From Venice to Riga: Authenticity and Globalisation

In an interview with Christina Cameron in 2011, Herb Stovel, one of the masterminds of the Nara Declaration of 1994, commented that “the authenticity discussion opened up the possibility for the world as a whole, the conservation field as a whole to say you must judge conservation decision-making in its cultural context (…) So beginning with that simple little word authenticity, the ripples in the water expanded to bring in this much larger idea”. And indeed, the debate on authenticity is deeply linked to the increasing globalisation of heritage discussions in the second half of the 20th century, particularly following the adoption by a growing number of countries around the world of the World Heritage Convention, drafted in 1972. It questions the balance between the need for universals and the respect for different cultures and thus, the possibility of a global consensus on conservation principles.
After a look back at the process of internationalisation of debates from the end of the 19th century onwards, this lecture will focus on the difficulties of making explicit a notion that was taken for granted in the European context, as illustrated by its use until the 1964 Venice Charter. Absent from the World Heritage Convention text but playing a key role in the Operational guidelines formulated for the first time in 1978, the notion of authenticity never ceased to cause dissents among the experts of various origins in charge of deciding whether a building or site deserved to be inscribed on the list. The drafting process of the Nara document, which was supposed to clarify the implementation of the “test of authenticity”, illustrates the difficulty of reaching a consensus on this notion, which is intrinsically linked to a differentiated appreciation of the values carried by an increasingly diverse heritage. The delay between the drafting of the document and its effective application within the Guidelines more than ten years later, even more so. Since then, the debate is by no means over, and the Riga Charter, adopted in 2000, is just one illustration of this. As Françoise Choay already pointed out in 1994, the concept of authenticity is far from being operative in the field of heritage. But on the other hand, it remains a formidable subject of discussion, crystallizing the complexity of the issues involved in safeguarding heritage.