Heritage (De)tangled: Not Just What We Make, but How and Why We Make It

Abstract

For nearly 30 years now, interest in novel ways of interpreting, reinterpreting, using and discovering new meanings of heritage has been growing significantly, in both theory and practice. There is now a strong focus on the performative nature of heritage, i.e. on the practices involved in making it,1 and there are now, at last, more voices calling for heritage to be understood as something that is simultaneously tangible and intangible, the sum of all its parts. 2 Viewed through a process-based lenses, the most important element for investigation should be the practice of making and using heritage objects. The process by which objects are transformed into heritage is therefore one of the key aspects to be documented, interpreted, applied and re-applied by heritage institutions today. Crafts offer enormous potential for this kind of investigation, since craft objects were until recently the main – we could almost say, exclusive–focus of interes