Plusieurs membres de l’équipe ANR ont participé à la conférence de l’Association of Critical Heritage Studies du 3 au 8 juin 2016 à Montréal.
- Anna Madoeuf : “Marrakech, son patrimoine, ses riads : un récit d’aujourd’hui”
Cette contribution se propose d’analyser la place des riads de Marrakech dans la fabrique et la narration d’une expérience touristico-patrimoniale, les riads de référence étant ceux médiatisés comme hébergements en « demeures traditionnelles » par les voyagistes. Il s’agira d’explorer les mises en scène de ces lieux, représentatifs d’un exotisme touristique, et de souligner leur inscription dans un paysage patrimonialisé. La pratique des riads, suggérée comme expérience singulière à référent spatial permet, depuis une perspective homothétique, de combiner quatre niveaux constitutifs d’une situation de découverte touristico-patrimoniale : pays singulier, ville historique, (doublement labellisée par l’UNESCO), quartier authentique (Médina), et demeure traditionnelle. Ensuite, des précisions concernant l’angle à partir duquel je souhaiterais aborder la question : schématiquement, c’est dans les années 1960 que des étrangers commencent à acheter des résidences dans la médina de Marrakech et à les restaurer, le phénomène s’accentue à partir de la fin des années 1990 où ces maisons sont alors réhabilitées dans une perspective hôtelière.
En ce qui me concerne, je travaille actuellement sur la mise en scène, en mots et en pratiques de ces établissements, dans le contexte contemporain de la narration de l’expérience touristico-patrimoniale associée. Aujourd’hui, Marrakech offre une double promesse, celle d’authenticités complémentaires ; la cité est en effet classée à deux titres par l’UNESCO : sa médina figure à l’inventaire du patrimoine mondial depuis 1985 et, de surcroit, l’espace culturel de la place Jemaa el-Fna est inscrit depuis 2008 sur la liste représentative du patrimoine culturel immatériel de l’humanité. Les superpositions des distinctions de Marrakech, tant dans le matériel estampillé que l’immatériel labellisé, valident doublement un paysage « patri-mondialisé », stablement arrimé et conformément animé, cadre qualifié, scènes de référence et lieux adéquats : cette conjonction systémique est une des pistes de ma recherche. Le matériau principal utilisé ici comme source de référence est celui fourni par une sélection de guides de voyage, magazines spécialisés, catalogues, brochures ainsi que de sites de voyagistes, de réservations hôtelières, de recommandations et de conseils à destination de voyageurs, et de sites dédiés de riads.
- Romeo Carabelli : “Casablanca: The Pragmatic Narration of a Modern Heritage”
The large Moroccan town of Casablanca has been the object of an on-going heritagization process for several years, but in 2014 it experienced an essential transformation. Casablanca’s downtown is composed of a huge amount of interesting buildings built up during the French protectorate (1912–1956) on Henri Prost’s designed urban scheme. Casamémoire is an independent association composed by a local elite and some Europeans living in town; it is leading the process of preservation and valorization of the Casablanca’s recent architecture.
In the second half of the 2010s, the association included a new target in its own strategy: the UNESCO label under the World Heritage List, an international passage to come back on site with an effective instrument. The proposal of a UNESCO-labelled site was accepted by all the local stakeholders but the first initiative to include it on the tentative list was stopped by the Ministry of Culture. A second initiative in 2013 permitted the admission to the list and now Casamémoire is managing the dossier after an official agreement with the Ministry.
Casablanca’s process of heritage valorization is led by an enlightened elite that is proposing a liberal progressive understanding of local and social development. On a long-term prediction, we can read this heritagization as a part of the potential conflict between liberal and neoliberal visions of the town development. The complex relationship between heritage and power is proposed in the economical capital of Morocco as a strategic issue for “high-level-grassroots” (Casamémoire is undoubtedly a part of civil society but not really a popular composed grassroots force). Casamémoire is able to open a dialogue at the global level to manage the local heritage conservation wills. It was able to reach the UNESCO widespread and mythic level in order to deal with its impact upon the local heritage governance.
- Linda Boukhris, Gael Chareyron, Francesca Cominelli, Maria Gravari-Barbas, Sébastien Jacquot, Elodie Salin : “Tango : production and circulations of heritage meanings”
The Argentinian and Uruguayan tradition of the Tango was inscribed in 2009 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, with a spatial reference to the Rio de la Plata basin, and more specifically Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Nevertheless, the scales of meaning and production of tango are regional, national and global. Indeed, as a tradition, the tango is defined as the result of the merging of various populations in the region at the beginning of the twentieth century: migrants, local inhabitants, and slaves. Since the 1990s, the tango in Argentina has become institutionalized as a national heritage, embodying the quintessence of Argentine identity, and is closely associated to the city of Buenos Aires, and especially to some urban spaces (La Boca, el Abasto, thematized as Gardel’s neighbourhoods) and types of places (the milongas, regarded as traditional places to dance tango). This dynamic also gave birth to new institutions such as the National Academy of Tango and its museum. So the tango as intangible heritage is spatialized.
However, this recognition of tango as heritage can also be analyzed through the lens of globalized transnational practices, from the end of the twentieth century. The meanings of tango are discussed within the heritage arena; UNESCO being both a protagonist of the heritagization processes and a mediator solicited by the other stakeholders. The debate on the definition of tango as heritage, the modalities of its preservation and revitalization occur at different scales and focus on different dimensions and scales of the practice. Which tango has to be recognized as an immaterial heritage? The tango performance of the argentinian and uruguayan cabarets (“tanguerias”), or the “tango milonga” where the public and the performers are one? What are the border and the territory of the tango community?
Tango clubs are created all around the world, Argentinian musicians are performing in multiple festivals in Europe, many practitioners are traveling to Buenos Aires as tourists to perform tango, leading to a delocalization of the production of tango significance. Thus, which is the meaning of the territorial delimitation of the UNESCO inscription? The objective of this paper is to analyze the different scales of production of discourses and practices of tango. Based on a multi-sited research project in Paris and Buenos Aires analyzing the circulations of expertise and practitioners, the main idea will be to discuss and question the traditional association of heritage, territory and identity, and on the contrary to analyze the effects of these circulations on local identification and significance of the tango as intangible heritage.
- Géraldine Djament, Maria Gravari-Barbas, Sébastien Jacquot : ” Alter-Heritagization / Alter-Metropolization ? Objects, Players and Forms of Alternative Heritage Production in Contemporary Metropolises”
The contemporary movement of heritagization, characterized by a multiple expansion (typological, chronological, spatial) of heritage and of heritage producers (local actors, inhabitants, social groups, national states, international players), nourishes also the production of alternative heritage. By this expression, we wish to focus on non-institutional, dissonant, under-recognized heritage, located on the “pioneer front” of contemporary heritage production. Alter-heritage represents, therefore, an alternative to the heritage institutional “production chain,” controlled by the national state (Heinich 2009), by metropolitan leaders or corporate private groups. It also represents an alternative to the hyper-spectacular heritage sites encompassing the capital resources, the global attention and the international tourist flows (Gravari-Barbas 2012; 2014). These questions become important in a context in wich heritagization is quasi-systematically associated with gentrification (Semmoud 2005) and used by the late aesthetic capitalism (Lipovetsky and Serroy 2013). Are other, “alternative” ways for heritage and heritagization possible?
Alter-heritage can represent different types of alternatives:
• A geographical alternative: by its location in the suburbs, away from the historic centres and the central tourist districts (Duhamel and Knafou 2007).
• A typological alternative: by the nature of “heritagizised” objects which may hold a controversial value, such as the heritage of the housing projects of the post-Second World War years (Pouvreau 2011; Veschambre 2010; 2014).
• A social alternative: by their reference to imagined communities and to minorities, as in the case of the heritage of immigration (Rautenberg 2007), or by the role played by non-favoured social groups in its construction.
• A tourist alternative: by their marginal location compared to the dominant fluxes and practices.
• A political alternative: by their own intention of being alternative; for example militant heritages (Aguilar 1982) or cultural activism (Prévot and Douay 2012), or protest practices of heritage (Bondaz, Isnard and Leblon 2012).
Alter-heritages can belong to one or more categories. They can be altogether geographic, social, typology and tourist alternatives (Jacquot, Fagnoni and Gravari-Barbas 2012). For example, heritage located at the suburbs of contemporary metropolitan regions may become, through the action of popular social categories or political groups, an activism locus, aimed at reversing the dominant stigma of the suburb.
The choice of examining the metropolitan regions comes from the trend toward metropolization of culture and heritage (Djament-Tran and San Marco 2014), and from the concentration of initiatives of alter-heritagization in metropolitan areas as well as from the growing role that metropolises play in the construction of a political alternative (Harvey 2012).
This proposed session on “alter-heritagization in the contemporary metropolitan regions” aims at:
• Identifying alternative heritages, their categorizations and their promoters (social, ethnic, cultural groups; inhabitants…).
• Analyzing the alternative terms of heritage (What does make the heritage alternative? Does the alter-heritagization imply a change in the notion of heritage itself?).
• Analyzing the eventual relationships between alter-heritage and institutional heritage (alter-heritage can break with the institutional heritage or on the contrary, it can become an institutional one).
• Analyzing the relationships between alter-heritage and tourism (does alter-heritage imply an alter-tourism?).
• Identifying heritage conflicts in which they are involved, the issues of power at stake and their relationships with metropolitan conflicts in general.
• Analyzing the contribution of alter-heritage to the construction of a metropolitan alternative (Beal and Rousseau 2014): Is alter-heritagization a tool allowing an alter-metropolization (in what meaning?)? What does alter-heritagization change in the metropolization process?
Plus d’info : https://achs2016.uqam.ca/en/
