Everyday Aesthetics in Place and Memory: an alternative economy of heritage abundance

The Centre for Environment, Heritage, and Policy, and the Centre for the Sciences of Place and Memory invite you to a joint seminar.

Aesthetic significance is a much-studied category of heritage value, usually defined in terms of the appreciation of the formal, visual qualities or beauty of exceptional and rare places and things. ‘Everyday heritage’ is a term frequently encountered in recent heritage literature, but it can have a wide range of meanings. These include the memory, material traces and places of ordinary, everyday life, but also the everyday lived experience of both official and unofficial types of heritage. More broadly, it’s used to signify a democratised, counter-hegemonic form of heritage, or even what some call ‘anti-heritage’, because it defies the established idea of heritage as valuable and rare.

While the democratising and identity-related aims of everyday heritage are well acknowledged, everyday aesthetics provides insights into how engagements with the embodied, emotional experience of everyday life and its memory, often employing techniques of estrangement or defamiliarization, do the ethical, political and economic work of creating everyday heritage. In its ordinary abundance, everyday heritage relies on an aesthetic transformation of the insignificant that challenges the neo-liberal paradigm of cultural heritage as a scarce commodity.

Please register to attend in person or online.

Tracy Ireland is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Heritage at the University of Canberra. She is an archaeologist and heritage practitioner whose research on heritage values has influenced practice and policy in Australia and internationally. She currently leads Australian Research Council funded projects Everyday Heritage and Nuclear Nation. See more about her publications and projects.