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

These aforementioned themes are investigated by means of relevant projects by Hybrid Space Lab, a Think Tank and Design Lab for Architecture, Urbanism, Design and Digital Culture, focusing on cultural innovation. Based on artistic research and with a thoroughly transdisciplinary approach, the projects situate speculative thinking into the future of heritage. The Hybrid Heritage project cluster aims at proposing future possible affective landscapes for re-signifying heritage, crafting an agile, transferable and context sensitive approach.

Humboldt
Jungle

 

Humboldt
Volcano

The Humboldt Jungle and Humboldt Volcano projects for the Humboldt Forum in the city centre of Berlin are paradigmatic of how creative methods can contribute to the collective processing of contested heritage.

Behind the replica of a baroque palace façade, the Humboldt Forum is developing as a cultural centre of international renown with the Berlin ethnographic collections and a space dedicated to the “Global Dialogue of Cultures”. The German government is rebuilding the exterior of the demolished Kaisers’ imperial palace to house the venue. The Forum takes its name from the Humboldt brothers: the scientist Wilhelm von Humboldt, who founded the Berlin University; and the explorer Alexander von Humboldt.

The palace of the Prussian imperial family once stood where the Humboldt Forum is currently being built. The former was bombed during World War II and subsequently demolished by the DDR regime to build a “Palace of the Republic” (also demolished after the German reunification). Therefore, the Humboldt Forum stirs heated debates, as it involves issues of national symbols, the international role of the city and supranational cultural networks.

In 2015 the funds needed for the Humboldt Forum façade were still missing, so consultations for alternative proposals remained open. As an alternative to the palace’s baroque façade replica, we therefore proposed to wrap the building with a luscious vertical green: a Humboldt Jungle, referring to the jungle explorer and sustainability pioneer Alexander von Humboldt and giving a more extrovert, more contemporary and more environmentally friendly form to the Humboldt Forum building. As the Humboldt Forum’s stone façade is in the meantime being built, we developed in the same spirit as a further proposal the Humboldt Volcano, an extension of the Forum as a greenhouse-pavilion with a vertical tropical garden and a waterfall, enabling the appropriation of the Humboldt Forum and opening it up to the city – in referencing Alexander von Humboldt and his volcano explorations and botanical discoveries.

Our radical Humboldt Jungle proposal was enthusiastically embraced by the cultural world and the press as the “rescue of the Humboldt Forum[1]. Humboldt Volcano was also very well received and is currently discussed in Berlin politics. Even the popular tabloid press was very passionate in the projects’ promotion[2].

With their special quality of bridging the dichotomy between avant-garde artistic expression (otherwise exclusive by definition) and an inclusive approach to culture, the projects allow different depths of readings of their multi-layered complexity by different groups. They therefore stand for an approach that fuses low and high culture, vanguard and folk, mainstream and niche, as a Hybrid Culture and a future Hybrid Heritage.

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