Interdisciplinary Handbook on Heritage Protection, Management and Communication
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Interdisciplinary Handbook on Heritage Protection, Management and Communication Index 1.PROTECTION OF CULTURAL HERITAGE ............................................ 2 A CASE STUDY – Best Practice on Heritage Communication ....................... 93 A CASE STUDY – The Dante’s House Museum ........................................ 116 A CASE STUDY – ITALIAN PROTECTION ................................................ 147 2. MANAGEMENT OF A HISTORIC SITE .............................................. 170 A CASE STUDY - COMMUNICATION ..................................................... 209 A CASE STUDY - MANAGEMENT ......................................................... 223 A CASE STUDY – Protection ............................................................. 240 3. MUSEUMS AND COMMUNICATION .................................................. 261 A CASE STUDY – Best Practice on Heritage Management .......................... 287 A CASE STUDY – Best Practice on Heritage Protection ............................. 311 A CASE STUDY – Best Practice on Heritage Protection ............................. 328 1 E D U G A M E PROTECTION OF CULTURAL HERITAGE EDUGAME HANDBOOK chapter by Politecnico di Milano Author: Nora Lombardini 2 1. Protection of Cultural Heritage Introduction Forward This chapter is introducing the Protection field in the practice of the conservation of cultural heritage and, specifically, architectural and territorial heritage. The chapter must guide the experts (freelances, public administrators, consultants, amateurs, volunteers and scholars) in conceiving the restoration approach in order to transfer cultural heritage to the future generation, that is the aim of each international declaration founding the protection actions. According to the new social and economic implications, it is necessary to approach the safeguarding of cultural heritage in a proper way, which means the intersection and the combination of the traditional tools and contents with new needs. The social changing and the economic transformation and the environmental revolution in the world and, particularly in Europe, are introducing a new way to conceive the restoration discipline, conceiving new approaches, with the involvement of new items (f.i. the economic matters) rooted in the precise consciousness of what is cultural heritage. The interest in Cultural Heritage is connected with the research and innovation domains with European added value. In order to hand over the new generation and the cultural heritage in the future it is necessary to recognize heritage in all its historical values whose signs must be surveyed and conserved. In the same time, it is important, also according the European directives, to recognise the common values brought by the sharing of the restoration and conservation approach in the European Countries. This reason is, also, very well connected with the necessity to create a common historical conservation labour market, introducing figure of preservionist, perhaps not interchangeable but able to build an intercultural dialogue of high quality and with useful practical spill-over on the labour market. For this reason it is important to define the protection approach that is closely related to the practice useful to recognise, maintain, restore, conserve and re-use the cultural heritage, The practice is developed in a political and dynamic environment where several stakeholders are involved. The cultural, social and economic asset of this environment can have a great influence on the procedural growth of the preservation and/or restoration action. 3 For this reason, it is important to have a solid knowledge of procedures and methodologies, of the reasons for the conservation of the heritage, of the purposes of this conservation and of the ways through which the reuse project can be implemented. This complex of knowledge constitutes the founding basis of the profession and this chapter intends, although not exhaustively, to introduce this. As Richard D. Wagner and de Teel Patterson Tiller state: “At the onset of the 21st century, it is important to ask if the policies and practices that sustained historic preservation in the last century will still be viable in the current century. The world is far different than it was just fifty years ago in our attitudes toward caring for the environment, shifting demographics within and between nations, acceptance of new technologies, economic growth and equality, and education. How the traditional policies and practices of historic preservation will be affected by those drivers of the future is important to understand before we can determine if they will still be valid in the future, or if they must be changed to meet the challenges presented”0F1 Photos 1 Creating Historic Preservation in the 21st Century, edited by R. D. Wagner, de TEEL Patterson Tiller, Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2018. 4 Protection Protection of cultural heritage is aimed at avoiding its loss when it is recognized expression of the identity of a Nation in order to transfer it to the future generation. Protection starts from the acknowledgment of cultural heritage and is activated through the implementation of good conservation and maintenance practices that use the formation of full awareness of their social value and of the impact they can have on the economy, both on a regional and national scale. The protection, despite having a specific purpose, which is to defend cultural heritage, can itself become a driving force of enhancement when the action does not take place only in specific and specialized social sectors, but undergoes a dissemination process as a value bearer. The moral value of the defence of what after the IIWW was defined cultural heritage, is sanctioned by Athens restoration charter. The international conference in 1931 invited to implement the principle of mutual collaboration as a program of "safeguarding the masterpieces where civilization has found its high expression and appearing threatened.” Restoration and conservation concretize the concept of protection of Cultural Heritage. The locution "Cultural Heritage" (CH), far more articulated than that of a monument, appeared for the first time in 1954 in the report of the Aja Convention. Its implies a protection interpretation that goes beyond representativeness national ideology, taking supra-national importance. Protection is an action put in place against risks that can injure CH. It is necessary to identify the risks and define them. The risks1F2 that can damage cultural heritage are natural and due by incorrect human behaviours. The natural risks are (in general), according to the European Parliament 20073:“Hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, landslides, volcanoes, wind effects, fires, environmental fatigue or similar long-term climate effects and other disasters sometimes cause irreversible damage to Cultural Heritage, or completely destroy entire areas of Cultural Heritage, both movable and immovable”4. The incorrect human behaviours able to damage CH are: the cause of pollution; unrespect of the value of cultural heritage, wrong use or re-use. Photos Risks as earthquake and flood in Italy. - Pictures from web - site 2 https://whc.unesco.org/en/disaster-risk-reduction/ 3 F. De Masi, D. Porrini, Cultural Heritage and natural disasters: the insurance choice of the Italian Cathedrals. J Cult Econ(2020);https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-020-09397-x; https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/etudes/join/2007/369029/IPOL-CULT_ET(2007)369029_EN.pdf. 4 Protecting the cultural heritage from natural disasters, Policy Department Structural and Cohesion Policies CULTURE AND EDUCATION, IP/B/CULT/IC/2006_163 23/02/2007, p. III. 5 WHAT IS CULTURAL HERITAGE? UNESCO has defined 'cultural heritage' in its: Draft Medium Term Plan 1990-1995 (UNESCO, 25 C/4, 1989, p.57) The cultural heritage may be defined as the entire corpus of material signs – either artistic or symbolic - handed on by the past to each culture and, therefore, to the whole of humankind. As a constituent part of the affirmation and enrichment of cultural identities, as a legacy belonging to all humankind, the cultural heritage gives each particular place its recognizable features and is the storehouse of human experience. The preservation and the presentation of the cultural heritage are therefore a corner-stone of any cultural policy. (quoted in Jokilehto, 2005) WHAT ARE MATERIAL SIGNS? Material signs are divided in anthropic signs and natural signs. Anthropic signs are: architectures, sculptures, paintings, gardens, agricultural landscapes, mining landscapes, drawings, books. Natural signs are: all the element of landscape, all the element of environment 5 “Signs 4F The “signs” can have a material and immaterial dimensions (in fact, it is possible to consider tangible and intangible heritage). Referring, briefly, to the semiotics, it is possible to define the “signs” as a “process of signs” in which it is imaginable to distinguish the “semaion” as the proper sign that is a physical entity; the “semainomenon”, or what is transmitted by the sign, and that is not a physical entity; the “pragma”, or what to which the sign referred. In case of architecture, building constructions, urban structures, “pragma” concerned the uses and the functions. The “pragma” can support also a commemorative meaning, developing the referent’s meanings: that is not only the function, but it is possible to consider also the historical acceptation, as a historic document. From the semiotics point of view, “pragma”,