Ecole de Chaillot organizes in 2017-2018 the 12^th cycle of Public Courses:

Raising the legacy after the ruptures of history
Yesterday's milestones and today's memorial debates

Not every ruin is a ruin of war.
John Ruskin noted around 1850 "There is nothing left of Notre Dame", and the defenders of the monuments were not numerous when Victor Hugo launched his thundering pamphlet "War on the Demolishers" against the vandal speculators.
The representation of ruins, the question of their interpretation, their transformation or their recovery, nevertheless crosses the political, monumental, artistic and cultural history of Europe since Antiquity.
But the elaboration of collective values and extended practices of patrimonialization is recent and follows the massive destruction in Europe at war in the twentieth century: the peoples had to resolve, in tense contexts, disasters as definitive as they were unprecedented.

And rebuild

Thanks to the reconstruction of ancient towns and monuments, restored or reconstituted since the Modern Era*, we have inherited a European memory that is a source of identity, diversity and unity. Thanks to the modernisation and industrialisation that followed the conflicts, the urban reconstructions of the 20th century added a new dimension to the common heritage.

Rebuild today?

International action for the safeguarding of very diverse heritage has broadened cultural representations and constructive knowledge over the past 50 years: new challenges have given rise to doctrinal debates concerning questions of memory and authenticity and the very notion of heritage.
The recent contribution of three-dimensional surveying and representation technologies has opened up ever more detailed perspectives on the nature and evolution of the monument. Digital technology opens the door to the preventive preservation of the memory of places and to the virtual reconstitution of all or part of the monument.
He moves our gaze on the monument by "increasing" it. 
Today, targeted heritage strikes, designed to erase the past of threatened peoples, remind the world of the impermanence of its symbols, the fragility of its memories and the uncertain horizon of universality.
They present communities and experts with new choices before the emergency.

The 2017-2018 cycle proposes to go through the reconstruction practices that have given a documentary or memorial role, then a collective and heritage meaning to monuments and cities destroyed by the fractures of history. He will compare the political dimensions of these increases against the scale and characteristics of the destruction of total war, or earthquakes, in the twentieth century (France-Germany-Italy). Finally, he will question their current relevance and the very future of the tangible heritage, at a time when the treasures of certain civilizations are being erased or commodified, and the culture of the intangible and the virtual is increasingly developing.

The historical period that goes from the discovery of the Americas (1492) to the Revolution (1789) is the sixteenth, seventeenth and seventeenth centuries.

Thursday evenings from 18h30 to 20h30
12 meetings from 2 November 2017 to 16 March 2018

Brochure

Bulletin d'inscription