Opening general session - The CoToCoCo project : a Conceptual Toolkit for Contemporary Conservation

Since the mid-twentieth century, theoretical and practical approaches to heritage have caught the interest of a growing number of academic and professionals. Facing the expanding scope of what an always larger diversity of stakeholders consider necessary to hand in to the future, guidelines, sets of principles, charters and recommendations have multiplied in order to address each and every challenge posed by this ever-expanding corpus and its very diverse public. At the same time, the globalisation of heritage debates starting, in the field of architecture, which the Athens Conference in 1931 and booming with the World Heritage Convention, has questioned the most deeply rooted cultural traditions on which conservation and restoration principles had been built and developed. Despite some attempts to organise this prolific production and these fundamental questionings into a coherent theory (Munos-Vinas, 2003), experience shows that in front of practical problems, practitioners tend to come back to some fundamentals – the Venice Charter in architecture, Cesare Brandi’s theory in art, for example – despite the anachronism of using them to answer questions which couldn’t be foreseen at the time when they were thought. In parallel, a tendency to decontextualise practices, extracted from their traditional background, regularly helps to argue in favour of projects aiming at sustaining the capitalistic machine or questionable political interests rather that the safeguard and transmission of heritage (using the periodic rebuilding of Shinto temples to justify the rebuilding of any monument in the world is the clearest example). In this context, blurred interpretations of the concepts of identity and authenticity are in many cases responsible for a confusion in the debates and lead to unsatisfactory compromises mostly in disfavour the safeguard of heritage. At the same time, the expansion and diversification of cultural goods contributes in a positive way to a renewal of conservation and restoration approaches. Our ambition is to conjointly revitalize reflections on movable and immovable cultural goods, proposing methodological tools and ressources for a interdisciplinary dialogue in a broad sense. The CoToCoCo project (Conceptual Tools for Contemporary Conservation) is based on borrowings from varied disciplines – sociology, anthropology, mathematics, philosophy, semiology – in order to draw alternative perspectives and submit them for practitioner’s consideration. For this conference, we will provide an example of our methodology and its practical application, starting from a text by the French sociologist Nathalie Heinich on “heritage emotions”. We will submit it to the reflection of two heritage professionals – a conservator of cultural goods, working with communities in Central America and an Irish architect, in order to demonstrate that in order to think “out of the box”, it is sometimes necessary to rejuvenate theory and to try it out just like any other practical tool.