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Between Sacredness and Bulldozers: The Struggle over Sulaiman-Too’s Cemeteries

Aksana Ismailbekova writes about the competing claims on Sulaiman-Too, the only UNESCO World Heritage Site in Kyrgyzstan, and how memory and development clash in this context.

Sulaiman-Too in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, intertwines sacred space, religion, memory, and kinship. Cemeteries honor ancestors, transmit knowledge, and sustain community, yet state-led urban development threatens graves, exposing tensions between heritage, religious devotion, and modernization.

Sulaiman-Too in Osch, Kirgistan, verbindet heilige Erde, Religion, Erinnerung und Familien miteinander. Die Friedhöfe dort dienen der Ehrung der Vorfahren, sie vermitteln Wissen und stärken die Gemeinschaft, doch die staatlich gelenkte Stadtentwicklung bedroht die Gräber und offenbart Spannungen zwischen Kulturerbe, religiöser Hingabe und Modernisierung.


Sulaiman-Too (“Solomon’s Mountain”), a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Osh, Kyrgyzstan. For centuries it has been a pilgrimage site and sacred burial ground. Photo: Aksana Ismailbekova.

In Central Asia, as in many parts of the world, to disturb the dead is to disturb the moral order. Graves are not mere plots of land; they are nodes in a network of sacred relations. When the state burns or bulldozes cemeteries, it risks burning bridges of trust with its citizens. This intertwining of sacred space, memory, and community is not limited to cemeteries alone. It extends to other sites of devotion and pilgrimage, such as Sulaiman-Too, the sacred mountain which is located at the heart of Osh in southern Kyrgyzstan. The mountain is not only a geological landmark in the Fergana Valley, but also a spiritual place that has attracted pilgrims, saints, migrants, and ordinary believers for centuries. Sulaiman-Too was a site of ritual devotion. This mountain also has a reputation of being a holy place, hosting shrines, mosques, and sacred caves[1].

But Sulaiman-Too is also a place for the deceased relatives of many Osh residents. Since Soviet times, the mountain’s slopes are occupied by numerous cemeteries — the resting places of Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Tatars, and others who used to live in Osh and called this their home. Among the graves lie prominent Soviet-era singers, scholars, community leaders, and ordinary local people. The families of these people would get together during Ramadan to clean the graves, pray, and honour the memory of their ancestors. This commemoration is also an important family and religious ritual where all the family members within several generations would learn the importance of the remembrance of their deceased relatives, passing on oral knowledge about the names and lives of their ancestors that might otherwise be forgotten[2]. This is a key part of local kinship systems, linking past, present and future through social gatherings during Ramadan.

Yet, in recent years this sacred geography has collided with the ambitions of the current state. The recent cemeteries have been burned, graves dismantled, and bones exhumed in the name of urban development, road extension, and “green zones.” As the mayor of the city said ‘let us remove all the cemeteries in order to create a green zone to earn money from tourists’[3].

A Cemetery in Conflict

Local residents recall that during the Soviet Union, the state decided to use Sulaiman-Too for burials — partly due to a shortage of land, partly to free up fertile fields for cotton production. Between the 1960s and 1978, the southern cemetery was active; burials in the northern cemetery continued until as late as 2013. In total, more than a thousand people were laid to rest on the slopes.

By law, graves should not be reused or repurposed until at least 25–30 years have passed. Yet, according to residents, the state began pressuring families to relocate remains barely 13 years after the last burials. Bulldozers appeared. The mayor’s office spoke of re-cultivation, greening, and urban development[4].

Every year some tragic episodes occur where parts of the cemeteries are burnt in what are apparently wildfires. Official explanations point to climatic conditions and accidental fires. Some local residents, however, pin blame on a lack of water due to the state not maintaining irrigation systems, and others see it as an intentional attempt to clear space for new projects.

For many families in Osh, this was not only an outrage but a deep spiritual violation. As one elderly resident told me, “99% of those buried here are our ancestors. Some of the bones belong to people whose children and grandchildren are still alive, live nearby and visit them often. This place is sacred for Uzbeks, but also for all the peoples of Osh.”

Cemetries near the Sulaiman Mountain. Photo by a local resident (anonymous).

Three Days to Collect the Dead

In July 2025, the situation also escalated dramatically in other parts of Osh city, where the decision was to remove the cemeteries located near the local mahallas in order to widen the roads. Residents were told they had just three days to exhume their relatives and re-bury them elsewhere. Those who lived in Osh had to carry bones down the mountain and pay the required 3,000 som (30 Euro) fee for a new burial site[5]. But what about families who had migrated to Russia or Europe? Many could not return in time. Their ancestors’ remains were collected in heaps, with bones buried together in communal graves.

This rushed process left many residents in shock. An 88-year-old male informant, whose parents were buried on the mountain, recalled bitterly: “We have lived here for generations. How can they [the State] tell us our cemeteries must disappear? They want to make a park, a green zone. But our ancestors deserve peace. Let the deceased rest in peace, please!”

Development vs. Memory

The dispute over Sulaiman-Too’s cemeteries is not just about land. It is about ethnicity, such as Uzbek mahalla cemeteries versus the Kyrgyz state. It is also the clash between heritage and development, sacredness and business. The state envisions wide roads, recreational spaces, and tourist-friendly landscapes. But Osh residents envision continuity — a landscape where the living cares for the dead, where cemeteries signify communal identity, and inter-generational knowledge is transferred.

One of the most painful aspects has been the silencing of disagreement. Few locals dare to protest openly, fearing repercussions from the authorities. One man explained, “We cannot express our opinions, as this may lead to problems and pressure from the state.” Another added, “Please broaden the road on the other side of the road. But don’t disturb the graves.” Their requests, however, were ignored.

The cemetery of the Soviet deputy,Sultanov Kadyrmat, who used to be a member of national parliament. Photo by a local resident (anonymous).

Sacred Mountain, Global Heritage

The irony is that Sulaiman-Too is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its cultural and spiritual significance is internationally recognized. Tourists climb its trails, visiting sacred caves and shrines. Yet, the cemeteries — equally a part of its sacred landscape — are treated as obstacles to development.

For some locals, hope lies precisely in UNESCO. One community elder, Aziz, aged 76, expressed faith that international protection might shield their cemeteries: “UNESCO supported us before. They sponsored our houses. Tourists do not only come to see the mountain or the apartment blocks, but also to see the traditional houses of the people living there, their clothing, and their customs. Maybe they will protect us again.”

But UNESCO’s mandate is limited, and cultural heritage often becomes a battleground of selective preservation. Which parts of the past deserve saving? Which can be erased for the sake of “progress”?

Why Cemeteries Matter

To outsiders, it may be tempting to see cemeteries as replaceable, especially in crowded cities, such as Osh. Yet anthropology reminds us that cemeteries are not just about the dead — they are about the living. They are places where memory is protected, where families renew bonds across generations, where cultural identity is affirmed. This is the heart of the local kinship system, Islam and community.

It is precisely this deeper social and religious significance that makes current developments in Osh resonate with earlier historical struggles. There is a parallel between Soviet times and today: while burial rites were actively defended against state repression during the Soviet era, today they face new pressures—urban development and shifting social priorities—that threaten their continuity. In both cases, cemeteries symbolize a boundary for the community, marking a domain where religious identity and kinship ties must be protected. As Marianne Kamp (2010) argues, during the Soviet times death practices (i.e., performing funeral prayers) represented a kind of red line for Central Asians, and many were ready to defend them against the state at any cost, especially when other religious practices were repressed.[6]

Between Stones and Stories

The story of Sulaiman-Too’s cemeteries is unfinished. After the Soviet times, new state projects (i.e. between Soviet times and the current developments in Osh) threaten the graves every year. Each year, the state plans the expansion of roads against the quiet resistance of families. Meanwhile, tourists snap photos of the mountain, unaware that just beyond the trail lies a battlefield of memory.

As one local put it emotionally: “This is not only a cemetery. It is our history, our ancestors, our identity. To erase it is to erase us.”

The future of Sulaiman-Too will depend on whether development can learn to coexist with sacredness — whether roads and green zones can be built without uprooting bones. For now, the mountain stands as a reminder: heritage is not just about monuments, but about the fragile bond between the living and the dead.


[1] Liu, Morgan. 2012. Under Solomon’s Throne. Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh. Pittsburgh:University of Pittsburgh Press.

[2] Ismailbekova, A. 2017 Blood Ties and the Native Son: Poetics of Patronage in Kyrgyzstan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

[3] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1157690362852446&rdid=Hhg4YvfQirEo59NI

[4] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1157690362852446&rdid=Hhg4YvfQirEo59NI

[5] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1101498778600604&rdid=bCohodiCTh5OaIFm

[6] Kamp, M. (2010) ‘Where did the mullahs go? Oral histories from rural Uzbekistan’, Die Welt des Islams, 50(3–4), pp. 503–531.


Aksana Ismailbekova is a Research Fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin. In 2025 she was a Leibniz — Newcastle University Fellow.


Title picture: Gateway to a staircase leading to a museum precinct on Sulaiman-Too mountain. Adam Harangozó, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Heritage Protection as Progressive Urbanism? Defending the Legacies of the Welfare State

John Pendlebury considers the progressive potential of the heritage of social housing.

Twentieth century workers’ and welfare state housing, often demonised, has increasingly been valorised as heritage. Does this have wider political relevance and potential in a time of housing crisis?

Die oftmals verunglimpften Arbeiter- und Sozialwohnungen des 20. Jahrhunderts erfahren eine zunehmende Wertschätzung als Kulturerbe. In Anbetracht der gegenwärtigen Wohnungskrise stellt sich die Frage, ob dies eine größere politische Relevanz und ein größeres Potenzial birgt.


Berlin Heritage

There are three World Heritage Sites in Berlin – can you guess what they are? You might expect to discover that, first, Museum Island and, second, the Palaces of Potsdam and Berlin are included on the list. But you might be more surprised by the third site – Berlin Modernism Housing Estates, six housing estates constructed between 1910 and 1933, principally from the period of the Weimar Republic. They are claimed to testify to innovative housing policies in a period when the city of Berlin was particularly progressive socially, politically and culturally. Together they “contributed to improving housing and living conditions for people with low incomes through novel approaches to town planning, architecture and garden design” also providing “exceptional examples of new urban and architectural typologies”, which “exercised considerable influence on the development of housing around the world” (Berlin Modernism Housing Estates, UNESCO).

A housing block in Siemensstadt by Hugo Häring, one of the estates forming the Berlin Modernism Housing Estates World Heritage Site.

Housing Crisis

The heritage of social housing seems particularly important in a moment when the availability of affordable, decent housing is a crisis issue in many countries. Writing from a British perspective, twentieth century social housing before 1979 – and the election of the Thatcher government which heralded a radical break from post-war consensus politics – speaks to a period when there was a widely held political aspiration to provide decent and better housing for all. Whilst the results were mixed, the best examples, now often given heritage status, show a scale of ambition, generosity and social priority that is difficult to imagine in the contemporary world. In England the ‘Post-war listing’ programme has positioned state heritage protection as an unlikely advocate and defender of the diminishing material and symbolic legacy of the architecture of the welfare state from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The legacies of this period are very different between different countries, but in many cases examples of such buildings are being formally protected as heritage. This opens-up important issues of how this period of planning history is framed, understood and valued within contemporary society. For example, do we consider material legacies of this period as important purely in terms of design, or is the social intent of the period of equal importance in our appreciation of such environments today?

The potential consequences of heritage protection for social housing – and its potential to contribute to more progressive urban outcomes – was the focus of my Leibniz Value of the Past Fellowship in June 2025 based at ZZF in Potsdam. The aim was to begin to extend the work we have undertaken in England (While and Pendlebury, 2025) to the German context, in the expectation that the different political context of both the creation of welfare state architecture and its subsequent political positioning will show elements of transnational overlap but also significant difference. Of particular interest in the case of Germany are the different histories – and trajectories – between the east and west of the country. And my first task, focusing on Berlin, was to try and understand something of the history and heritage status of the social housing in the city.

More Berlin Housing Heritage

Whilst Berlin’s history of innovation in social housing came to an abrupt stop under National Socialism, it returned with force in both Berlins in the 1950s. In West Berlin, this was exemplified by an international competition for the Hansa Quarter. The International Building Exhibition (INTERBAU) includes social housing blocks by eminent German architects, including the returning Walter Gropius as well as international figures such as Arne Jacobsen, Alvar Aalto and Oscar Niemeyer, although perhaps the most famous consequence of the exhibition was built elsewhere – the Le Corbusier reworking of the Unite d’Habitation. The counterpoint in the east, with an equal level of ambition but very different architectural approach, was the monumental series of blocks aligned along Stalinallee (now Karl Marx Allee), influenced by socialist urbanism and classicism. The combined innovation of new social housing methods and typologies from east and west has led to unsuccessful attempts to be included on Germany’s tentative list of future World Heritage Sites.

After the construction of the Berlin Wall, the large-scale construction of social housing continued in new forms in both territories until the Wall’s fall. In part this took the form of large-scale peripheral estates. In the west these were pushed out to the south (Gropiusstadt) the west (Falkenhagener Feld) and most monumentally to the north (Märkisches Viertel). In the east the later peripheral estates were grouped around the areas of Marzahn, Hellersdorf and Hohenschönhausen. Although not yet generally defined as heritage, a few buildings in these estates have been given monument status. Alongside the construction of peripheral estates there were also redevelopment efforts of social housing in the inner city. The best known of these is the International Building Exhibition (IBA) which ran in West Berlin during the 1980s, using the concepts of “careful urban renewal” and “critical reconstruction.” International celebrity architects on this occasion included Rob Krier, Charles Moore and Aldo Rossi, representing a distinct postmodern turn. Not surprisingly, some of these works now have heritage status.

Although German reunification and in the case of Berlin the “stitching back together” of a divided city is to be celebrated, reunification also led to the cessation of significant social housing building programmes in Berlin, albeit a decade later than with the conservative, neo-liberal political turn in the UK. The reasons for this are not simple, but initially housing demand was low, accompanied by high costs for reconnecting a city systematically severed for 45 years which led to the sell off of assets, including housing. Whilst in Berlin the provision of affordable housing today is perhaps less of a crisis issue than in many British cities, and London specifically, that there is a problem is clear. Despite its innovative and generous history of housing provision and a history of renting and protection for renters, Berlin has not been immune from global neo-liberal forces driving the commodification of housing. Do the protected legacies of earlier eras have any role to play in resisting these changes?

Heritage protection as progressive urbanism?

Historic building conservation is normally perceived as something conservative, rather than as a site of resistance in the city. However, preserved fragments of social housing stand as material testimony to periods when providing decent housing for all was a widely held political and social priority. Furthermore, protecting buildings for heritage purposes potentially challenges market hegemony, disrupting normal processes of capital accumulation. This may be part of the reason, along with a lingering antagonism to the material legacies of the welfare state (“concrete monstrosities”), why the government in England has distinctly cooled on extending protection to more postwar social housing in recent years. Robin Hood Gardens by Alison and Peter Smithson is the most well-known casualty, making way for a high-density area regeneration programme. Furthermore, some of the estates in London that do have protection through listing have been fully gentrified through radical tenure changes. But in our article (While and Pendlebury, 2025), we argue there may be tactical possibilities for resistance, a basis for community engagement, and a more local and bespoke approach to regeneration.

The last block of Robin Hood Gardens in 2024, awaiting demolition.

And in Berlin?

It is difficult to resist the juggernaut of neo-liberal housing policies that in many countries have made our houses commodities rather than homes. However, my preliminary impression of Berlin in comparison to England is of a generous and independent approach to heritage listing, of an inspirational history of innovation and provision of social housing, of a tradition of renting and protecting renters’ rights and, importantly, of a history of civic mobilisation and resistance that cumulatively make me feel optimistic of the progressive potential of Berlin’s rich history of social housing in providing some resistance to these global forces.


John Pendlebury is Professor of Urban Conservation, Centre for Heritage, Newcastle University, UK. In June 2025 he was a Leibniz Value of the Past Fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF).


Title picture: A block by Wilhelm Büning in the White City Estate, one of the estates forming the Berlin Modernism Housing Estates World Heritage Site.

All pictures in this contribution: John Pendlebury.

On Peformances and Playing Cards

After attending Brecht’s ‘The Threepenny Opera’ in Berlin, James Harriman-Smith reflects on what performance is today and what it used to be.

What is performance? And what was performance? I came to Berlin to think about these questions and continue that thinking here with the help of a peculiar pack of cards and a trip to the Berliner Ensemble.

Was ist „Performance“? Und was war „Performance“? Ich bin nach Berlin gekommen, um über diese Fragen nachzudenken. Diese Überlegungen führe ich hier mithilfe eines eigentümlichen Kartenspiels und eines Besuchs im Berliner Ensemble weiter.


At the start of Barrie Kosky’s production of Die Dreigroschenoper at the Berliner Ensemble, a single spotlight picks out a pale face peeking through the sparkly stage curtain. This is the face of The Moon Over Soho (played by Josefin Platt). She begins to sing: ‘Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne…’ Recognizing the tune, the theatregoers around me begin to hum and sway along to Kurt Weill’s music as we begin our three-hour journey through the London underworld.

I sat in this audience after a day’s work at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung. My time at the ZfL was drawing to a close. I had come there to think about performance, more specifically to study different ways of thinking about performance. I’d spoken with Katrin Trüstedt about Stellvertretung, with Falko Schmieder about Koselleckian approaches to conceptual history, and had the chance to share my own ideas with the Theoriegeschichte programme area. Yet, as I watched Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper unfold, I remembered an object sitting in my hotel room that I had not had a chance to share. I’d like to use this blog contribution to share it now, and so continue electronically some of the thinking I was so fortunate to do in Berlin.

This is the object:

Playing cards and an eighteenth-century card holder.  Photo taken by the author.

This is a modern facsimile of John Bowles’s set of Beggar’s Opera Playing Cards. John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera was the inspiration for Die Dreigroschenoper; it was also an enormous theatrical success from the moment of its premiere in 1728. The first editions of Bowles’s cards date from this time, although they were then reprinted throughout the eighteenth century. I bought my facsimile because I believe that answers to the question of how to read these cards offered new ways of thinking about the performance, reception, and legacy of this famous eighteenth-century work.

First of all, we might read these cards as just another manifestation of the contemporary cultural impact of The Beggar’s Opera. In the wake of the work’s record-breaking, sixty-two-night opening run, various mementos began to appear, from paintings and engravings (the first Polly Peachum). The playing cards are a similar kind of product, cashing in on the popularity of the Opera. They are different from other objects, however, because these cards offer their owners a chance to engage with Gay’s work in a particular way: they provide all the information necessary to perform many of the songs, be that Gay’s lyrics, the musical score, or the name of the tune that Gay was giving new words to.

The nine of diamonds, showing the name of the ballad tune (‘All in a misty morning’), musical score, and Gay’s lyrics. Photo taken by the author.

By providing such information, these cards thus extend beyond the theatre what Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has described as a distinctly political aspect of performance of The Beggar’s Opera. Dillon argues that Gay’s audiences would recognize many of the ballad tunes he reused in the work, and perhaps even join in. Such recognition (or even participation) transformed the theatre into a shared space of common musical goods, and so resisted contemporary efforts to privatise and enclose previously public material. Bowles’s playing cards might allow such participation to continue after the performance ended, and at the very least seem to exploit the extent to which Gay’s work became an omnipresent aspect of a shared English culture.

But there are other ways of reading these cards, which extend and supplement the above interpretation. Palming through the cards, I notice that only two contain any information about plot. The ten of clubs tells us it depicts a song ‘sung by Polly and Lucy in their resentment against Macheath’. The six of clubs similarly contains a cue that explains the emotional stakes of the song.

The six of clubs, with the information that the song was sung when Polly and Lucy were ‘both claiming of’ Macheath. Photo taken by the author.

Yet even these cards do not say why Polly and Lucy are upset, or even who Macheath is. This probably testifies, again, to the popularity of the Opera. It also, though, might suggest the unimportance of the details of the work’s plot, and so a way of understanding it more as a collection of sung performances loosely connected by events. A kind of eighteenth-century jukebox musical.  Indeed, in the noisy and crowded theatres of 1720s London, where audience members would arrive late and leave early, and productions would be broken through short breaks between each act, a more fragmentary understanding of The Beggar’s Opera as a collection of memorable moments reinforced with music seems appropriate.

A translation of the theatrical work into the format of playing cards emphasises such an understanding because of the way that playing cards are used. If these cards were played with, they would, for example, have been shuffled, so that the songs they depict would be produced in a different order in every game. There would still, of course, be patterns: there are more cards with songs by Macheath than any other, as befits his lead role; Polly and Lucy are next, while Peachum only has one of his songs represented. Beyond this, the choice of cardgame might give new meanings to certain cards. The ten of diamonds was the ‘big cassino’ in games of cassino, and the player lucky enough to draw it would perhaps experience a version of the youthful joy expressed in the song by Mrs Slammekin it represents. The ace of spades (also called ‘spadille’) is a powerful card in lots of games, and here it is used for the song in which Lucy Lockit describes the power of Macheath’s kiss.

The ace of spades, or spadille. Photo taken by the author.

It is possible these choices are pure chance, but – even if they are – they are still evidence of how the transfer of Gay’s work from the stage to the cards can open it up for new meaning while exploiting the already fragmentary aesthetics of The Beggar’s Opera. Indeed, it is perhaps out of fear of gaining new meanings that one song is not depicted on the cards: Macheath’s strongest condemnation of corrupt English society, sung to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’ and explaining how ‘gold from law can take out the sting’.

There is more to say about these cards, and about performance than I have space to say here. Die Dreigroschenoper, for instance, is also a work whose songs have had an independent life, and which, by drawing on the aesthetics of the music hall, reimagines the ballad opera style of Gay. To my knowledge there is no cardset inspired by Brecht and Weill, although there is a Japanese rewriting of Die Dreigroschenoper called Hanafuda Denki (literally, Playing-Card Fantasy: 花札伝奇).

And there are also those people who sat next to me humming along to ‘Moritat von Mackie Messer’. We can understand those spectators’ engagement with the Berliner Ensemble production a little better with the help of John Bowles’s Beggar’s Opera Playing Cards. After all, the same aspects of Gay’s work that these cards once extended – be that the collection and adaptation of pre-existing music models or, as Dillon argued, the use of such songs in the theatre as a kind of shared cultural currency, radically available to all – are also some of the things that make Die Dreigroschenoper still a blockbuster theatrical experience today.


Picture: private.

James Harriman-Smith is a lecturer in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature at Newcastle University, UK. He was a Newcastle University-Leibniz Research Alliance Bilateral Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL) in Berlin.

@jharrimansmith.bsky.social


Title picture: Josefin Platt as the Moon over Soho in Die Dreigroschenoper, JR Berliner Ensemble.

Memory-making in tourism: a call for a more differentiated discussion

Alena Pfoser and Sabine Stach analyse the production and circulation of memories in the arena of tourism.

Tourism is an important arena for the production and circulation of memories in today’s societies. In their recent article in the journal Memory Studies, Alena Pfoser and Sabine Stach argue for a more systematic investigation of this tourism-memory nexus.

In unserer heutigen Gesellschaft stellt der Tourismus einen zentralen Ort der Produktion und Zirkulation von Erinnerungen dar. In ihrem kürzlich erschienenen Artikel in der Zeitschrift Memory Studies plädieren Alena Pfoser und Sabine Stach für eine systematischere Untersuchung dieses Zusammenhangs zwischen Tourismus und Erinnerung.


Tourist destinations often invite us to travel back in time, to experience a time stood still or turned back. Iconic heritage sites and museums are major tourist attractions, visited by millions of tourists each year. Alongside well-preserved old towns, iconic architecture, or ancient cultural sites, more recent and obscure pasts – such as memories of communism, recent revolutions and industrial heritage – have been incorporated into the tourism industry. Tourism is also driven by individual memories of past visits, personal and family ties that can stimulate a desire to (re)visit them. Moreover, tourism also creates new memories in the form of stories, photographs and souvenirs that are taken back home and shared with others.

Holiday mementos for sale (Source: Sunguk Kim, Unsplash, Creative Commons).

Despite the obvious (yet complex) connections between tourism and memory-making, tourism remains surprisingly underexamined in memory studies research. When we, two researchers working on guided city tours in different contexts in Eastern Europe, met for the first time in May 2019, it was quickly apparent that we had a similar view of the limitations of existing research. Tourist sites appear to be primarily the subject of heritage studies, which have long been critically concerned with questions of the construction and management of cultural heritage. Moreover, the topic of tourism has also increasingly become the focus of academic debates in history, history education and, above all, public history. Often, the term “history tourism” (in German “Geschichtstourismus”) is used to analyse the integration of memorial sites and “authentic places” into tourism industry offers. However, while these fields of study have some overlapping concerns, we thought that bringing tourism into conversation with work in memory studies offered both more focused and nuanced perspective on memory and the remembering process in tourism. Our following exchange resulted in an article that was recently published in Memory Studies. There, we not only sought to provide a critical reflection on these limitations but also put forward a vision of how an expanded examination of the “tourism-memory nexus” could look like.

A bibliometric analysis of tourism in memory research

To go beyond our own impressions of the literature, we first conducted bibliometric research of the most significant peer-reviewed journals in memory studies: Memory Studies (2008-), History & Memory (1998-), Memory, Mind and Media (2022-). We identified a total of 134 articles, out of which 19 mentioned “tourism” either in their title, keywords, or abstract. Most of the remaining 115 articles did not have tourism as their focus, but examined for example the creation of heritage sites or city branding processes and dedicated a smaller part of their analysis to tourism planning or promotion. Other articles focused on museums and memorials and discussed visitor practices and/or the reception of sites as part of the analysis but did not address questions of touristification nor explored tourists’ meaning-making in detail. Apart from confirming our impression of the limited preoccupation with tourism in memory research, the analysis also showed a narrow thematic focus on sites associated with violence and trauma. Over two thirds of articles discussed “difficult pasts / dark tourism” such as studies on battlefield tourism, concentration camps, prisons, and war memorials. The number of articles focusing on other themes were particularly small when considering only those publications that had tourism as their primary focus, with only seven articles discussing subjects beyond difficult pasts.

Themes of tourism-related articles in memory studies journals (Source: Pfoser & Stach, 2024, own calculations).

Castles, neighbourhoods and museum shops as sites of remembering

Moving beyond this narrow focus, we firstly propose to expand the range of sites examined in the literature to include those with a high tourist appeal such as ancient, medieval or early modern heritage. Despite their popularity with families, such sites are usually only discussed in terms of monument preservation and heritage management. Castles, city fortifications, rulers’ residences or townhouses seem to belong to an unproblematic, picturesque “distant past” that can be touristified in whatever way one likes (Groebner, 2013: 412–414). Alongside an examination of these sites, we should also reflect upon the “tourist component” of sites already in focus, considering them as destinations anchored in the international tourism industry. This involves an analysis of consumer infrastructures such as museum shops and of the planning and designing of sites for tourists. Finally, a broader understanding of toured sites should encompass memory processes that refer to multiple sites including the analysis of itineraries and the work of tour guides who put sites in an order and make them part of an overarching narrative, thereby producing new meanings.

Memories of joy and entertainment

Alongside the expansion of sites, we also need to expand the analysis of the variety of modes of remembering. As understandable as the focus on difficult heritage is, it is equally important to question the seemingly natural link between memory research and trauma. Scholars such as Ann Rigney (2018: 370) have argued for a “positive turn” in memory studies scholarship, which can also be built on work on memory-making in tourism. This is particularly important as tourism is closely associated with fun, relaxation and entertainment. Criticism of tourism has also underlined the notion of tourism as a hedonic, light, joyful, and somewhat superficial experience. It is reasonable to ask whether this discredits tourism as an object of research, or whether entertainment and fun should instead be brought into its focus. This includes individual, joyful, and playful but also voyeuristic, escapist, and entertainment-centred modes of remembering. We argue that tourism offers a unique opportunity to engage more fully with these modes and their interconnections with others, allowing us to move beyond a normative approach that implies a division between legitimate, i.e. empathic and reflective, and less legitimate, i.e. self-centered and hedonic, modes of remembering.

Museum shops: an understudied site of memory-making (Source: Erikk Pung, Unsplash, Creative Commons).

Multiscalar tourism memories

Finally, research on memory-making can also build on discussions of scales in memory studies research. We argue that more attention needs to go into the scale of personal and autobiographical remembering. As Sabine Marschall (2012: 2217) wrote, memory-making in tourism “does not necessarily require the presence of monuments and precious cultural objects, but relies on embodied memories that evoke emotions”. Memories are actively used by tourists to construct images of self and other. Prior to their trip, when making decisions of where to travel, and during and after their trips, tourists draw on their own past experiences as well as socially and culturally transmitted understandings of the past.

Moreover, as tourism routinely involves border crossing, tourism lends itself well to analysis of transnational remembering, allowing us to analyse both the deterritorialisation and transnationalisation of memory in tourism institutions and practices and its reterritorialisation in particular places. As our work on tour guiding shows, international tourism enables a transnational negotiation of memory that results not necessarily in the creation of cosmopolitan frameworks that replace the national ones but can also lead to pragmatic interpretative adjustments and selective silences as a response to mnemonic difference, pointing to the translations and frictions of transnational memory work.

For a more nuanced discussion of tourism memories

Tourism continues to be conceived implicitly or explicitly as diminishing memory, detaching it from the past and rendering it inauthentic and trivial. Our hope is that by expanding the study of memory-making in tourism to cover a range of sites, modes and scales we can contribute to a destigmatisation of tourism as a research subject and reach a richer and more differentiated understanding of the tourism-memory nexus. In fact, modes of remembering in tourism often are politically more ambiguous and can stand in contrast with the memories of hope that have been at the centre of a ‘positive turn’ in memory studies. Yet, memories based on direct tourist encounters can also challenge hostile conceptions of the other, and the idleness that tourism at least partly enables can act as counterweight in a world driven by the demands of speed. Instead of being dismissed, memory-making in tourism deserves a more nuanced discussion.


Bibliography

Groebner V (2013) Touristischer Geschichtsgebrauch. Über einige Merkmale neuer Vergangenheiten im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert. Historische Zeitschrift 296: 408–428

Marschall S (2012) Tourism and memory. Annals of Tourism Research 39(4): 2216–2219.

Pfoser A & Stach S (2024) Beyond difficult pasts: Towards a fuller understanding of memory-making in tourism. Memory Studies.

Rigney A (2018) Remembering hope: transnational activism beyond the traumatic. Memory Studies 11(3): 368–380.


Sabine Stach is a researcher at GWZO Leipzig in the department “Culture and Imagination“.

Alena Pfoser is a senior lecturer in Communication and Media Studies at Loughborough University, UK.


Title picture: Playing with heritage (Source: Jakob Owens, Unsplash, Creative Commons).

Unlocking the Past with AI: Spectral Decomposition for Image Processing in Cultural Heritage

Marco Colombo reflects on Yury Korolev’s conference presentation and shares his own perspective and insights.

This blog post is part of a series on the conference “Artificial Intelligence in Archives and Collections” held on December 12-13, 2024, at the Herder Institute in Marburg and presents perspectives on the coference contribution by Yury Korolev, University of Bath – written by Marco Colombo.


Recent advancements in artificial intelligence and mathematical techniques are transforming the way we approach cultural heritage preservation. These technologies provide new ways to analyze and interpret digital data, particularly in the realm of historical documents and artifacts. By applying mathematical models to imaging data, researchers can uncover hidden details, restore ancient manuscripts, and better understand the history behind archaeological findings.

In the world of cultural heritage preservation, technology plays an increasingly vital role in uncovering and understanding historical artifacts. One of the most promising advancements in this field is mathematical imaging, which has revolutionized the way we analyze historical documents. This article delves into how spectral decomposition aids in processing images for cultural heritage applications, with a focus on analyzing handmade medieval paper. This topic was treated by Assistant Professor Yury Korolev in his oral presentation at the conference.

The Power of Spectral Decomposition in Image Processing

At its core, spectral decomposition involves breaking down an image or signal into simpler components that can be interpreted and manipulated independently. A well-known example is the Fourier transformation, which decomposes a signal into sine and cosine waves of different frequencies. This method has long been used in audio processing, where equalizers modify frequencies to emphasize or dampen specific sounds.

Applying this principle to image processing allows researchers to filter images by modifying their spectral components. Similar to how equalizers can adjust bass or treble in music, spectral decomposition enables the enhancement or suppression of specific image features, revealing details otherwise hidden in noise and distortions.

A musical manuscript (Pantokratoros monastery, code 214), 1433.

Challenges in Fourier-Based Image Processing

Traditional Fourier-based filtering presents certain challenges when applied to images. One primary issue is the handling of edges and sharp transitions within an image. The Fourier transform favors smooth variations and struggles with the abrupt changes often found in historical documents, where distinguishing between textual content, illustrations, and background textures is crucial for accurate analysis.

Additionally, artifacts such as noise and dirt often share high-frequency components with vital image details, making it difficult to distinguish between essential and extraneous elements. This limitation necessitates alternative approaches that can better separate meaningful structures from irrelevant noise.

Total Variation Spectral Decomposition: A More Effective Approach

A promising solution to these challenges is total variation (TV) spectral decomposition [1, 2, 3]. Unlike Fourier methods, TV decomposition is particularly effective in processing images with sharp edges and high contrast variations, such as handwritten medieval manuscripts. This approach decomposes images based on the scale and contrast of details, allowing for a more meaningful separation of image elements.

Using TV spectral decomposition, an image is analyzed at different levels of detail, isolating high-contrast features such as text and marks while preserving background textures like paper grain and chain lines. The ability to filter images in this way is invaluable for historians and archivists, as it allows them to extract key structural elements from historical documents with remarkable precision.

Grégoire de Tours, Histoire des Francs. Initial P in the form of a fish opening the book. Late 7th century.

Applications in Medieval Paper Analysis

One particularly compelling application of TV spectral decomposition is in the study of handmade medieval paper. This type of paper was created using molds made of metal wires, which left distinctive imprints known as chain lines (vertical lines) and laid lines (horizontal lines). Additionally, many papers featured watermarks that identified their origin, providing crucial insights into historical trade networks and manuscript provenance.

By applying spectral decomposition techniques, researchers can:

  • Digitally remove overlying text and stains from historical documents to better reveal the mold imprints.
  • Enhance faint chain lines and laid lines, allowing for accurate identification of the paper’s origin.
  • Segment different elements of an image to isolate and analyze individual components more effectively.

This methodology has been successfully employed on manuscripts from the Cambridge University Library, enabling historians to trace the origins and movements of medieval texts with better accuracy.

Beyond Cultural Heritage: Broader Implications

The benefits of TV spectral decomposition extend beyond historical paper analysis. This approach has demonstrated its effectiveness in several other imaging applications, including:

  • Image Denoising: Removing unwanted noise from photographs, particularly in low-light conditions.
  • Image Segmentation: Identifying and categorizing different elements within an image, useful in medical imaging and microscopy.
  • Image Fusion: Combining multiple imaging modalities to create a more comprehensive representation of an object, especially in medical diagnostics.

Moreover, machine learning is being integrated into these spectral decomposition processes, significantly improving computational efficiency. Researchers are developing AI-driven models to automate and optimize these transformations, making them more accessible and scalable for various imaging needs.

Gemini, from the medieval Georgian manuscript of an astrological treatise, 12th century.

Future Prospects and Challenges

While TV spectral decomposition has proven to be a powerful tool, it is not without its challenges. One notable limitation is its preference for detecting rounded or disk-like structures, which may not always align with the features of certain historical documents. Future research is focused on refining these methods to accommodate a wider variety of structural elements, making them even more effective for cultural heritage applications.

Additionally, computational efficiency remains a concern. Unlike standard Fourier filtering, TV-based decomposition requires solving complex optimization problems, making it computationally intensive. However, ongoing advancements in machine learning and algorithmic optimization are expected to mitigate these challenges, paving the way for faster and more efficient implementations.

Conclusion

Spectral decomposition, particularly through total variation methods, represents a powerful technique for cultural heritage applications. By enabling clearer and more detailed analysis of historical documents, this technology offers invaluable insights into the past while preserving artifacts for future generations. As AI and machine learning continue to enhance these techniques, the potential for further breakthroughs in digital humanities and archival science remains immense.

With continued research and innovation, spectral decomposition will undoubtedly play a crucial role in unlocking the hidden secrets of our cultural heritage, bridging the gap between history and technology.


References

[1] Gilboa, G., 2014. A total variation spectral framework for scale and texture analysis. SIAM journal on Imaging Sciences, 7(4), pp. 1937-1961.

[2] Grossmann, T.G., Schönlieb, C.B. and Da Rold, O., 2023. Extracting chain lines and laid lines from digital images of medieval paper using spectral total variation decomposition. Heritage Science, 11(1), p. 180.

[3] Grossmann, T.G., Dittmer, S., Korolev, Y. and Schönlieb, C.B., 2022. Unsupervised learning of the total variation flow. arXiv:2206.04406.


Marco Colombo is a PhD student in the Materials Analysis Group at the Darmstadt Technical University. He was a participant at the conference in Marburg and was particularly interested in Yury Korolev’s work, so he decided to write down his impression and perspectives on his presentation.

The original title of Yury Korolev‘s presentation at the conference was “Image filtering based on total variation spectral decompositions: an overview of the method and an application in medieval paper analysis”. For further information on the conference see the programme.


Title picture: Book of Hours — a prayer book written in Medieval Latin (c. 15th century).

All pictures: symbolic images, public domain via Wikimedia, see also here.

Current developments in AI and what they mean for everyday use in archives

Anja Link takes a closer look at various contributions from the panels and identifies three key findings from the conference.

Insights from the Conference “Artificial Intelligence in Archives and Collections”

This blog post is part of a series on the conference at the Herder Institute in Marburg on 12 and 13 December 2024 and will highlight three overall findings.


AI needs to be co-created by humans – to do its work but also to supervise its ethical conduct

Questions of finding the happy medium of human and machine action were touched on by many speakers. While the call co-creation may appear self-evident—after all, AI models are developed by humans — when taking a closer look at the modelling and training phase, the issue reveals to be more complex. The complexity begins with data selection and extends through the modelling and training phases to the actual implementation of AI systems. Furthermore, it touches ethical questions of (energy) resource efficiency, bias and power. Ensuring meaningful human involvement at every stage is therefore not just a technical necessity, but an ethical imperative.

Data Selection and AI

>>> Mo von Bychelberg’s overview on „Artificial Intelligence Technology’s Influence on the Authenticity of Digital Intangible Cultural Inheritance” explored how AI introduces new dimensions of power and bias into archival practices—dimensions that, in fact, build upon long-standing issues in the field. Traditional dimensions of power and bias in archives cover questions of what is worth being archived as well as who decides what is being archived. In the era of digitisation those dimensions extend to questions of what is worth being digitised and who decides on that. The emergence of AI technologies adds yet another layer: Which archives can afford to use or even create AI? Who has the human resources and expertise to work with off-the-shelf AI solutions? Will the staff be able to handle off-the-shelf AI? Can AI potentially address broader challenges, such as preserving the tacit knowledge of retiring archivists? Von Bychelberg argued that many of these issues—power, bias, access, and sustainability—converge in the context of AI. Before archives consider adopting AI technologies, these critical questions must be openly and thoroughly addressed.

Mo von Bychelberg, Uppsala University

AI model training phase

>>> In her presentation on “Dusting Off the Unlabelled Data: Graph Semi Supervised Learning for Large-Scale Datasets” Angelica I. Aviles-Rivero shared insights from her research on efficient image procession in training phases. Regardless of the model’s ultimate goal—be it image classification, recognition, or generation—every image-based AI system begins with object detection and data labelling. Since AI models have limited generalisation capabilities, acquiring large datasets with accurate annotations is costly in terms of time, financial resources, and the need for expert knowledge. Reducing those costs requires a well-balanced combination of human expertise and machine-based interpretation of image data.  Semi-supervised learning approaches that balance since its central task is replacing data by human knowledge and thus training with less data. Aviles-Rivero’s findings indicate that SSL can lead to improved model performance by replacing parts of the training data with human insight, thereby requiring fewer labelled examples.

>>> Nicole Graaf explored the temporal, gender-based, and cultural dimensions of bias in AI-generated image metadata in her presentation „Between ritual and relief – when the computer squints: analysis if AI-based indexing in the Image Archive of the ETH Library”. From an archivist’s persepective, Graaf presented the results of a qualitative analysis of automatically tagged images. The images were labelled using Clarifai’s general model and subsequently reviewed by subject experts—not only for semantic accuracy, but also for their potential to create or reinforce bias. As it turned out, automatic tagging works best with iconic, easily recognisable images that would likely be used to teach a child. In contrast, automatic tagging struggles significantly when it comes to abstract cultural or gender-related concepts. These findings underline two key points: a) AI-generated metadata must be critically evaluated by humans, and b) the ethical dimensions of AI output are fundamentally shaped by the data used during training. Graaf suggested that one possible technological approach to mitigating bias is to address the issue at its source—by regularly reprocessing digitised archival materials with updated AI models. Another long-term solution could lie in developing institution-specific AI systems tailored to the archival context.

>>> Christopher Kermovant also explored pre-trained AI-models’ capacities and limitations in interpreting historical image material. In his presentation on “How to use controlled vocabularies to describe early Japanese photographs using deep learning models” he shared his main findings for interpreting historical image material, particularly archive documents of non-Western origin. Kermovant’s findings highlighted two central issues: a) Pre-trained AI models (in this case: CLIP, Qwen2, and ChatGPT-4o) tend to perform best in languages with strong representation in their training data—namely English, French, and German. b) These models exhibit a significant bias toward Western perspectives when interpreting non-Western imagery, often leading to distorted or overly simplified classifications. His work also underscores the need for more culturally diverse training datasets and the careful use of controlled vocabularies when applying AI to global archival materials.

Reducing time, labour and energy intensity —while also addressing ethical concerns— reveals to be a major task in the field of object detection and labelling image and text documents. On the one hand there is the question to what extend co-creation is essential for bridging the gap between machine-classifiable content and the deeper semantics of images or texts. On the other hand, it must be critically assessed which tasks necessarily have to be executed by AI and which ones humans might be better at than resource-efficient AI could ever be.

The conference took place in a hybrid format. Questions were taken directly from the audience as well as via the chat.

Picture quality matters. But in a different way than we as humans might expect

Image quality plays a crucial role in both the preprocessing and processing stages of archival image and text documents. While preprocessing can be extremely time-consuming, it is highly relevant for enabling meaningful analysis. In archival contexts, preprocessing typically involves distinguishing between the medium (e.g., paper texture, handwriting, image artifacts) and the actual content. Only after this separation can the content be decomposed and relevant information extracted effectively.

>>> Contrary to what one might assume, in the case of object detection, higher resolution does not automatically yield better results in object detection tasks during AI training. The appropriate level of image detail depends on the specific analytical goal, as Karsten Tolle, Yury Korolev and Christopher Kermovant explained in their respective presentations „Potpourri of Computer Vision in Cultural Heritage“, “Image filtering based on total variation spectral decompositions: an overview of the method and an application in medieval paper analysis“ and “How to use controlled vocabularies to describe early Japanese photographs using deep learning models“. For certain features, reducing the resolution—or even intentionally blurring the images—can improve detection performance. This approach not only facilitates the filtering of relevant information but also helps eliminate insignificant visual elements, such as scratches or artifacts, which might otherwise be misinterpreted by the model as meaningful features.

>>> Mahsa Vafaie’s insights into „Separation of machine-printed and handwritten text in archival documents” illustrated many incremental steps required to extract semantically accurate information from digitised archival documents—steps that are essential for uncovering previously unknown historical knowledge. The process begins with removing traces of the documents’ physical characteristics, such as background noise, material textures, or the representation medium itself. It may also include the distinction between relevant elements and noise. When documents contain both machine-printed and handwritten text, further complexity arises. Text-type separation must be carried out using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for print and HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) for script. This involves handling heterogeneous layouts, processing both standard and non-standard fonts, recognising different handwriting styles, identifying stamps and annotations. However, Vafaie pointed out that the computational challenge does not stop at the complex procedure of accurately identifying information of every single document. Future research will have to address ways of connecting as well as embedding information into its historical context.

Mahsa Vafaie, FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure

Several contributions throughout the conference have underlined that AI forces us to examine analytical steps that the human brain implicitly takes and to adapt those steps to the technology’s requirements. Both the training of AI models and the analysis of archival material using AI are often shaped by trial-and-error processes that highly profit from creative ideas and fondness of experimenting.

Multimodal AI solutions are needed for AI to be applied across a broader range of archives

Despite growing technical capabilities, most current research projects still tend to focus on either image or text processing. The integration and simultaneous analysis of hybrid data—combining visual and textual elements—seems to remain the widest research gap.

As Erik Radisch concluded in his presentation on “A new Approach to Semi-Automated Annotations with Segment-Anything (Meta AI)” while numerous AI tools are already available, their full potential is only realised when they are combined —both to improve usability and to produce meaningful outcome. Radisch also emphasised the highly dynamic nature of the AI landscape: many models currently in use may soon be otperformed. The interim solution to that appears to lie in relying on pre-trained multimodal AI systems. When doing that, one has to bear in mind that pre-trained AI tends to fail at analysing phenomena that are not reflected in their training material for cultural or language differences or because they lack adequate historical training material.

Autor’s reflexion on the research findings and what they might mean for everyday use in archives

Practitioners attending the conference with high expectations for ready-to-use, one-size-fits-all AI solutions—comparable in performance and accessibility to chatbots like ChatGPT—may have left somewhat disappointed. At present, no such solution does exist. However, that does not mean that these ideas went unaddressed. As it is common for any conference the horizon of the panels was broadened by informal discussions during the coffee brakes where speculative ideas were explored. In this case the coffee brake discussions with practitioners from archives proved to be specifically insightful when it came to questions of integrating research findings into day-to-day archival work. While the conference contributors presented insights into the use of AI-models for different types of archival use it became even more apparent in the discussions that the path to their everyday applicability remains to be a long one. This path starts with the basic necessity of the existence of digitized material. Yet, particularly in small and understaffed archives, the proportion of digitised holdings is often very low. Ironically, these are the very institutions that could benefit most from AI-supported tools, given their limited financial and human resources. However, it is particularly that lack of resources that makes the use of AI tools unattractive at this point in time. Until AI tools can be seamlessly integrated into archival workflows in a significantly more resource-efficient manner, their use will likely remain out of reach for the average archive.

Among its many opportunities and challenges, AI has the potential to not only enhance biases. It also has the potential to widen gaps between well-resourced and under-resourced archives. Addressing these challenges requires more than just developing open-source, multimodal AI models. Equally important is ensuring maximum usability—through intuitive interfaces, cost-effectiveness, adequate server capacities, and robust data protection measures. Additionally, setting special focus on developing models in a modular system that can be used by a wide range of archives and adjoining institutions might be useful. AI might even constitute a new field of state action similar to already existing e-government or cloud infrastructures. Regardless of the specific perspective taken on AI in archives and collections in the near future, the field continues to offer ample food for thoughts, future research and discussions.


Anja Link has been working as a research assistant in the Department of Architectural Theory and Building History at Bremen University of Applied Sciences since 2019. By focussing her doctoral thesis on the history of architecture and urban planning, which is underpinned by an economic-historical perspective, her doctoral project brings together her previous research interests. She participated in the conference and is the author of this conference report.


Picture credit (all): Impressions from the conference, Claudia Junghänel, Herder Institute.

​Innovative Tools and Current Projects: Artificial Intelligence in Archives and Collections

In his article, Erdal Ayan presents a selection of AI tools for archives and collections as well as current projects that were presented at the Marburg AI Conference.

Key topics of the conference Artificial Intelligence in Archives and Collections: Practices, Potentials and Evidence Production in Dealing with Images and Multimodal Cultural Heritage included computer vision techniques, multi-modal large language models (MLLMs), semi-automated annotation, and innovative tools for search and discovery. Several new and ongoing projects showcased advancements in deep learning, text-image embedding, and graph-based learning.

This blog post is part of a series on the conference held on December 12-13, 2024, at the Herder Institute in Marburg and will present a number of selected tools and topics that have been discussed.

Opportunities and Challenges

The conference emphasized both the opportunities and challenges presented by AI-driven tools, including ethical concerns, explainability, and data bias, while promoting collaboration and knowledge exchange across disciplines. It focused on visual sources such as photographs, graphic collections, and mixed image-text archives, addressing both theoretical and practical challenges in automated indexing, cataloguing, and image processing. The growing role of AI and ML in multi-modal cultural heritage research was highlighted, particularly in semantic segmentation, object classification, and annotation. Key datasets discussed included coins, archaeological record cards, Buddhist murals, Soviet newsreels, and historical photographs, etc. This article will present a number of selected tools and topics that have been discussed.

​Image Archives and Image Processing

Image archiving and processing topics had an important place in the conference, and current studies on these topics attracted a lot of attention from the participants. The presentations at the conference demonstrated how AI and ML are revolutionizing the management and analysis of image archives.

Ralph Ewerth introduced iART, a computer vision-based search engine that enhances the accessibility of art and historical archives. It addresses cultural heritage images that integrate computer vision techniques for object recognition and cross-modal search. The dataset includes coin images, and the tool supports both scholarly research and public engagement. iART enables users to explore large image collections through features like object recognition, pose estimation, and natural language queries. Ewerth demonstrated how state-of-the-art computer vision techniques, combined with large language models, facilitate improved retrieval results and explanations for search outcomes.

Frank Puppe addressed the digital indexing of archaeological record cards, presenting a pipeline that processes scanned documents through Optical Character Recognition (OCR), semantic mapping, and multi-modal large language models like ChatGPT-4o. This pipeline enables the transformation of analogue archaeological records with images into searchable, structured formats such as JSON.

Home page of HikarIA, screenshot taken on 21 May 2025.

Christopher Kermorvant highlighted challenges in applying contemporary deep learning models to early Japanese photographs. He introduced HikarIA, which is a search engine designed for Japanese historical photographs, addressing issues of limited metadata and enabling discovery through advanced AI techniques. While convolutional neural networks and transformer models excel with modern datasets, historical images often present difficulties due to cultural and temporal differences. Kermorvant emphasized the need for tailored approaches to address these limitations.

Erik Radisch mentioned the Segment Anything, integrated with Annotorious for semi-automated image annotation. Segment Anything is a model developed by Meta AI for image segmentation, capable of prompt-based annotation without extensive retraining. And Annotorious is an open-source JavaScript solution for image annotation. This method significantly reduces the time required for detailed polygon-based annotations, making it ideal for large-scale archival projects. Segment Anything’s ability to adapt to new tasks without extensive retraining provides a powerful tool for researchers.

​New and Ongoing Projects in Image Archiving

At the conference, researchers talked in detail about their own work on image archiving and processing and shared their knowledge and experience on new and ongoing projects. The conference, therefore, showcased several innovative projects and tools that push the boundaries of AI-driven cultural heritage research. Among these were:

Celtic coin type “Divinka” from Slovakia. Foto: Marek Sobola, Wikimedia Commons.

ClaReNet (Karsten Tolle): A project utilizing object detection and classification to analyze coins. Tolle demonstrated the use of Orange Data Mining, a visual programming tool, to enable non-programmers to perform clustering and classification tasks. 

Wiedergutmachung (Harald Sack and Mahsa Vafaie): A collaboration with the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg that focuses on the classification and extraction of handwritten and machine-printed text in historical documents. Vafaie presented a pipeline for separating handwritten annotations from machine-printed text, resulting in a 26% improvement in OCR accuracy.

Kinokroonika (Mila Oiva): A project that explores clustering of images as graph data, leveraging graph-based methods for visual analysis.

Dight-Net (Mila Oiva): A collaborative research initiative utilizing tools like ResNet-50 to advance digital cultural heritage projects.

Orange: An open-source visual programming tool for clustering, classification, and image analytics, designed for non-programmers.

ResNet-50: A deep learning model architecture for image classification, compatible with Python libraries like Keras.

Collection Space Navigator (CSN): A tool for visualizing and exploring collections through vector encoding of images, built using Python (Flask) and React.

The sharing of these studies and experiences by experts at the conference provided an important impetus for knowledge transfer and the development of future collaborations.

Conclusion

The Artificial Intelligence in Archives and Collections conference underscored the transformative potential of AI and machine learning in managing, analyzing, and understanding cultural heritage data. Projects like iART and Wiedergutmachung demonstrated practical applications of computer vision and text recognition, while tools like Segment Anything and Orange highlighted the growing accessibility of AI technologies for non-experts.

Despite these advancements, the conference also addressed challenges such as data bias, explainability, and the limitations of current models when applied to historical datasets. Speakers emphasized the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and the need for ethical considerations in the deployment of AI technologies.

Overall, the event successfully fostered dialogue between researchers, developers, and practitioners, paving the way for future innovations in AI-driven cultural heritage research.


Selected Reference List for the Projects Presented

Arnold, T. (2024). Explainable and Auditable Search and Discovery of Visual Cultural Heritage Collections.

Aviles-Rivero, A. I. (2024). Dusting Off the Unlabeled Data: Graph Semi-Supervised Learning for Large-Scale Datasets.

Evans, J. (2024). The Geometry of Culture: Analyzing Meaning through Embeddings of Text and Images.

Ewerth, R. (2024). Unlocking Cultural Heritage: Computer Vision for Art and History Archives.

Markus Huff, Nine Abele, Dominik Kimmel, Helen Fischer, Gerrit Anders, Tolgahan Aydin, Jürgen Bude. (2024). ArchiveGPT: Psychological and Technological Perspectives on the AI-Supported Archiving of Image Material.

Kermorvant, C. (2024). How Contemporary Deep Learning Models Describe Early Japanese Photographs?

Puppe, F., N. Fischer, D. Kimmel (2024). Pipeline for Digital Indexing of Archaeological Record Cards.

Radisch, E. (2024). A New Approach to Semi-Automated Annotations with Segment Anything.

Sack, H., & Vafaie, M., Waitelonis J. (2024). Separation of Machine-Printed and Handwritten Text in Archival Documents.

Tolle, K. (2024). Potpourri of Computer Vision in Cultural Heritage.

All of these projects were presented at the conference. The full programme and all abstracts can be found on the website of the Herder Insitute.


Erdal Ayan is a Software developer working at FIZ-Karlsruhe, Germany. As a young researcher and developer, he has been active in Digital Humanities for many years now. He is currently interested in software development in image processing and Computer Vision and has participated in the conference.


Title picture: An example of image processing. Original image, and resulting image after Laplacian and Sobel filters. Alaens, Wikimedia Commons.

Artificial Intelligence in Archives and Collections: Practices, Potentials and Evidence Production in Dealing with Images and Multimodal Cultural Heritage

In this report, the organizers look back on their conference and provide an outlook. Further summaries and reflections of the panels will be presented in a small blog series.

Report on a hybrid conference in Marburg, 12–13 December 2024


In the years to come, curatorial and archival processes in memory and heritage institutions (including key aspects of cataloguing such as description, classification and categorization) will be increasingly supported by automated systems and artificial intelligence. These practices attribute value to sources and link archival materials and collection objects to societal narratives. Collections and archives thus form an essential basis for memory-related discourses and shape our view of the past. New technologies have now reached the stage where they are potentially suitable for the requirements of cultural heritage institutions. There is substantial promise in the partially automated indexing and cataloguing of historical sources, particularly of digital images, the hermeneutics and meaning of images which in the past have only been accessible to the human eye and not the machine.

Images can now be automatically described semantically, making them easier to find. AI methods – and most recently multimodal AI processing – are opening new possibilities for automatic text extraction and layout recognition, automated image segmentation and annotation, as well as the analysis of visual sources and their contextualisation. At the same time, however, there is a lack of knowledge about how evidence – and subsequentially facts – are generated and how AI processes affect the attribution of authenticity to archival documents and photos. Currently, the humanities lack semantically high-quality, historically adequate and subject-appropriate training datasets. Similarly, there is hardly any agreement about what constitutes an acceptable outcome of computational classification processes, or what kind of benchmarks should be used to evaluate the results. We therefore need to develop best practices (that may tap into explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods), benchmarks and common goals. To increase the value that the information and knowledge held in our archives and collections have for future research, we need to deepen our understanding of processes and algorithms.

To deepen the discussion on these questions, the Research Lab ‘Digital Heuristics and Digital History’ of the Leibniz Research Alliance ‘Value of the Past’, in cooperation with NFDI4Memory, Task Area ‘Data Quality’ have organised a conference in Marburg on artificial intelligence in cultural heritage institutions, such as archives and collections, and how these new technologies are transforming archival institutional practices. Topics primarily focused on – but were not limited to – visual sources, such as photography and graphic collections or mixed image-text sources and multimodal information processing.

The conference provided a forum for researchers and practitioners from the humanities, as well as archives and collections to connect with researchers and engineers in the fields of artificial intelligence, computer science and the digital humanities, to discuss new findings, and to exchange experiences. The event was seeking to promote an interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral dialogue between research, development and practice.

The conference brought together curatorial and archiving knowledge and new AI-based methods but has also provided a forum for ethical reflection on the use of AI in academic and archival practices. Participants discussed how automated processing and AI methods require detailed epistemic reflection and methodological-technical control to ensure that no false or tainted evidence is generated. Thus, the conference reflected on the effects of these new technologies on the production of evidence, thereby contributing to the crucial question of how the digital transformation is changing knowledge creation in the humanities and what this means for scholarship in historical disciplines.

The call was met with a large response: Speakers from Austria, China, France, Germany, USA, UK and Sweden presented. More than 400 colleagues from 25 countries, most of them online, registered for the conference and followed the presentations or participated in the discussions. Papers covered topics such as Exploring and Analysing Collections from Textual and Multimodal Contexts, Computer Vision (Semantic Segmentation, Classification, Analysing and Understanding Images), The Effects of Computational Methods on Image Analytical Research and Visual Studies in Cultural Heritage, Opportunities and Challenges for the Automated Indexing and Cataloguing of Visual Sources in Archives and Collections.

As the organizers of the conference, we conclude from the high level of interest that – even though there are many possibilities in the various scientific communities to exchange upon new developments in AI – there is still a need for interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral exchange in the GLAM realm.  We would like to keep this interest alive and support networking on the topic also in the time to come – not limited to conference participants.

Participants – and any colleague who likes to join – will be informed about future activities and about possible publications. We will keep you updated about future publications resulting from the conference. Stay tuned! As a start, we will publish several short summaries and elaborations on selected conference topics on this blog, written by young researchers who participated in the conference. 


Programme and abstracts: https://www.herder-institut.de/event/conference-artificial-intelligence-in-archives-and-collections


Organizers:

Leibniz-Forschungsverbund „Wert der Vergangenheit“, Lab 1.3. Digitale Heuristik und Historik

Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie (LEIZA), Mainz

Herder-Institut für historische Ostmitteleuropaforschung – Institut der Leibniz-Gemeinschaft, Marburg

NFDI4Memory, Task Area Data Quality


This conference report was written by the organizing committee:

Elke Bauer, Herder-Institut

Simon Donig, Herder-Institut

Annette Frey, LEIZA

Dominik Kimmel, LEIZA


Further information on future activities on the topic: Interested parties can still use the conference registration tool to register for forthcoming information.

Contact: archivesai@herder-institut.dedominik.kimmel@leiza.de


Title picture: image detail of the conference flyer

Latenzphasen und latente Zeitschichten – Wie kommt es dazu?

Ein Kommentar zu unserer Blogserie zur Latenz kulturellen Erbes, verfasst von Scarlett Wilks.

Die Auseinandersetzung mit Latenz im Zusammenhang mit Kulturerbe lässt Themen sichtbar werden, die eine zentrale Rolle im Prozess der Erbewerdung spielen. Um zu verstehen, warum kulturelles Erbe latent geworden ist, latent wird oder nie aus der Latenz heraustritt, muss sich mit diesen Themen auseinandergesetzt werden.

By addressing latency in the context of cultural heritage, socially relevant issues emerge that play a central role in the process of heritage-making. To understand why cultural heritage becomes latent, remains latent, or never emerges from latency, these issues must be thoroughly examined.


Für die Blogserie Latenz habe ich mir Gedanken gemacht, inwiefern der Begriff Latenz auch für meine eigene Forschung relevant ist. Denn ich beschäftige mich mit Konzepten des „Vergessens“ und welche Rolle diese bei der Bildung von kulturellem Erbe spielen. Dabei stelle ich mir unter anderem die Frage, was eigentlich von wem wann vergessen wird und wie sich das auf das materielle Erbe auswirkt. Bevor ich an der Tagung „Übersehen, vergessen, stillgestellt? Zur Latenz kulturellen Erbes“ teilnahm, habe ich mich zugegebenermaßen wenig mit Latenz beschäftigt. Ich erhoffte mir von den Beiträgen Antworten auf folgende Fragen: Wie und in welchen Kontexten tritt Latentes auf? Wie wird mit Latenz umgegangen bzw. wie können wir mit Latenz umgehen? Ich habe meine Gedanken zum Tagungsthema und zur im Anschluss erschienenen Blogserie zusammengefasst, als Anregung für weitere Forschung. Um eine erste Schlussfolgerung vorwegzunehmen: Latenz ist bei Fragen des Kulturerbes immer virulent.

Für mich sind bereits während der Tagung zwei mögliche Ebenen deutlich geworden, auf denen Latenz auftreten kann. So kann materielles Kulturerbe zunächst „augenscheinlich“ latent werden. Dies zeigte sich besonders nachvollziehbar im Beitrag von Helmut Groschwitz und Kerstin Kammerer zu Liminale Räume – Latenz, Akteure und Praktiken von und in „Lost Places“. „Lost Places“ befinden sich in einem Zustand zwischen ihrer früheren Nutzung und der Entscheidung über ihre Zukunft – sei es eine dauerhafte neue Nutzung oder der Abriss. Häufig werden sie temporär zwischengenutzt, wie beispielweise von Urban Explorern oder als Eventlocation. Diese Phase beinhaltet häufig Verfall, Vandalismus und Alterungserscheinungen. Ich habe mich gefragt, ob das der Moment ist, an dem Latenz sichtbar wird. Sind somit „Lost Places“ Orte, an denen Latenz auf materieller Ebene ablesbar wird?

Der wohl schon länger andauernde Zwischenzustand eines „Lost Places“, 2024, Foto: Thomas Pokorny.

Andreas Ludwig beschreibt in seinem Beitrag Latenz und Gewissheit. Sedimentierte Wertzuschreibungen in musealen Sammlungen eine Fotografie aus dem Dokumentationszentrum Alltagskultur derDDRmit „Latenz im Karton“. Die Werke in den Sammlungsbeständen, die weder für Forschung noch für Ausstellungen genutzt werden, befinden sich zwischen gesammelt, gesichtet und ausgestellt – in der Latenz. Aber für andere Werke kann es noch schlimmer kommen, denn sie werden tendenziell nie aus der Latenz heraustreten. Grund dafür könnte sein, dass ihnen jeglicher Kontext fehlt und sie, wie Anna-Magdalena Heide in ihrem Beitrag Vergessen – Stillgelegte Objekte in musealen Sammlungen schreibt „von irgendwem, irgendwann, von irgendwoher mitgebracht, dann aber sang- und klanglos in einem Schrank oder Schublade versenkt worden sind“ – wie etwa die 22 Kinderzeichnungen im Archiv des Deutschen Bergbau-Museums Bochum.

Die zweite Ebene, auf der sich Latenz im Kulturerbe zeigt, ist jene, in der Bedeutungszuweisungen, bzw. Bedeutungsebenen von Kulturerbe latent werden. Dies wird beispielweise in Frank Zöllners Beitrag Spottnamen für Denkmäler der DDR. Zwischen Latenz und Renitenz deutlich. Durch neue Sinngebungen, in diesem Fall Spottnamen, werden Objekte angeeignet, und vergangene Bedeutungen in die Latenz gerückt. So kann nicht nur ein Objekt auf physischer Ebene latent werden – indem es in Schubladen, Schränken und Kartons liegt oder unbeachtet im Dickicht steht – sondern bei einer Mehrschichtigkeit von Bedeutungen auch eine Bedeutungszuweisung oder Zeitschicht latent werden, während andere offensichtlich bleiben.

Warum ist oder wird Kulturerbe latent?

Versucht man nun der Frage nachzugehen, warum das von den Autor*innen beschriebene Kulturerbe latent geworden ist, latent ist oder in der Latenz bleibt, sind im Vergleich ähnliche Einflussfaktoren auszumachen. Klar ist, dass Latenz ein raumzeitlich gebundenes Phänomen ist und daher bei einer Untersuchung die Latenzphase oder Latenzschicht eines Objekts in seinem gesellschaftlichen Kontext betrachtet werden muss. In den Beiträgen zu Museen, Kunstwerken und Sammlungen wird deutlich, dass Objekte, die (noch) nicht kanonisierbar sind, also in keine Erzählung eingereiht oder nicht namhaften Künstler*innen zugewiesen werden können, latent sein können. Wenn zudem keine wissenschaftliche Fragestellung am Kulturerbe erarbeitet werden kann, bleiben diese Objekte latent und verstauben schließlich in Depots.

Meiner Meinung nach laufen Objekte auch schon bevor sie in Museen gesammelt und im Karton auf Präsentation warten Gefahr, latent zu werden. Denn bevor Objekte in eine Sammlung oder ein Archiv aufgenommen werden, durchlaufen sie einen Selektionsprozess. Nehmen wir sie auf oder nicht? So schreibt auch Heide über Einflussfaktoren, die auf diesen Prozess einwirken, dass „die Aufnahme von Objekten in museale Sammlungen aber auch von Zufälligkeiten, pragmatischen Entscheidungen, strategischen Zwängen oder der Affinität von Sammlungsmitarbeitenden für ihre Arbeit bestimmt wird“. Demnach kann der Moment der Selektion von pragmatischen oder personellen Faktoren beeinflusst werden und ist damit aleatorisch.

Zwischennutzung des Peter-Behrens-Baus als Kunstraum, Ausstellung Himmel Unter Berlin: The Dark Rooms Vertical, Berlin-Oberschöneweide, 2024, Foto: Thomas Pokorny.

In Bezug auf die Latenz von Sinnbezügen und Bedeutungsebenen verspüre ich die Notwendigkeit zu fragen, wer diese überhaupt in welchen Kontexten beeinflussen kann. Wer hat die Deutungshoheit, wer formt diese, und wer kann Sinnbezüge und Bedeutungszuweisungen dem Latenten einschreiben? Welche und wessen Bedeutungen werden aufgrund von Machtmechanismen sowie Unterdrückung latent und welche nicht? Um herauszufinden, wieso etwas latent ist, lohnt es sich nach Akteur*innen, Akteurskonstellationen sowie Machtverhältnissen zu fragen.

Und nun?

Wieso wird Kulturerbe also latent? Die Blogeinträge haben gezeigt, dass es darauf keine simple Antwort gibt. Wenn das so einfach zu beantworten gewesen wäre, hätten die Herausgeber*innen sicher keine Tagung zu dem Thema ausgerichtet. Im Grunde müssen immer kontextualisierende Untersuchungen durchgeführt und Faktoren wie Akteurskonstellationen, Interessensvertreter*innen, Kanon, Selektion und Erinnerungskultur betrachtet werden. In Bezug auf meine eigene Forschung hat sich herausgestellt, dass insbesondere die Frage nach Macht in Deutungs- sowie Selektionsprozessen von Bedeutung ist. Nicht ohne Grund sind Fragen nach der Deutungshoheit in den Diskursen um Erbe zentral und werden in den (critical) heritage studies längst verhandelt. Neben der raumzeitlichen Gebundenheit von Latenz habe ich mir die Frage gestellt, ob es interessant wäre, in die Betrachtung einzubeziehen, für welche Gruppen (z.B. Heritage Communities) welches Erbe bzw. welche Zeitschichten oder Bedeutungszuweisungen latent sind und welche nicht. Offen bleibt für mich noch die Frage nach dem Umgang mit latentem Kulturerbe. Welche existierenden Methoden könnten wir anwenden, oder müssen wir möglicherweise neue entwickeln? Seit der Tagung sehe ich jedenfalls latentes Kulturerbe an jeder Ecke lauern und frage mich, wann dieses aus der Deckung kommt.


Scarlett Wilks, M.A., arbeitet in Berlin und ist Doktorandin. Ihre Promotion wird durch das Elsa-Neumann-Stipendium des Landes Berlin gefördert.


Titelbild: Spuren der Latenz, Wünsdorf bei Berlin, 2020, Foto: Scarlett Wilks.

Image Controversies – Die Wiederkehr der Bilderstürme in der Gegenwart

Christiane Kruse, Birgit Mersmann und Arnold Bartetzky über Denkmalstürze, Bilderstürme und den Streitwert der Vergangenheit.

Birgit Mersmann, Christiane Kruse und Arnold Bartetzky im Interview über ihren kürzlich erschienenen Band Image Controversies. Contemporary Iconoclasm in Art, Media, and Cultural Heritage.


Birgit Mersmann, Christiane Kruse and Arnold Bartetzky in an interview about their recently published volume Image Controversies. Contemporary Iconoclasm in Art, Media, and Cultural Heritage.


Sie haben vor kurzem das Buch „Image Controversies. Contemporary Iconoclasm in Art, Media, and Cultural Heritage“ zusammen herausgegeben. Was war der Anlass dafür und wie ist die Idee dazu entstanden?

Birgit Mersmann: Am Anfang stand die Beobachtung einer – unerwarteten – Wiederkehr von Bilderstürmen in der Gegenwart. Das Fach Kunstgeschichte hatte sich vor allem mit historischen sowie kunstreflexiven Formen des Ikonoklasmus beschäftigt – erinnert sei etwa an Martin Warnkes Buch Bildersturm. Die Zerstörung des Kunstwerks (1988) und Dario Gambonis Studie Zerstörte Kunst. Bildersturm und Vandalismus im 20. Jahrhundert (1998). Nach 1989 geriet zwar der postkommunistische Denkmalsturz ins Blickfeld der Denkmalpflege in Deutschland. Die Forschung zu zeitgenössischen Ikonoklasmen in einer breiteren Perspektive nahm aber sichtbar erst von 2021 an Fahrt auf, als David Freedbergs Band Iconoclasm in erweiterter Fassung wiederaufgelegt wurde.

Konkreter Auslöser, das Thema des Ikonoklasmus kunst-, bild-, kultur- und geschichtswissenschaftlich aufzuarbeiten, waren die Denkmalstürze in Südafrika und den USA, die sich seit 2015 gegen Kolonialismus, Rassismus und Rechtsextremismus richteten. Statuen von Konföderierten-Generälen, Unterstützern und Profiteuren des Sklavenhandels (wie etwa Cecile Rhodes) sowie Kolumbusfiguren wurden von ihren Sockeln gestürzt. Das machte uns nachdenklich und mündete 2020 in die Organisation eines Workshops zu Reemerging Iconoclasms am Kulturwissenschaftlichen Institut (KWI) in Essen, der das Thema gegenwartsbezogen, interdisziplinär und aus einer globalen Perspektive verhandeln sollte. Die Konferenz gab den Impuls für die hier diskutierte Bucherscheinung.

Spuren des Protests gegen Rassismus: Graffito am Vance Memorial in Ashville, North Carolina, 2022 © aus besprochenem Band.

Christiane Kruse: Mein Zugang zum Thema ergab sich aus dem Interesse für ‚starke‘ Bilder, die in der traditionellen Kunstwissenschaft vor allem in der Hochkunst westlicher Provenienz gesehen wurden. W.J.T. Mitchell hat mit seiner Studie What do pictures want? (2005) bereits auf das starke Begehren von Bildern aufmerksam gemacht und die Tatsache, dass Bilder ihre Betrachter provozieren können. Genau dieser Ansatz hat mich dazu bewegt, in einem mit Birgit Meyer herausgegebenen Band (Taking Offense. Religion, Art, and Visual Culture in Plural Configurations, 2018) darüber nachzudenken, welche Rolle die westliche Kunstgeschichte in Kontroversen über Bilder spielt, die nicht im Kunstkontext entstanden sind. Gezeigt werden konnte auch in dem hier vorgestellten Band, dass Bilder in komplizierte, kulturhistorische Kontexte verwickelt sein können, die zu Anstoß bis hin zu ihrer Zerstörung führen.

Arnold Bartetzky: Ich habe mich in verschiedenen Zusammenhängen mit dem Umgang mit Denkmälern des Kommunismus beschäftigt, zuletzt auch im Kontext der Entwicklung des Leibniz-Forschungsverbunds „Wert der Vergangenheit“. Mich interessierte seit längerer Zeit auch die globale Dimension des Themas Denkmalsturz. Die neue Welle von Angriffen auf Denkmäler nach der Ermordung von George Floyd im Jahr 2020 war für mich ein Anstoß, dem Thema intensiver und systematischer nachzugehen. Der von Birgit Mersmann und Christiane Kruse organisierte Workshop bot eine willkommene Gelegenheit dazu.

Die Verwandlung eines Heldendenkmals der Südstaaten in ein Mahnmal der Black-Lives-Matter-Bewegung: Das Denkmal für Robert Lee in Richmond, Virginia, nach der Ermordung von George Floyd, Foto 2020. © aus besprochenem Band.

Sie selbst haben auch jeweils einen Beitrag zu dem Buch beigesteuert. Was waren Ihre Themen?

Arnold Bartetzky: Ich widme mich in einer Ost und West verbindenden Perspektive den Auseinandersetzungen um missliebige Kunstwerke in Museen und den Angriffen auf Denkmäler in jüngster Zeit, wobei ich Beispiele aus den USA und aus verschiedenen Teilen Europas heranziehe. Dabei zeigen sich unter anderem frappante Parallelen in den Reaktionsmustern gegenüber Kunstwerken und Geschichtszeugnissen, die nicht den aktuellen Weltanschauungen entsprechen. Sie werden im Umgang mit als moralisch anstößig empfundenen Bildern in Museen ebenso deutlich wie in den Kampagnen zur Dekommunisierung und Dekolonialisierung des öffentlichen Raums.

Im Fokus des antikolonialistischen Aktivismus: Bismarck-Denkmal in Hamburg-Altona, Foto 2020 © aus besprochenem Band.

Christiane Kruse: In meinem Beitrag geht es um die Kritik an einer im Stadtraum vor dem Wohnhaus des Künstlers Hasemann nicht gerade exponiert aufgestellten N***statue, die seitens der Anwohner ursprünglich als Hommage an den Künstler gedacht war und lange Zeit niemanden störte. Im Zuge der von der offenen Stadtgesellschaft betriebenen Dekolonialisierung des Stadtraums, hier Berlin, missfiel dieses Bildwerk und wurde zum Politikum. Es sollte entfernt werden und geriet dabei zum Diskursobjekt widerstreitender politischer Meinungen über Kolonialismus, Kunst im Nationalsozialismus, Rassismus, Migration, Rechtsextremismus.

Birgit Mersmann: Mit meinem bildkulturwissenschaftlichen Beitrag zu virtuellen und physischen Rekonstruktionsvorschlägen zum zerstörten Kulturerbe von Bamyian suche ich das Konzept des Postikonoklasmus zu beleben, das innerhalb der Ikonoklasmusforschung bisher nur marginal Verwendung fand. Postikonoklasmus bezieht sich auf die Phase nach dem ikonoklastischen Zerstörungsakt; im Fokus steht der Umgang mit dem zerstörten Bildwerk bzw. Monument, der sich selbst wiederum zu einem Bilderstreit entzünden kann. Bereits 2021 habe ich mich in einem Aufsatz mit dem Titel Islamistischer oder okzidentalistischer Ikonoklasmus? mit der Zerstörung der Buddha-Statuen von Bamyian befasst, die inzwischen als Auftakt eines zeitgenössischen performativen Ikonoklasmus im Bereich des globalen Kulturerbes im 21. Jahrhundert gilt. Mein aktueller Beitrag in unserem Band Image Controversies wirft die Frage auf, inwieweit digital entworfene Rekonstruktionsvorschläge als ikonoklastische Praxis gegenüber dem zerstörten Original verstanden werden können. Anhand der Analyse unterschiedlicher Revitalisierungsvorschläge führe ich vor, wie der Wert der Vergangenheit, hier des Weltkulturerbes von Bamyian, und seine Bedeutung für die Gegenwart in digitalen substitutiven Bildakten neu ausgehandelt werden, die selbst wiederum eine mediale Kontroverse um wahre und falsche Bilder sowie bildliche Verlebendigung auslösen.

Zerstörung von Kulturerbe als Mission: Propagandavideo des Islamischen Staats, 2017 © aus besprochenem Band.

Die Buchbeiträge beziehen sich damit auf recht aktuelle Beispiele von Ikonoklasmus, gesellschaftlichem Streit über Bilder und Denkmalstürzen. Würden Sie sagen, dass wir in einer neuen Zeit der Infragestellung von Denkmälern, aber auch von politisch unliebsamen Bildern in den Künsten und Medien leben? Oder ist das nichts Neues?

Christiane Kruse: Das Thema Denkmalsturz ist so alt wie die Denkmalkunst selbst und daher nichts Neues. Neu und aktuell ist aber, dass sich Denkmalsturz in pluralen Gesellschaften ereignet und Denkmäler bzw. öffentlich oder museal aufgestellte Bilder zu Brennpunkten beispielsweise von Kolonial- und Migrationsgeschichte werden können. Auch in Museen wurden Bilder aus politischen Gründen immer wieder abgehängt und konnten bei Veränderung der politischen Situation auch wieder aufgehängt werden. Museen, die sich der Pflege und Ausstellung von globalen Kulturen widmen, ziehen im Zuge von Debatten über Kolonialismus und Migrationsgesellschaften sowie Tourismusströmen immer mehr Besucher*innen an. So arbeiten etwa im Amsterdamer Wereldmuseum (ehemals Tropenmuseum), wie Pooyan Tamimi Arab in seinem Beitrag in unserem Band berichtet, Kurator*innen sehr genau daran, wie bzw. ob überhaupt Bilder, die potenziell Kontroversen seitens der Besucher*innen auslösen können, ausgestellt werden sollten. Und dann kann es passieren, dass sich die Kurator*innen selbst nicht einig sind, wie etwa mit einem Bild von Mohamed zu verfahren sei: Kann man es zeigen oder läuft man Gefahr, dass gar ein Anschlag auf das Bild als Stellvertreter einer bestimmten islamischen Glaubensrichtung vorgenommen wird?

Können Denkmalstürze gesellschaftlich gerechtfertigt sein? Und wann ist das nicht der Fall? Haben Denkmäler im öffentlichen Raum auf der Straße eine andere Wirkung, als wenn wir ihnen in Museen begegnen? (Meist werden die Statuen ja nur aus dem öffentlichen Raum entfernt.)

Arnold Bartetzky: Als ein in Deutschland sozialisierter Kunsthistoriker mit besonderer Nähe zur Denkmalpflege finde ich es fast immer bedauerlich, wenn Denkmäler aus dem öffentlichen Raum verschwinden. Zudem bin ich der Meinung, dass wir gerade die unbequemen, heute Anstoß erregenden Denkmäler brauchen, die an die historischen Brüche, einstigen Selbstgewissheiten, Verirrungen und häufig auch Verbrechen der Vergangenheit erinnern – und zwar im öffentlichen Raum und nicht nur im Museum, wohin nur ein relativ kleiner Teil der Bevölkerung den Weg findet. Wenn ein Denkmal aus heutiger Sicht politisch oder ethisch inakzeptabel ist, kann es mit einer kommentierenden Inschrift kontextualisiert werden. Eine produktive Möglichkeit der Auseinandersetzung bieten auch Gegendenkmäler, wofür es in Deutschland einige gute Beispiele gibt. Ich sehe aber auch, dass der Wert des Denkmalerbes nicht immer der wichtigste Gesichtspunkt sein muss. Es gibt auch besondere Situationen, in denen der Denkmalsturz politisch geboten oder zumindest psychologisch verständlich sein kann. So glaube ich zum Beispiel, dass es uns heute nicht ansteht, die von Russlands Angriffskrieg terrorisierten Menschen in der Ukraine zu belehren, wenn sie Denkmäler der Sowjetherrschaft und des russischen Hegemonialanspruchs beseitigen.

Entsowjetisierung des öffentlichen Raums in der Ukraine: Sturz einer Lenin-Statue in Chmelnyzkyj, Foto 2014 © aus besprochenem Band.

Was unterscheidet Bilderstürme von unten und von oben?

Arnold Bartetzky: Tatsächlich sind Bilderstürme von unten eher eine Seltenheit. Und das ist bei genauerer Betrachtung keine Überraschung, denn für die Beseitigung von Bildwerken aus dem öffentlichen Raum braucht man meist einen gewissen Organisierungsgrad und damit auch zumindest Teilhabe an politischer Macht. In der Geschichte handelt es sich bei den meisten Denkmalbeseitigungen um organisierte Aktionen mit Zustimmung oder zumindest Duldung der aktuellen Machthaber, in vielen Fällen waren es auch Verwaltungsakte. Die Vorstellung von geknechteten Volksmassen oder diskriminierten gesellschaftlichen Gruppen, die sich durch Denkmalsturz im Kampf gegen eine ohnmächtig gewordene Obrigkeit selbst ermächtigen, trifft in den meisten Fällen nicht zu.

Künstlerische Auseinandersetzung mit Denkmalsturz: “Once in the XX Century”, Video von Deimantas Narkevičius, 2004 © aus besprochenem Band.

Lässt sich aus Ihren und den anderen Beiträgen eine gemeinsame Aussage, eine Art Fazit, ziehen? Oder sind die Themen zu divers und stehen eher für sich?

Christiane Kruse: Es war die Absicht der Herausgeber*innen, in dem Band das Themenfeld möglichst breit zu öffnen, um eben zu zeigen, dass jeder ikonoklastische Akt heute einer gewissenhaften Kontextualisierung bedarf, die oft tief in die Geschichte nicht nur des gestürzten Denkmals, sondern darüber hinaus auch in die Geschichte der Kulturen im Umgang mit Bildern hineinreicht. Das gemeinsame Fazit lautet daher, dass der bildkulturwissenschaftliche Zugriff auf das Thema transdisziplinär angelegt sein muss und Expert*nnen aus verschiedenen Disziplinen zusammenbringen muss, um eine globalisierte Bildkultur im 21. Jahrhundert verstehen zu lernen.

Unser Forschungsverbund beschäftigt sich mit dem Wert der Vergangenheit. Hat sich Ihre Perspektive auf den Wert der Vergangenheit durch dieses Projekt verändert?

Birgit Mersmann: Als Forscherin und Gegenwartsanalystin mit Schwerpunkt zeitgenössische Kunst und digitale Bildkulturen hat mir das Buchprojekt verdeutlicht, wie wesentlich eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit unterschiedlichen Wertigkeiten der Vergangenheit, insbesondere konfligierenden historischen Deutungsansprüchen ist, um die aktuellen, medial gesteuerten Bilddebatten und -dispute besser zu verstehen, die von friedlichem Aktivismus bis zur zerstörerischen Gewaltanwendung gehen können. Image Controversies hat mir hat gezeigt, dass die historische Macht der Bilder als geschichtetes politisches, religiöses und kulturelles Erbe bis in die Gegenwart hineinragt, um dort dekonstruiert und reimaginiert zu werden.

Wollen Sie mit Ihrer Publikation in diese öffentlichen Kontroversen eingreifen? Und wenn ja, mit welcher Intention?

Christiane Kruse: Der Band steht im Dienst der Aufklärung von Kontroversen sowie des Verstehens sich verändernder Bildkulturen steht. Wir wollen mit ihm dazu beitragen, eine globale Bildkulturwissenschaft zu etablieren. Es geht dabei um neue Forschungsfragen und methodische Herangehensweisen, die eine Reihe verschiedener Expertisen verlangt, um der Komplexität der Image Controversies gerecht zu werden.  

Arnold Bartetzky: Der Band versammelt Beiträge von dreizehn Autorinnen und Autoren. Sie repräsentieren ein breites Spektrum von Themen, Fragestellungen, disziplinären und methodischen Zugängen. Es sind wissenschaftliche Beiträge, in denen allerdings zum Teil auch Haltungen zu aktuellen Auseinandersetzungen um Bilder erkennbar sind. Es wäre übergriffig von uns, wollten wir die Ergebnisse des Bandes an dieser Stelle auf eine aktivistische Formel bringen. Ich glaube aber, dass wir für alle Autorinnen und Autoren sprechen, wenn wir sagen, dass Bilder, auch wenn sie uns selbst heute missfallen, Teil des Kulturerbes sind, das einen verantwortungsvollen Umgang verlangt und vor Vernichtung zu bewahren ist.

Birgit Mersmann:  Ein direkter Eingriff in die öffentlichen Kontroversen würde voraussetzen, dass sich die versammelten Autor*innen in diesem Band als wissenschaftliche Aktivist*innen verstehen. Eine solche Verbindung aus Wissenschaft und Aktivismus ist nicht die Intention gewesen. Vorrangiges Ziel der Publikation ist es, neues bildkulturwissenschaftliches Wissen über Bildkontroversen in unterschiedlichen Streitkontexten und Konfliktbereichen zu generieren und die bisherigen Forschungen zu Ikonoklasmen in einen gegenwartsbezogenen, globalen wie interdisziplinären Debattenrahmen zu stellen.


Image Controversies. Contemporary Iconoclasm in Art, Media, and Cultural Heritage.
Herausgegeben von: Birgit Mersmann, Christiane Kruse und Arnold Bartetzky. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter 2024 [open access], https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110773576


Das Interview führte Mascha Neumann, Projektassistentin im Leibniz-Forschungsverbund “Wert der Vergangenheit” am Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam.

Prof. Dr. Birgit Mersmann ist Professorin für Zeitgenössische Kunst und digitale Bildkulturen am Kunsthistorischen Institut der Universität Bonn.

Prof. Dr. Christiane Kruse ist Professorin für Kunstgeschichte und visuelle Kulturen sowie geschäftsführende Direktorin am Institut für Kunst-, Design- und Medienwissenschaften der Muthesius Kunsthochschule Kiel.

Prof. Dr. Arnold Bartetzky ist Leiter der Abteilung “Kultur und Imagination” am Leibniz-Institut für Geschichte und Kultur des östlichen Europa (GWZO) in Leipzig. Er ist zudem Sprecher des Lab 3.1 “Streitwert der Vergangenheit” des Leibniz-Forschunsverbunds “Wert der Vergangheit”.


Titelbild: Nach langer Diskussion: Der wirkungsvoll in Szene gesetzte Sturz der Edward-Colston-Statue in Bristol, Foto 2020. © aus besprochenem Band.