Online Activities > Online Lectures - Tuuli Lähdesmäki and Alfredo González-Ruibal

We are happy to announce our next two online activities, organized by PhD students:

Constructing and governing cultural heritage and its “European dimension” in EU heritage policy, online lecture by Associate Professor, Tuuli Lähdesmäki (University of Jyväskylä, Finland) – March 12, 2021 10h CET. The lecture will be introduced by PhD Candidate Sabine Volk.

From ruins to rubble. On heritage and destruction, online lecture by Researcher, Alfredo González-Ruibal (Institute of Heritage Sciences, Spain) – March 12, 2021 11h CET. The lecture will be introduced by PhD Virginia de Diego.

Information on how to join:

ZOOM link: https://zoom.univ-paris1.fr/j/93520900856?pwd=dTdUTHJWbVNndUgxNFdOU2piYkpIdz09

Passcode: 351718

ID: 935 2090 0856

Constructing and governing cultural heritage and its “European dimension” in EU heritage policy

Postmillennial Europe has faced various political, economic, social and humanitarian challenges and crises that influence how Europeans deal with the past, present and future of Europe. These challenges and crises have also shaken the foundations of the EU and strengthened criticism of its legitimacy and integration processes. Simultaneously, the ideas of European cultural roots, memory, history and heritage have gained a new role in European politics and policies. The EU’s increased interest in the European past and shared cultural heritage can be perceived as the EU’s attempt to tackle some of these recent challenges and crises – including identity crises – in Europe. How does the EU utilize the idea of shared cultural heritage as a political tool? How is the “European dimension” of cultural heritage constructed and governed in the EU’s heritage policies and initiatives? The lecture discusses these topics by using the most recent EU heritage action, the European Heritage Label, as a case study.

De Gasperi Home Museum, Italy, c. Tuuli Lähdesmäki

Tuuli Lähdesmäki (PhD in Art History; DSocSc in Sociology) is an Associate Professor at the Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä (JYU), Finland. Lähdesmäki is currently leading the research project “EU Heritage Diplomacy and the Dynamics of Inter-Heritage Dialogue” (HERIDI), funded by the Academy of Finland, and works as the PI for JYU’s consortium partnership in the project “Dialogue and Argumentation for Cultural Literacy Learning in Schools” (DIALLS), funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme.

Sabine Volk is a doctoral candidate at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and a Marie Sklodowska- Curie Fellow in the EU-funded Horizon 2020 project “Delayed transformational fatigue in Central and Eastern Europe: Responding to the rise of illiberalism/populism” (FATIGUE). At the intersection of political science, memory studies, and social movement scholarship, her work draws from ethnographic methods to explore the political culture of the populist far right in post-socialist eastern Germany.

From ruins to rubble. On heritage and destruction

Destruction is inherent to the production of heritage and can even be considered an element of added value: patina, for instance, is a subtle form of biogeochemical destruction, whereas crumbling abbeys or castles can attract more visitors than standing ones. There is, however, a risk in romanticizing destruction. In this talk, I will be examining its different modalities – from mere alteration to utter devastation – and the political economies that produce them. I will reflect on what it means to live in an age characterized by systematic destruction of life and matter in a gigantic scale and what this implies in our temporal imagination and in how we value the past. I am particularly interested in the annihilation of memory in modern cities, which is often presented as compatible with the celebration of cultural heritage.

c. Jonk

Alfredo González-Ruibal is a researcher at the Institute of Heritage Sciences in Spain specializing in the archaeology of the contemporary past and African archaeology. For over two decades, he has been interested in the negative side of modernity and he has studied phenomena such as dictatorship, colonialism and conflict. He has conducted fieldwork in Spain, Ethiopia, Somaliland, Equatorial Guinea and Brazil and he is now working on a long-term approach to the state in the Horn of Africa and on the legacy of dictatorship in Spain. He is also interested in the ethics, politics and aesthetics of archaeology. Recent books include An Archaeology of the Contemporary Era (Routledge, 2019) and The Archaeology of the Spanish Civil War (Routledge, 2020).

Virginia de Diego (Madrid, 1983) is a Visual Artist, Curator and Doctor cum Laude in Fine Arts (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) with her thesis “The Ruin as a Replica. The Protocontemporary moment”. Nowadays she combines her work as a professor (Universidad de Comillas, Istituto Europeo di Design, Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto) with her artistic work and her curating practice at her gallery PRESENTE, based in the city of Porto (Portugal).

Announcement PDF – Online lectures – Tuuli Lähdesmäki and Alfredo González-Ruibal