BEATRIZ DUARTE
Site em construção
Counternarratives to material preservation: new approaches to contemporary heritages
Author: Beatriz Duarte
in Derivas #05
Editors: Cat Martins and José Carlos de Paiva
Invited editors: Caroline Biscaino,
Cristianne Melo,
Ana Pereira,
Anna Carolina Cosentino,
Selda Soares
Published by: i2ADS – Instituto de Investigação em Arte, Design e Sociedade,
Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto
ISSN: 2183–3524
2022
publishing researching; writing
Material stabilization has been a strategy employed by heritage policies and practices as a way of caring for and engaging with the past, ensuring its transmission and perpetuation for future generations. This article reflects on the development, contradictions, and inherent issues of this preservationist imperative of material conservation, indicating reconsiderations within this conceptual framework.
With reference to the works Berlin Fassaden and Ethics of Dust by artists Asta Gröting and Jorge Otero-Pailos, the article explores two elements— void and dust — that are typically invisible (and marginalized) in preservation practices. It offers new approaches, inquiries, and counter-narratives to material culture. Gröting and Otero-Pailos' works, by questioning the material trajectories buildings accumulate, provide a perspective on historical artifacts that renders tangibility to the past in the present, complicating its temporality and reclaiming its "life" or "thingness" (Ingold, 2010). Additionally, through the technique of imprint or contact replication, these artistic practices express a critical commentary and generate a dialectical image (Didi-Huberman, 2008) in relation to conventional heritage operations and values. Dust and void can be more than negative processes, shedding new light on preservation and generating re-significations of historical narratives through their materiality, particularly related to post-war trauma and the Anthropocene.
link to download the article