Curating Heritage. On the Future of the Past in the Every-day Landscape of the Metropolis of Madrid
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22530/ayc.2025.27.765Keywords:
Madrid, landscape, heritage, curatorship, critical studies, criticism, aesthetics, metropolisAbstract
The influx of landscapes into heritage studies has expanded the boundaries of both fields. Thus, the notion of heritage has been enlarged to include that which belongs to the networks of affection that communities form with the places they inhabit; that is, that which people value as it allow them to recognize themselves in their living environment. This paper offers a theoretical discussion on the identification and protection of values in the everyday landscapes of the metropolis of Madrid. To do so, it examines three recent exhibitions promoted by the CentroCentro cultural space: Madrid acuosa (2021), dedicated to water management in the city; La ciudad del Futuro: de la huerta a la mesa (2021-2022), about the agri-food gap between the city and the countryside; and Entre río y raíles (2022-2023), on the transformations since the nineteenth century of the railway corridor in the former river terraces of the Manzanares river. Although the exhibitions have been presented to the public as narratives on several current socio-environmental issues, both a detailed study of their contents and an analysis of their interpretive schemes allow us to identify consistent discourses of patrimonialisation. The study discusses the idea of curatorship as a critical practice of thinking about heritage from the past, in the present, for the future. This practice is based on collecting, selecting and attributing value to objects, places and practices from a transitory assemblage. In this way, curating is reformulated as a specific mode of reflexive knowledge production that infiltrates aesthetics in its method. At the same time, curatorship can leave the exhibition halls to explore the spatial dimension of heritage and contribute to imagining future landscapes for the metropolis.
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