The Sutton Subrang Dance Ensemble, Photo: Rolf Killius

The Museum of Croydon and the London Sitar Ensemble hosted a major exhibition in the Croydon NOW gallery of the Museum of Croydon, and other public display areas at Croydon Clocktower, from April to July 2009. The exhibition showcased the outputs of the ‘String and Dance Festival’ Project which was run by London Sitar Ensemble. The core exhibition comprised of oral history interviews (video), musical instruments and associated objects from the Community Groups involved and other donors (potentially the Horniman Museum), photographs and videos showing musical performances and dances from the Indian Sub-Continent as performed in the UK, costumes and associated musical instruments of all eight classical Indian dances and three folk dance genres from western India. Within the musical instruments display the emphasis was on string instruments like the sitar, sarangi, violin, veena, sarod, santoor and the supporting instruments like drums and cymbals.

Two photo exhibitions complemented the exhibition and were displayed in other public areas of the Clocktower: one showing Croydon-based dancers and musicians; and the other about a music instruments collection project in India. The exhibition was embedded in a string of events like workshops, rehearsals, oral tradition interviews and concerts. Taking and using a wealth of digital video, still photography and audio recordings constituted a major part of the activities and display.

Indian music and dance is one of the finest traditions in the world. Tracing its roots back to times immemorial, these art forms have an interesting pattern of evolutionary changes. Many changes, transformation and evolution have taken place, enriched by the contribution of the musicians and dancers, great and small, famous and unknown. The India – Britain story is a 400 year long tale of travel, migration and cultural exchange. This journey has made a significant influence on the cultural scene of British Arts. The ‘Indian Strings and Dances’ project, undertaken by London Sitar Ensemble and Croydon Museum and supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, aims to explore the evolution and contribution made by the musicians and dancers in Britain.

The exhibition was curated by Lata Desai and Rolf Killius in close collaboration with Rob Shakespeare, Acting Museum Service Manager.

5^th to 10^th April 2009, Hanoi, Republic of Viet Nam

The UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Hanoi People’s Committee, Hanoi University of Architecture (HAU), the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) and the Organizing Committee are pleased to announce the forthcoming 12^th FUUH International Seminar to be held at the National Convention Center (NCC) in Hanoi, Republic of Viet Nam, on the following theme:

“HISTORIC URBAN LANSCAPES: A NEW CONCEPT? A NEW CATEGORY OF WORLD HERITAGE SITES?”

The CALL FOR PAPERS and all relevant information is available on the seminar website:

http://universityandheritage.net/hanoi_seminar_2009

For further information, please contact with the seminar secretary:

2009seminar@fuuh.upv.es

]]> http://blog.icomos-uk.org/2008/10/08/historic-urban-landscapes-a-new-concept-a-new-category-of-world-heritage-sites/feed/ 0 icomos-uk http://blog.icomos-uk.org/2008/09/16/a-journey-through-kazakhstan/ http://blog.icomos-uk.org/2008/09/16/a-journey-through-kazakhstan/#comments Tue, 16 Sep 2008 09:34:42 +0000 icomos-uk http://icomosuk.wordpress.com/?p=784 ]]> Saturday 4th October, 9.30am-7pm

A study day organised in association with the British Museum, British Kazakh Society and the Royal Asiatic Society, focussing on the history and culture of Kazakhstan. It will include lectures by noted academics and writers of the archaeology, history, art and music of Kazakhstan, providing an introduction to this vast country of diverse landscapes and a rich cultural heritage. There will also be a performance by renowned Kazakh musicians of traditional music, a photographic exhibition and a reception at the end of the day.

For more information and bookings please click here.

Monpa Musician, Photo: Rolf Killius

Seven months ago the Horniman Museum opened its exhibition Utsavam – Music from India, exploring the rich and diverse music of India. It takes its name from the Sanscrit word “Utsavam”, meaning musical festivities.

Utsavam – Music from India explores the cultural and lingustic diversity of a land that is home to a sixth of the world’s population. Sound, film footage, musical instruments and objects including a spectacular Kathakali dance costume take you on a journey to India, where music traditions are under threat at a time of rapid change in the subcontinent.

Responding to the huge public demand, Rolf Killius, Co-curator of the exhibition, decided to invite for a special guided tour through the exhibition. On Sunday 21 September the Museum will host the Kala Chetana Kathakali Company with special guests (dancers and musicians) from Kerala. The special tour will take place on 21st September at 4.15pm directly after the Kathakali performance at the exhibition entrance. To see the line-up details, read the press reports and watch the programmes about the exhibition please follwo this link www.rolfkillius.com produced by Nigel Muris from Printstream.You might also be interested in an exciting new project, which in a way follows the path cleared by the Horniman’s Utsavam exhibition: an online sound project of the British Library Sound Archive in collaboration with the Horniman Museum, Traditional Music in India, where 100 music examples from recording trips to India starting in 1995 will be selcted and presented on the official British Library website and will be downloadable in mp3 format.

Heritage and Environment: An Indian Diary by Shyam Chainani

This is a personal account of a lifetime’s campaigning for the protection of India’s architectural and wider environmental heritage by a remarkable man.

Shyam Chainani’s father was, in the time of the Raj, one of the few Indians to become an ICS officer (one of the ‘heaven born’) and after Independence was appointed a High Court Judge. His son initially followed a conventional career as a business executive with the great Tata Group, following education in India, Magdalene College Cambridge and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

As a young man Shyam Chainani’s instinctive appreciation of the contribution historic buildings make to the urban environment led him to start questioning the destruction which he saw around him in the Bombay of the 1960s and 70s. When his beloved Royal Bombay Yacht Club’s nearby predecessor building of 1898 was proposed for demolition, he was galvanised into what became an obsessive lifetime’s devotion to environmental action.

It is a remarkable tribute to Tata and, by extension, the new young democratic country of India, that Chainani’s employer continued, for over 20 years, to pay a salary to allow him to carry out full time campaigning work, even when sometimes those campaigns were in direct opposition to the interests of the company. Is there a comparable example in UK business history?

The 500 plus pages of this illustrated book recount numerous instances of moral bravery by the committed few who gathered under the banner of the Bombay Environmental Action Group (BEAG) and were prepared to stick their necks out over matters of principle, sometimes in the face of seriously intimidating threats.

The name of the Group came to be rather misleading once its campaigning activities extended to many of the other great cities of India and even to hill stations and sites of ecological importance.

One of its bitterest and most challenging campaigns was fought in the 1980s against the might of the Navy, in defence of Bombay’s historic Naval Dockyard and its other historic buildings. The dockyard has been in continuous use since the early part of the 18th century and is where numerous ships for the East India Company and later the Royal Navy were built. Chainani describes how, after protracted and sometimes vicious exchanges at ministerial and chief of staff level the Government’s Director of Archaeology was finally won over by BEAG and the Government was persuaded to declare the historic structures listed buildings. This together with the winning over of some admirals frustrated the Navy’s intention to demolish the 18th and 19th century frontage buildings.

Government ‘heritage’ officials were not always so cooperative. Protection for India’s archaeological sites was put in place before Independence but the resultant great bureaucracy ‘The Archaeological Survey of India’ (ASI) considers the protection of the overwhelming bulk of India’s built heritage outside its remit and the book recounts how it has fallen to the heroic discriminating few to campaign for legislative protection for this vitally important part of the country’s cultural heritage.

Anyone interested in India’s extraordinary post independence history will find this an intriguing read, providing as it does an insight into the complex workings of that liberal democracy. Those who have fallen under the spell of India and love its historic towns and villages should purchase a copy to demonstrate their solidarity with the brave few whose heroic battles are catalogued here.

Barry Joyce
March 2008

Book details

HERITAGE AND ENVIRONMENT: AN INDIAN DIARY
By
Shyam Chainani

Published by The Urban Design Research Institute. November 2007.

Rs.995, $25, £13

ISBN 81-9019740-4-4

The project is funded by an important donation from the Sultanate of Oman. The competition was launched by the Minister of Culture, Mr Tarek Mitri, at the General Assembly of the International Union of Architects on 4 July in Turin.

All information on the competition and registration forms are available at:

www.darbayrut.org

Full details and Submission Form

Abstract Deadline: 1 September 2008

Rapid economic and social change across Asia today means the region’s heritage is at once under threat and undergoing a revival as never before. Expanding infrastructures, increasing incomes, liberalizing economies and the lowering of borders, both physical and political, are all converging as powerful forces transforming Asia’s social, cultural and physical landscapes.

But as the region’s societies look forward, there are competing forces that ensure they re-visit the past and the inherited. In recent years the idea of ‘heritage’ – both natural and cultural – has come to the fore across Asia, driven by a language of identity, tradition, revival, and sustainability. For some, heritage has become an effective means for protecting those landscapes, rituals, artifacts or traditional values endangered by rapid socio-economic change. For others, it has emerged as a valuable resource for achieving wider goals such as poverty alleviation, the legitimization of narratives of place and past, nation building or the cultural profiling of citizens. And yet for others, heritage protection is an obstacle inhibiting progress, national unification, or the shedding of unwanted memories.

In a region of immensely uneven change – such that the pre-/industrial and post-industrial all co-exist to create simultaneous presents – major analytical challenges arise from the need to preserve, safeguard and restore in contexts where aspirations for modernization and development are powerful and legitimate forces. To date however, much of the analysis of heritage in Asia has relied upon inherited or borrowed conceptions, and assumptions about what should be valued and privileged. The legacies of colonialism, state-centric agendas, social inequality, and the uneasy management of pluralist populations all conspire to stifle open and innovative discussion. There is little doubt that over the coming decade the contestations surrounding heritage in Asia will continue to intensify, whereby converging forces and conflicting values are the norm.

Hosted in Singapore, Heritage in Asia: Converging Forces and Conflicting Values examines heritage in relation to the broader social, environmental and economic changes occurring across Asia today. Moving beyond sector specific analyses, we define heritage in holistic terms and include the natural and cultural, the tangible and intangible. We strongly welcome contributions which consider the validity of current heritage theory for understanding contemporary Asia, and where appropriate, offer new conceptual and analytical directions. We also encourage submissions from researchers who offer insights into the connections between heritage and social development, urban studies, post-conflict reconstruction, migration/diaspora, trans-national capitalism, human rights, or popular culture. The conference provides the interdisciplinary platform necessary for making sense of the broader contexts and forces surrounding heritage in Asia today; and, in so doing, offers an innovative look at the rapid and complex socio-cultural changes now occurring across the region.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Prof. William Logan, UNESCO Chair and Director of Cultural Heritage Centre for Asia-Pacific, Deakin University
Dr Nobuko Inaba, Professor of World Heritage Studies Program, University of Tsukuba
Dr Johannes Widodo, Professor of Architecture, National University of Singapore

Proposed Themes:

Heritage in Cosmopolitan Urban Spaces
Across Asia cities continue to expand at unprecedented rates. Migrating populations, urban development and real estate speculation are placing severe pressure on fragile heritage resources. Simultaneously though, as cities compete for attention in today’s ‘new economies’ they increasingly draw on heritage resources to brand themselves as sites of cultural or historical interest. What strategies successfully protect historic sites from the real estate developer? What role should the residues of colonialism play in new urban blueprints? How can the social pluralism of today’s urban landscapes be reflected and equitably represented in the built environment?

Potential themes include:

• Heritage and Performing The Global City
• Industrial, 20th Century and Independence Heritage
• Rural, Urban Transitions: Landscapes of the Vernacular and Everyday Heritage

Heritage, Reconstruction and Reconciliation
In recent years devastating disasters – whether it be from earthquakes, cyclones and tsunamis, or from the manmade violence of civil wars and conflict – have led to the destruction of irreplaceable architectural and archaeological sites across Asia. But should reconstruction and revival merely be about the heritage resources themselves, or can heritage play a wider role in the re-constitution of traumatized communities and the reconstruction of livelihoods? Does the language of ‘commemoration’, so favored by the international community, merely result in the retention of localized hostilities or can memorials be used as a tool for reconciliation?

Potential themes include:

• Heritage and Post-Conflict/Post Disaster Livelihoods
• Trauma, Memory and Forgetting
• Post-Disaster Governance: Capacity Building, Geopolitics and Cultural Diplomacy

Economies of Heritage
Heritage is now widely employed as a ‘resource’ for socio-economic development. The use of cultural and natural heritage by governments, non-governmental agencies and institutions like the World Bank and Asian Development Bank within a framework of development has yet to receive the critical attention it deserves. Is heritage merely being exploited as an economic resource by wealthy elites or can it contribute to programs of ‘sustainable development’ that foster more equitable economic growth? Can poverty reduction help curb the illicit trafficking of cultural antiquities? In what circumstances do initiatives to promote intangible heritage create gender specific economies?

Potential themes include:

• Heritage, Tourism and Development
• Theorizing the ‘Values’ of Heritage
• Sustainability, Community, Participation: Concepts or Buzzwords?

Heritage and Diversity
In recent years cultural heritage has emerged as an effective tool for promoting a benign language of difference within and across communities. But how successfully do current heritage policies reflect the cultural, ethnic and religious diversities of Asia? Do UNESCO conventions on ‘intangible heritage’ promote pluralism or are they enabling states to further their agendas of culturally profiling their citizens? How will the consumption of the Other or the exotic by a fast growing Asian tourism market influence the socio-cultural topography of the region?

Potential themes include:

• Ethnicity, Culture and Plurality
• Heritage, Human Rights, and Indigenity
• Empowering The ‘Bearers of Culture’

Heritage and Modernity
Modernity across Asia has destabilized previously accepted assumptions about ‘authenticity’ and the aesthetics of nature and culture. Do heritage frameworks conceived within the cultural traditions of ‘Western’ modernity remain valid for Asia today? In a region undergoing rapid industrialization, is industrial heritage a relevant category of social commemoration? Does a concern for the preservation of cultural heritage inhibit the shedding of the ‘post-colonial’? How should natural landscapes best be protected from ‘modern’ intrusions? What rights should communities living inside historic landscapes have towards development and ‘modernization’? Do new media technologies present new opportunities for interpreting the past?

Potential themes include:

• The Modern/Postmodern: Towards Asian Centric Theories of Heritage
• Simultaneous Presents and The Multiple Temporalities of Place
• Media, Popular Culture and Heritage

Submission Details

250-word abstracts and a 5-line biography should be submitted by 1 September 2008. Successful applicants will be advised by 15 September 2008and will be required to send in a completed paper by 15 December 2008. Some funding will be available for those in the Asian Region, post-graduate students, and others unable to fund themselves. Selected papers will be put forward for publication in a refereed edited volume.

Please submit enquiries and/or Abstracts to Dr Patrick Daly (aripd@nus.edu.sg) or Dr Tim Winter (tim.winter@usyd.edu.au).

Further details and Submission Form