Heritage and innovation

Today we had a round table to discuss the issue of identity and cultural heritage with a group of young people coming from different backgrounds. «Does modifying our heritage or updating it threaten our identity and risks to destroy it ?» That was the question. What inspired us to organise this meeting was that we recieved a feedback saying that if we want to promote our heritage, organising wrokshops may not be the right choice.

We started with a definition of heritage, and one participant said that it’s «something we inherit from our parents and transmit as it is to our children» which makes it sacred and untouchable. According to her «You don’t have the right to modify it as it’s a proof of our history. Otherwise, we will lose what makes a building’s architecture Tunisian, a dish’s flavor Tunisian, a musical rythm Tunisian etc. and makes it something you can find everywhere in the world. She finds that we are living in an era where things develop quickly every single day, and if we apply that to our heritage as well, we won’t get to witness anything Tunisian reflecting our identity in just a matter of a few years.
As a response for that, another person stated that he cannot imagine himself transmiting to his children something that dosen’t have his own touch and that in fact, cultural heritage is the accumulation of our ancesters’ different footprints and that now we should add ours. The majority said that we do have to make heritage continue its natural evolution otherwise it will disappear by suffocating. But we need to introduce the adequate doses of «modernity» so that we keep the local identity. And to make that clearer, the participants started giving examples for innovation in cultural heritage. It appeared that almost all of them show that innovation in heritage means taking a work that’s already existing and updating it or adding some personal touches: turning an old house into a hotel, adding electronic music to a traditionnal song, changing some difficut words in a poem with easier ones to make it more understandable. Also, according the some, not everyone has the right to do it. In order to do such things, you have to be an expert in the history or the heritage of the country. Otherwise, modernity and external cultures can flood you and make you get an overdose of updating that erases the true identity.

From all of these statements and other reflections I made in other occasions, I could make my personal point of view toward this issue. Actually, when it comes to the definition of cultural heritage, if we make a small basic research about the history of any historical monument in our country (or in any other country in the world I believe ), we’ll find out that its current architecture is the result of years and decades of evolution and constant modification, whether it is Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, European etc. So who has the right to say that we should stop evolving, that our cultural heritage must remain the same and that our only duty towards it is to just protect it from any other new modification? I believe cultural heritage is exactly like a flower: if you keep it in a room hoping to protect it from external danger, it will eventually faint and die. Our culture depends on the surrounding cultures. It gets richer and wealthier by interfering with them. If we applied what some people thought of artists five centuries ago, our heritage wouldn’t be as it is now. Our current identity includes the modern items and the exchange with other cultures and that’s something most people deny. They consider it as just a manifestation of invasion and intellectual colonisation.

And when it comes to innovation, why does it always have to

be based on something already existing? Why does innovation mean only restauring  a building or rearranging a music piece? Why is the starting point for such a thing another artist‘s work claiming to revive it and make people hear of it again? I agree that it’s interesting and good to show what we have, but at the same time, doesn’t it create limits for creativity? Doesn’t it oblige the artist to always follow what has already been created and just add small modifications? Why can’t the artist’s identity be the starting point?

And this gets me to the last point I noticed: Identity and heritage are not only the arts we see, they are also the stories we hear, the locals’ way of life that, the communication manners  in the community. Even the place and the way we gathered today reflect some Tunisian criteria. I just came back from an exchange program and everyone noticed that we Tunisians have an extreme desire for having fun and partying, unlike participants coming from other countries. Well, for me that’s another aspect of our identity that we don’t really appreciate, or rather neglect. So why can’t all of this be a good material for new artistic work that reflects artistic innovation? And maybe the biggest question that I still didn’t find an adequate answer for - for those who said that innovation in cultural heritage needs to be done while repecting some doses of modifications - is : How can we know if we reached these doses?

By Houssem Abida

Edited by Nesrine Chemkhi

Photos :Amenallah Latrous