A Living Heritage Approach to a Contested Document: Learning from the Venice Charter's Translations

The Venice Charter is, by any measure, a paradox. Sixty years after its adoption, it remains one of the most cited, debated and contested documents in heritage conservation – simultaneously a founding reference and a prime target of criticism. For the Association of Critical Heritage Studies and others working in its wake, it stands as the canonical expression of the Authorised Heritage Discourse: expert-driven, Eurocentric, and ill-equipped to accommodate the diversity of the world's heritage cultures. And yet, whether embraced or challenged, the Charter refuses to go away. Accepting this paradox – rather than resolving it – is precisely where this project begins.

This presentation reports on the results of a pilot project first introduced at the ICOMOS General Assembly in 2024. It takes this paradox seriously – not in order to rehabilitate the Charter, but to make it work differently. Where the Charter has been criticised for imposing a culturally uniform framework, the project reorients it towards an ambition closer to that of the 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions: not the assertion of a single authoritative doctrine, but the fostering of a dialogue between cultures on the principles, values and vocabulary of conservation. The Charter, in this light, becomes not a prescription but a prompt.

The pilot has focused on four versions: three of the Charter's four official languages – French, English and Spanish – plus Italian, given its close ties to the tradition from which the Charter emerged. Russian, the fourth official language, could not be currently included for political reasons. The analysis brings together specialists with first-hand knowledge of the conservation cultures of the countries involved, combining archival research, network mapping and AI-assisted tools to cross-link and compare information across linguistic and cultural contexts. It pursues two objectives: the first historical – tracing the globalisation and fault lines of heritage discourse over six decades through the Charter's international trajectory; the second operational – using the discrepancies, mistranslations, terminological gaps and divergent interpretations revealed by this comparison as the starting point for an intercultural dialogue on the founding principles of conservation. What gets lost in translation? What concepts resist equivalence? What is missing from the Charter's vocabulary when read outside a Western European framework?

In this sense, the project treats the Venice Charter itself as a living heritage object – not a closed authority to be obeyed or discarded, but a shared, contested, continuously reinterpreted artifact that communities of practice have been appropriating and transforming for sixty years. Applying a living heritage approach to a doctrinal text means accepting its contradictions and cultural limitations as productive rather than paralysing — and shifting attention from the document as it was written to the document as it has been lived: translated, misread, adapted, resisted and reinvented across cultures. Whether one regards the Charter as a foundation or a constraint, it remains, for now, the closest thing the conservation world has to a common language. This project asks what it would mean to listen to all the ways that language has been spoken.