Cultural Heritage as Symbolic Capital: Transnational Archival Research

Study Day in Udine

Tuesday, December 11th 2018, 9:30 am – 5:30 pm

Udine, Palazzo Toppo-Wassermann (via Gemona 92, aula T4)

The research project TransCultAA aims at investigating the transfer of cultural assets in the Alpe Adria area in the 20th century. It involves a multinational team of scholars, who analyse the “uses of the past”, in particular historical and current conflicts of ownership, patrimony, and cultural heritage in a hitherto unexplored transnational perspective.
TransCultAA examines the effects of different patterns of translocation of the cultural heritage in a specific area, but its results have a wider significance for the history of a Continent, which features many similar processes.
More specifically, our starting question is who transferred or translocated which objects in the Alpe Adria region, when and why? These questions give way to more complicated issues. Which explanations (if any) were given? Which can be given today? How does archival documentation contribute to the understanding of periods and events still largely to be described?
In the past, these issues have all been heavily charged with propaganda for political purposes. Based on transnational research, the study of first-hand archival papers will lead to new perspectives which are going to overturn unilateral and tendentious interpretations.
During the workshop, the research group will present a selection of archival sources which will be included in a source edition. This latter is designed as a research tool for and at the same time as an outcome of the project TransCultAA. The documents will illustrate the multiple meanings of events that in the twentieth century concerned the circulation of works of art, the role of institutions, above all museums, and the art market in the four countries involved.

Download the full programme here (PDF)

TransCultAA is a HERA Project