Spectacles of Cultural Heritage Destruction in Global Media
May 4 @ 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Virtual Event
AIA Society: Minneapolis/St. Paul
Lecturer: Ömür Harmansah
The new visual politics of our contemporary moment includes spectacles of cultural heritage destruction on global media. Since the early 2000s, we have seen that audio-visual media is mobilized or activated with the powerful tool of imagery of heritage violence to harm local communities and push forward military agendas on the ground. Iconic images of the performative destruction of monuments have marked a very important shift in the 2000s and coincided with the debates on climate change and the ecological crisis. This new form of heritage violence, referred as “performative iconoclasm” was carried out with a lot of media coverage which was made available to global news outlets and serviced to social media platforms. A highly memorable and harmful example of this was the dynamiting of the colossal rock-cut Bamiyan Buddha statues in the Bamiyan valley in Afghanistan by the Taliban, which I see as a turning point in the history of critical heritage studies, presenting a radical challenge to heritage professionals that they had never encountered at this scale before, and didn’t know how to respond. What connects several of these choreographed performances of heritage violence? First and foremost, they were presented as historical reenactments of past iconoclastic events. Secondly, the destructions preceded by some kind of edict or proclamation that historically situated the act and justified it. Third, the choreographed or performative destruction was carefully documented by the media apparatuses and serviced to global media channels. This model was taken up by the Islamic State (ISIS) in 2014-2015. Destruction of urban and rural monuments in Iraq and Syria occupied most of the public attention on cultural heritage for a few years. For instance the demolition of monuments at the archaeological site of Palmyra during the Islamic State’s occupation of the site, the highly choreographed performance at the archaeological site of Nimrud, targeting the wall reliefs at the Northwest Palace of Assurnasirpal II of the 9th century BCE, and the release of profoundly eerie and powerful images to the global media, have been then etched into our memories. Why are we living through this kind of violent turn in cultural heritage? Who are these actors, and what are their intentions for such spectacles of violence? This lecture explores this new challenge in cultural heritage studies through a critical analysis of the politics of visuality in global media.
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