Hybrid Heritage @ Practices of Heritage

How to re-signify heritage and physical monuments with the help of creative visions and hybrid (combined physical and digital) tools?

Hybrid Heritage engages with this challenge presenting a series of projects researching and designing contemporary interpretations and further development of heritage from a multicultural perspective.

Including the integration of digital technology and media networks in heritage projects, Hybrid Heritage also focuses on cultural hybridity in today’s globalized world.

Publication Hybrid Heritage @ Identity and Heritage, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Stuttgart, Germany, 1 Februari 2022

Hybrid
Heritage

Humboldt
Jungle

 

Humboldt
Volcano

Deep Space

 

Resignifying
Valle de los Caídos

With Humboldt Jungle and Humboldt Volcano we experienced that creative projects can open spaces of opportunity in controversial public debates, which are threatened by severe impasse, enabling us to re-envision cultural spaces. This approach can expand beyond contemporary participatory art production and curation by changing the way we collectively process cultural heritage. This prompts us to also focus on spaces where culture meets contested heritage and collective processing can move forward stagnating debates on controversial history. This allows for more inclusive participatory processes in memory-making by accounting for the polyphony of previously silenced stories and narratives.

In our current project on Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen, close to Madrid in Spain) we examine how traditional physical architectural monuments and heritage can be transformed with creative and digital tools. Valle de los Caídos is the world’s most controversial active monument, an example of the difficulties of the processes for transforming such controversial heritage. The Francoist memorial with its 152-meter high cross visible up to a distance of 30 kilometers and a 262-meter long crypt with a 42-meter high vault cut out of the granite mountain rock, encompasses an entire landscape.

The structure was built between 1940 and 1959 partly by the forced labor of Spanish republican political prisoners. And next to the remains of over 33.000 fallen from both sides of the conflict (that were moved there from mass graves spread all over the country), the basilica featured until October 2019 Franco’s grave in its most prominent spot – next to the grave of the Falangist leader Primo de Rivera. The Benedictine monks who maintain the monument and are hosted in a monastery onsite used to say a daily Mass on Franco’s grave, in his honour – until his exhumation from the underground Basilica in October 2019. Yet, at Valle de los Caídos there is no information about this complex contentious history, and it is still a tourist destination.In October 2018 (one year before Franco’s exhumation) we organized a workshop to re-signify Valle de los Caídos, involving Spanish and international curators, psychoanalysts, forensic archaeologists, ethnologists, artists, architects, designers, landscape architects, digital technology experts, and historians.One workshop group focused on the mapping of the monument in its surrounding landscape, developing proposals for paths and viewpoints, creating new perspectives, aiming at making people aware of the Valley’s painful history as they move through it.The second group stretched their design thinking into 50 years from now and envisioned a future for the monument including the possibility of it becoming a Research Center, a venue hosting an Art and Engagement Program, and a Global Centre for Peace and Interpretation.

A third group dealt with the idea of creating a ‘Digital Archive’ which would allow to gather, access and store bottom-up collaborative and interdisciplinary contributions on the monument’s morbid history. This would foster dialogue, counterbalancing the site’s totalitarian narrative with the networked polyphony of democratic voices, accompanying the decline of the monument – the pixels deconstructing and corroding the stone.

The Deep Space: Re-signifying Valle de los Caídos project was received very well in Spain as well as internationally. In particular, the implementation of digital tools for post-Franco memory-making attracted considerable attention as this could change the totalitarian nature of Valle de los Caídos, as described, for example, in the article published in the Spanish newspaper El País[1].

In addition to integrating creative speculative research methods into the processing of heritage and territories, the Deep Space program bolsters innovative ideas on (the future of) heritage sites and memory-making in the Digital Age. It investigates how digitally supported co-creative processes potentially eliminate boundaries to engagement and visualization, fostering radical re-signification of physical spatial heritage. Dynamic, digital, networked archives enable the integration of side-lined voices within polyphonic sites, unearthing previously unchartered territories. The Deep Space workshop kick-started this exploration, focusing on how future heritage sites could look, feel, sound like, and how their digitally enriched features could affect memory-making processes.

The next step is the development of an Augmented Reality (AR) application that would enable visitors to explore onsite the hidden layers of the memorial’s complex, controversial history whilst crossing it.

Allowing other views on it when moving through the terrain can help support the troublesome and long-term process of the site’s transformation. Next to providing information, the Augmented Reality application would, also have a potential to help reconciliating with unresolved historical wounds. Such an ‘augmenting’ of the physical monument with the help of virtual worlds, would make visible what Franco did not want visitors to see at Valle de los Caídos. In doing so, it would counter-balance the predominant narratives, paving the way from recognition to reconciliation.

DMZpace

Taking Hybrid Space Lab’s engagement with conflictive landscape and divisive sites of memory further, we are currently working on a project on the Korean DMZ, developing the DMZpace pavilion as a tool for unfolding the complex layers of the site.

Since the suspension of the Korean War in 1953, stretching for 250km from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea, the 4-kilometer wide Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea has served as a no-man’s land buffer territory. Almost untouched for more than 65 years, the military demarcation has inadvertently allowed undisturbed lush vegetation to cover it and the DMZ has unintentionally become a nature reserve housing endangered species of flora and fauna.

The DMZpace pavilion is designed as an instrument for researching and processing this multi-layered, complex and traumatic history of a specific site next to the DMZ. The pavilion is a triangular (infra)structure as an artificial topography that serves as a perception accelerator for the panoramic viewpoint of Soi-san. Now situated in the South Korea’s Civilian Controlled Area close to the DMZ, Soi-san hill was in ancient times a post to communicate messages through light signals. Later it overlooked Cheorwon, a city of 38.000 inhabitants in 1945, entirely destroyed during the Korean War. Due to its strategic location, Soi-san accommodates a now disused US Army viewpoint.

The DMZpace pavilion is also a gateway to appreciate the story of how the region inadvertently became the ideal habitat for cranes, symbols of peace. By documenting and communicating the ecological dimension of the site, the pavilion is an instrument conveying nature’s regenerative potential of barren, conflictive landscapes, inviting new, forward-looking processes of memory making.

When DMZ was established and Korea was divided in two, water was prevented from flowing across the DMZ, too. This led to the creation of an artificial lake to irrigate the paddies. As a result, over the years the region of Soi-san inadvertently became the ideal habitat for cranes, symbols of peace. With the flocks of cranes thriving and flying over the military demarcation, 20th century conflicts are put, through birds’ eyes, in a different perspective.

We are therefore organizing a transdisciplinary dialogue on the conversion potential of the DMZ and the European Green Belt that runs for more than 12,500 km along the former Iron Curtain which divided the continent for nearly 40 years after World War II, looking at the role nature and environmental conservation activity can play in transforming negative spaces such as military demarcations and borders.

Hybrid
Heritage

Harnessing the potential of trans-disciplinary expertise and drawing on creative methods and artistic endeavours, digital tools and persuasive media strategies, allow us to envision ever-expanding domains for cultural heritage and memory making.

In a globalized world, the polyphony of voices gaining and demanding recognition generates the necessity and the possibility to reconsider contested heritage. The collective reckoning with controversial history and the processes of re-signification and restitution deal with complex issues that must account for a multitude of claims. We therefore need a fresh, radically innovative outlook with a solutions-oriented approach to address the various forms of contested heritage – be they monuments, or object – in a way that is fit for the 21st century.

By situating artistic research as a fundamental factor in addressing contested heritage, the scope is expanding, reaching out to include innovative ideas on the future of museums. This entails envisioning open, mobile museums, participatory heritage platforms and discussion spaces supported by the combination of the digital and the physical. At once engaging with online and onsite reality, such dynamic networked archives enable the integration of side-lined voices within polyphonic heritage.

Relying on such hybrid strategies, and considering heritage as a hybrid, shared cultural asset, a design-based approach, integrating participants’ diverse inputs with artistic, speculative and investigative design research methods has the potential to process contested heritage anew. The program therefore opens paths for restitution processes, as the Hybrid Heritage approach contributes to a more practical, proactive attitude towards biased debates and conversations on restitution.

With the objective to bolster collaborative, co-creative re-signification and restitution processes which work on physical heritage with digital platforms, light formats and mobile and temporary creative interventions, Hybrid Heritage meaningfully addresses contested heritage, projecting design research into the future of heritage.

Voiced
Space

Focussing on rereading the cityscape, granting visibility and recognition to voices and histories previously silenced, the Voiced Space program focusses on fostering memory-making and -processing through the development of innovative, participatory methods that do not physically touch the spaces involved. Enriched and informed by the experience of how relevant digital tools are towards re-signification whilst dealing with large-scale heritage sites such as Valle de los Caídos, such tools allow to critically engage with the multi-layered urban landscape.

As we cross and live the city with our quotidian practices, it is often all too easy to overlook the palimpsest of contested past that surrounds us. It is therefore necessary to create tools to re-read the everyday in the city and on the urban scale with awareness and intention. In the context of post-colonial processes and discourse, attention to the cityscape’s blindness to silenced memories is increasing, especially in relation to how different people experience the urban environment. There is the need to reckon with the polyphonic nature of cities, with their composite outlook which calls for an inclusive heritage.

2020 saw a rise in destruction of and damages to monuments and statues as symbols of slavery, colonial past, racism and oppression, in the US and Europe, too. By surpassing the binary logic of destruction and acceptance as the only valid responses to a critical reading of the city and its heritage, the Voiced Space program devices inclusive community tools and creative methods to reckon with unresolved historical wounds and controversial past. By using creative methods that lead to a change in perspective as well as hybrid technologies and tools that ‘augment’ the urban landscape with unvoiced narratives, the city cracks open and can be re-read in its layered complex, controversial past.

Voiced Space aims at awakening the sensory apprehension of urban landscapes through the lenses of global, interconnected histories, reckoning with cityscape’s past and present and its unvoiced, stratified traces in our everyday spaces. This includes re-contextualizing and re-reading the cityscape, exploring alternative systems capable of including other memories and stories beyond the dominant ones.

The program envisions solutions that circumvent the physical problems of the site by expanding the physical spaces with the support of virtual worlds. This enables to re-read the city anew, using a variety of approaches, including temporary artistic, eye-opening installations and interventions as well as digital solutions that unfold the silenced stories and voices.

Deploying methods of investigative and speculative artistic research, Voiced Space includes narrative practices as inclusive artistic research methods. Bringing creativity into controversial situations informs engagement with conflictive urban landscapes and contributes to breaking through negotiation stasis and political reticence.

Reboot
Culture

Initially emerged as a response to the COVID-19 crisis as an attempt to find new ways of ‘staging’ cultural encounters under the stifling restrictions imposed by the pandemic’s related physical distancing regulations, the Reboot Culture program aims at redefining the essence of public cultural spaces and is committed to a polyphonic (future) heritage. Reboot Culture is designed to permeate the city fabric with processes of cultural co-creation and reception by activating public space through the multiple voices composing the polyphonic city.

Launched by Hybrid Space Lab in 2020, the international program enables and supports new forms of hybrid (combined physical and media) staging of public cultural events, with a special focus on smaller cultural institutions in urban peripheries. It also aims at developing a strong symbolic momentum with hybrid public staging and renditions marking the rebooting of cultural programs in the post-pandemic city. As both a design and interventionist project as well as a research program, Reboot Culture is starting in summer 2021 with small-scale public prototyping programs in the Netherlands in collaboration with cultural organisations in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague.

To support hybrid cultural formats and mobilise culture, the program weaves a sophisticated decentralised network of mobile media infrastructures with media-containers, media-busses, media-pontons and media-boats travelling via roads or waterways to cultural venues. It also envisions hybrid staging on an ambitious and evocative mega-scale, temporarily shaping public spaces by contemplating large, captivating hybrid cultural events alongside riversides and quays – whilst upkeeping the necessary measures of physical distancing. By addressing the mega, medium and nano scales, Reboot Culture develops a nuanced, context-sensitive approach to cultural co-production and hybrid reception, integrating onsite features with the help of a mobile media infrastructure and an online digital platform.

By following a strategy of permeating physical space and with a focus on small scale platforms in urban peripheries, the project aims to reformulate spatial cultural hierarchies. Moving from cultural centres to the peripheries and bringing these experiences from the peripheries back to cultural centres via a connecting digital platform as a space of representation, the project’s objective is to break through the “bubbles” and echo-chambers of highly personalised, tailormade digital existences and performances of identity.

Hybrid cultures, anchored to and embedded in physical spaces, are increasingly distributed, shaped and negotiated in trans-local media networks. As we reckon with hybrid cities merging digital spaces and networks that shape our relationships and the physical spaces for cohabitation and encounters, it is important to experiment with collective cultural experiences that combine public physical urban space and public digital space.

Recognising and upkeeping the value of public space, a strong emphasis is placed on the public nature of cultural practices and on the development of safe and public hybrid (combined media and physical) cultural spaces. Through focusing on the potential of hybrid formats to meaningfully activate culture in public space, the program embeds the rebooting of culture in the urban environment, drawing on the multiple voices and sounds of the polyphonic city. By activating public space through the multiple voices composing the polyphonic city, Reboot Culture cherishes the city as a Voiced Space.

With its commitment to hybrid staging for the polyphonic city, the project celebrates cultural hybridity as a core feature of our contemporary condition in today’s globalized world. Reboot Culture supports the further development of a co-created, multi-voiced, plural and heterogeneous hybrid culture – the further development of our Hybrid Heritage!

Notes

[1] Werner Bloch „Ist das die Rettung? Berlin diskutiert über eine große Idee: Den Humboldt-Dschungel” in DIE ZEIT, 18.02.2016, page 48.

[2] Stephanie Hildebrandt “Berliner, wollt Ihr ein Dornröschen-Schloss? Ein ernst gemeinter Vorschlag für die Fassadengestaltung des Humboldtforums sorgt für erregte Diskussionen” in Berliner Kurier, 20.02.2016, page 11.

[3] Peio H. Riaño in El País, 06.06.2019, see: https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2019/06/05/inenglish/1559749483_663193.html , 07.02.2021, 17:00 CET.

Deutsche
Forschungs-
gemeinschaft