Cities, Heritages, and Colonial Pasts

14 March 2019, Florence (Italy)

Decolonializing heritage has been a notable recent trend among cultural practitioners, researchers, and policy makers. It has also become increasingly visible in public discussions, from contested confederate monuments in Charlottesville in the US to France’s recent report on the repatriation of African heritage from French museums. Finding ways to create pluralistic and meaningful public debates and heritage representations around these issues requires greater collaboration from a broad range of scholars and practitioners. This workshop therefore concentrates on the discussion of historical and recent cases of representing colonial pasts in different cities across the globe. A variety of case-studies provide the basis for transdisciplinary reflection on what it means to decolonize this heritage, and what are the challenges and solutions related to this process.

Invited speakers will discuss a range of decolonial and other reflective practices ranging from artistic interventions, curatorial compromises, temporary exhibitions, the remaking of city museums, as well as the broader transnational policy frameworks through which colonial heritage is remade. Particular attention will be paid to the ways of representing diverse colonial pasts in urban settings and attempts to make them relevant to local publics.

The workshop will bring together practitioners based in Italy with researchers from both the EUI’s Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and the Public History Working Group of the History and Civilization Department, and the ECHOES H2020 Project on European Colonial Modalities in Entangled Cities.

Please see here for full event programme and visit this page to register.