(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

The work of memory has been the object of inquiry by scholars who seek to understand how we process our experience and how we perceive its role in the configuration of individual and collective identities. Concepts of collective memory (Halbwachs, 1925), memory theatres (Banu, 1987), memory-habit (Connerton, 1989), places of memory (Nora, 1984-1994), incorporated memory (Taylor, 2003), post-memory (Hirsh, 2008), memory linked to places (Taylor, 2011,) and memory reenactment (Agnew et al., 2019) have helped to describe complex relations between past and present. This paper aims to investigate reenactment processes that confront history, heritage, and art with a “repertoire in intermedial mode” (Bénichou, 2020). Assuming that memory is a continuous performative act (Schneider, 2011), we examine the role of memory in the current digital context by discussing (i) the process of re-creation/re-contextualization and its relationship with the memory work, (ii) memory as a digital resignification and appropriation (codes, mediums, texts, images, and narratives) through artistic-research, (iii) the politics of memory in current societies, and (iv) new intermedia forms of representation of (in)tangible heritage as a resource for social and artistic research. This paper also relates these possibilities of re-signification to the concept of digital reenactment through a dual path of reflection and artistic re-creation that resulted from a previous project developed under an art-based research regime (Dinis, 2021), dedicated to processes of reenactment and recreation developed in ten cultural and heritage territories from North to South of Portugal. In one of the digital reenactment practices, a process of de-/reterritorialization (Haesbaert, 2004) was developed, linking post-memory with the representation of the memory, in a multimedia work entitled “[re]activation” (2017), about the relocation of an entire village (Aldeia da Luz, in Portugal), due to the construction of the Alqueva dam.