Context 159 - May 2019

C O N T E X T 1 5 9 : M A Y 2 0 1 9 41 German Unesco Commission and the European Movement Germany as part of the European Cultural Heritage Summit in Berlin. In line with the overall year that workshop focused on how heritage in Europe can contribute to mutual understanding and strengthen the idea of a shared Europe. Hosted by the Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn had been carefully chosen to explore the notion of what it means to ‘share heritage’. At this conference some of these notions where critically examined.The validity to the limitation to Europe was discussed and the question of ‘Fortress Europe’ came up. Feeling European: is that still timely? Should heritage focus on the global instead? Or is it more important to strengthen the local and regional, where the lived experience for most people is? Is populism the result not just of demagogy, but also a legitimate limitation in an ever-expanding and un-navigable life? It is perhaps here that the UK can play a future role in facilitating dialogue between an ‘internal’ EU view and ‘external’ considerations of heritage. Notwithstanding other paradigm shifts of herit- age management which – particularly in the built environment – come from the devaluation of the object and the devaluation of expert knowledge and professional experience, a very pertinent question regarding nationalism and sharing her- itage came from the observation that heritage understanding in the former communist bloc is acutely based on the renationalisation process after the fall of the iron curtain. How relevant is transcultural heritage interpretation and sharing heritage for these young states who assert their sovereignty and cultural independence? In the case of Estonia, it also became apparent that the heritage is at least divided – if not shared – by four different ethnic origins: Swedish, German, Russian and Estonian. Ethnic Russians seem to be the least integrated community in the heritage debate, illustrating the very task which should come from a project like EYCH. Something that is always prevalent on the continent is that the regional is at least always border-crossing. That, however, largely excludes the UK, which is surrounded by the sea on all its borders other than the one between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Counter to this stands the conviction that history is always entangled, so heritage is always shared in one way or another. To discover that shared aspect can be a fascinating and enlightening experi- ence, possibly one of the most important tasks in today’s world, and not just Europe. One of the most-shared recent heritages in Europe is of course that of post-war rebuilding: something that unites all countries, irrespectively of the political side they ended up on. Predominantly the heritage of modernism, with its perceived character of placelessness, is currently also one of the least understood and least appreciated heritages. However, it has the potential ulti- mately to foster a sense of sharing. In Tallinn, Kerstin Stamm outlined her theory of a blind spot in the perception of European Heritage: that of the mere spatial scaling up or down – local, regional, national, continental, global and return – of heritages. According to her, what we need is not a persistent self- assurance of our shared (European) identity, but a constant reassessment and a fluidity which shares multiple identities in multiple places at the same time. An entire conference in Paris was also dedicated to this challenge. ‘The Cultural Heritage of Europe @ 2018: re-assessing a concept’ 9 examined what is understood as an ‘unquestioned core assumption of the validity of Europe’s territorial status with simply intercon- nected borderlines of its affiliated member states and of a given collective “we”-identity within the European Union’ 10 . In those contexts the following aspects require continuing investigations in conjunction with each other: the integrative power of heritage; the validity of the notion of European heritage; and the benefit or otherwise of this notion for Brexit Britain. The European Cultural Heritage Year 2018 has come to an end. At the closing conference in December 2018 in Vienna, the first-ever European Framework for Action on Cultural Heritage 11 was presented. The conference called for a mobilisation of all stakeholders 12 . Although the UK played a very marginal role during the year, this does not mean that it can not play a bigger role in the future. If heritage is interrogated as a force for good in any sort of rEUnaissance 13 , the UK must again become a leading actor on the continent of Europe, despite its future more distant relationship to the European Union if not, indeed, more so because of this. ⁹ https:// sharingheritage. de/wp-content/ uploads/2018/04/The- Cultural-Heritage-of- Europe@2018-Paris-4- 5-June-2018.pdf 1⁰ http://labex-ehne. fr/en/2017/10/11/ appel-a-contribution- patrimoine-culturel- de-leurope-2018- reexaminer-concept- redefinir-enjeux/ 11 https://europa.eu/ cultural-heritage/news/ european-framework- action-cultural- heritage-released_en 12 http://www. europanostra.org/eych- closing-conference- in-vienna-confirms- strong-mobilisation-of- all-stakeholders/ 13 https://www.eesc . europa.eu/en/agenda/ our-events/events/civil- society-reunaissance Sabine Coady Schäbitz, associate professor in architecture at Coventry University, trained as an architect at the Bauhaus- University in Weimar and studied architectural conservation at ICCROM. Sharing Heritage was hosted by the Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn.