Heritage out of Control: Introduction
Stirring the debates on what is worth preserving, what is dismissible and what needs to be dismantled, heritage has become a hotspot for political…
Read MoreHeritage out of Control
Focusing on absences, affective dissonances and silent consensuses, this thematic thread emerged out of four overlapping questions about heritage: Under what circumstances does waste become heritage, and heritage becomes waste? How does the intimate relationship between spirits and energies operate in relation to the abstract public that heritage presupposes? Can spirits, rituals, energies be imagined as heritage?
Heritage out of Control: Don’t trash my holocaust
It was an ordinary, unseasonably cool, summer day in a sleepy town just forty minutes outside of Berlin. Oranienburg once was home to Sachsenhausen…
Read More
Heritage out of Control: Today’s utopia tomorrow’s waste?
Exploring how beliefs and spiritual dimensions of inequality turn today’s realities of waste into future heritage and (invisible) monuments When I read about the…
Read More
Heritage out of Control: (B)Lasting Bombs
On January 30, 2021, more than 8000 inhabitants of Göttingen, Germany, had to evacuate their homes. Four suspected WWII bombs had been detected underground,…
Read More
Heritage out of Control: Human bones as inherited waste of Europe
Central and Eastern Europe – known as “Bloodlands”, the area where Nazi and Stalin’s atrocities met, leaving behind many sites marked by mass killings…
Read More
Heritage out of Control: Negative heritage and de-normalizing necropolitics
Upon entering the Orthodox Christian cemetery in Siret, a town on the Romanian-Ukrainian border, we were met with neatly kept marvel gravestones, occasionally adorned…
Read More
Heritage out of Control: Disturbing Heritage
Disturbing Heritage The past is present through its lasting material forms, in open and hidden ways, marked and unmarked. Whether cherished, taken for granted…
Read More
Heritage out of Control: Models of Inheriting Spiritual Love
“Muslims go to Mecca once, if they are not unnecessarily wealthy (laughing), but people of all kinds come to visit Mevlana [‘s musealized tomb]…
Read More
Heritage out of Control: When Heritage Turns to Rubble
In December 2017, Toungouma was stolen, the famed stone said to render justice in the Département of Dogondoutchi, Niger. When it was found a…
Read More
Heritage out of Control: Present Gods, Absent Nation
The sun had already set when the night-long live broadcast of a kohoḿbā kankāriya ritual in a Sri Lankan town begins. A larger-than-life image…
Read More
Heritage out of control: Is Libation a Prayer?
Religion as Heritage in Ghana In 2009, Ghana celebrated its 52nd birthday as an independent country with the usual pomp and circumstance. The parade…
Read More
Heritage out of Control: Jinns Matter
Contested mystical heritage in Pemba, Zanzibar On the island of Pemba, off the coast of Tanzania, jinns play a key role in shaping human…
Read More