Heritage for all (more inclusive) policies for the management of Cultural Assets

Abstract

This text intends to be a summary of the oral communication that I made at the invitation of the YOCOCU Portugal Association, in the context of the European Heritage Days, in September 2021. I understood such participation as the possibility of giving a personal testimony of what are some of my most pressing current issues questions regarding the Management of Cultural Assets, having brought to the debate several questions, since, in a time of constant change, models tend to be reassessed and even changed. Since 2019, the world has been threatened by events that have shaken our certainties and introduced profound changes in our daily lives. The Covid 19 pandemic has forced us to carry out the digital technological transition more quickly, which will certainly affect the various sectors of cultural heritage, from preservation to fruition. As I write this short text, a war is taking place in Europe that will change world geopolitics, and whose devastating consequences are still not fully guessed. The Russian-Ukrainian conflict of 2022 thus allows us, unfortunately, to witness the destruction of thousands of lives, the setting up of emergency plans for the protection of cultural assets, which demonstrates the resilience of a people, but equally, perhaps, to the biggest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II. Terrorism and war represent, nowadays, opportunities to annihilate the cultural identity of a community or people, through the destruction of cultural assets, which has been increasing since the 1990s, when some archaeologists warned of what would be the “ethno-archaeological destruction of built heritage” during the conflict in Bosnia (Renfrew & Bahn, 1991, p.511). The evolution of heritage studies, however, led us more recently to discover that cultural identity can also be a factor of social cohesion and the recovery of peace and conciliation between peoples (Viejo Rose, 2021, p. 11).