Building Future Heritage

26 September, 2025, University Theater, University of Amsterdam.

Heritage is deeply entangled with violence, conflict, and the destructive transformations that are affecting our present such as the climate emergency. Yet, while heritage can be destroyed, transformed, re-interpreted or manipulated, it also serves as a powerful tool for cultural resistance and creativity, survival memory and societal healing. The ways we protect, interpret and produce heritage – across local, national and transnational contexts – can shape both historical justice and future peace by (re-)creating common grounds and solidarities. In the context of multiple, overlapping crises, the questions of heritage, conservation, and cultural memory take on a renewed urgency and require us to rethink our theoretical frameworks, concepts, and approaches. Four Dutch universities together – the University of Amsterdam, University of Groningen, Leiden University, and Utrecht University – propose to organize a one-day seminar on these themes. Starting from the recognition that heritage is never neutral but rather entangled with dynamics of power and identity-making, our focus is on the profound entanglement of the material and immaterial dimensions of heritage as well as that between past, present and future in processes of heritage-making. The seminar intends to serve as an incubator for inter-university co-operation and engagement on this important theme for societies in the past, present, and future.

Organized by Chiara de Cesari (UVA), Michiel van Groesen (UL), Lidewijde de Jong (RUG), and Susanne Knittel (UU).

Format
Plenary sessions with short presentations by four speakers (one from each participating university). The sessions are on Heritage, Violence and Conflict; Heritage, Reconstruction and Repair; and Heritage and Environment. The seminar also includes a session on on fundraising focusing on third party funding beyond the usual suspects, and examples of successful projects in heritage.

Programme

10:00 Walk in, register, tea/coffee

10:30 – 10:40 Introduction

10:45 – 12:00 Session 1

Heritage, Violence and Conflict

12:00 – 13:00 Lunch

13:00 – 14:15 Session 2

Heritage, Reconstruction and Repair

14:15 – 14:45 Break

14:45 – 16:00 Session 3

Heritage, Identity and Environments

16:00 – 17:00 Third party funding presentation and Q&A session by Julia

Noordegraaf

17:00 – 19:00 Networking/social program