substantial parts of Christian practices into history. On a global scale (Western), conservation and heritage practices have been applied on tangible and intangible expressions...

How do borders shape heritage and its potential for change? Despite the growth of international connections in heritage studies, national, linguistic and disciplinary borders continue to structure scholarly and practical approaches to heritage. The aim of this session is therefore threefold. First we will address which borders limit our understanding of heritage today. What are the roles of linguistic, disciplinary, religious and national borders? Which methodologies are best suited to overco...

Dans le cadre de cette session, nous souhaitons faire, dans une perspective multidisciplinaire et critique, un état des lieux qui interroge doublement, à la lumière de trois axes que sont la narrativité, la temporalité et la performativité, la patrimonialisation des sujets sensibles tant sur ses rôles, ses formes et ses effets sur les sociétés qui les entreprennent, que sur sa fonction révélatrice d’un monde en changement. L’espace public laisse une place grandissante aux objets, aux li...

There is no doubt that the involvement of civil society is a key element in the history of heritage. Working upstream, in line with or against the tide of state recognition, enlightened amateurs or ordinary citizens have invested time and energy in the safeguarding and enhancement of a good, a place or a practice, judged, from their point of view, as irreplaceable or remarkable. It is easy for each country or each region to find an example of a precursor, working alone or in a group, who has ...

Essentiellement construite sur des questions d’aménagement et d’environnement, urbain ou non, cette session est envisagée à la croisée de plusieurs thématiques: les «communautés imaginaires», les usages du patrimoine dans le tourisme, le rapport à l’expertise. Nous proposons de décrire et d’organiser un faisceau de situations et d’exemples, qui ressortissent à une même hypothèse sur le caractère social, la nature de bien collectif et le rôle de catalyseur des transformations joué par le pa...

Montreal based Portrait Sonore developed an App that tells the story of a modern country and its transformation. Fun walks, experts accounts, on-site experiences and custom sound tracks make for a dynamic understanding of Canadian modern heritage. We seek to build bridges between those who build cities and those who live in them. Does heritage really matter to people? Our goal is to make it matter, partners in stride! http://portraitsonore.org

Many people are actively using working class heritage as a resource to reflect on the past and the present, and there is a growing tendency for the heritage of working class people to be interpreted and presented to the public in museums and heritage sites—see for example the Worklab network of museums. Working class communities and organizations also play active roles in creating a memory of their own past, and mobilizing this to sustain political action in the present. Drawing on scho...

With sustainable development gaining momentum as a priority of UNESCO heritage policies, an increasing number of food-related nominations are being submitted for inscription on the lists of the Convention for the safeguarding of the intangible cultural heritage. The Mediterranean diet, traditional Mexican cuisine and the Japanese dietary culture of washoku are just some examples of this booming phenomenon. Since food and foodways are powerful references for self-representation and ident...

Le patrimoine recouvre des notions et des pratiques, et désigne des objets, dont « [la] perte constitue un sacrifice et [dont la] conservation suppose des sacrifices » (Chastel et Babelon 1980). En amont de ces productions de significations et perceptions sociales, ces notions et les modes de désignation diffèrent selon les univers linguistiques, géographiques, et temporels, alors que, sous la pression d’un ‘algorithme universalisant’ (Merleau-Ponty 1969), un processus de normalisation est...

In many parts of Europe and North America, but also in Australia, Japan and parts of China, regions of heavy industry, in particular regions of coal and steel industries, have been in decline since the 1960s. In many of these regions, the transition to post-industrial landscapes has provoked discussions surrounding industrial heritage, what to do with it and for which purposes. One of the most ambitious industrial heritage projects was initiated in the Ruhr region of Germany from the 1960s on...

The contemporary movement of heritagization, characterized by a multiple expansion (typological, chronological, spatial) of heritage and of heritage producers (local actors, inhabitants, social groups, national states, international players), nourishes also the production of alternative heritage. By this expression, we wish to focus on non-institutional, dissonant, under-recognized heritage, located on the “pioneer front” of contemporary heritage production. Alter-heritage represents, therefo...

Dans le cadre de ce que l’on pourrait qualifier de « changement de régime de patrimonialité » (Gravari-Barbas, 2014), la question des patrimoines culturels est de plus en plus étroitement associée, depuis le début du XXIème siècle, à celle des droits fondamentaux, individuels et collectifs. Définies comme ressources héritées du passé, ces patrimoines ainsi revendiqués sont volontiers pensés comme biens communs, supports d’identification, constitutifs du sujet politique (Meyer-Bisch, 2014)....