Giorgia Aquilar (Venedig/Weimar): »Metaphors, Discourses, Becomings«

Consider the crystal. It has a thwarted history as a spatial and material metaphor, symbolizing
a plethora of analogous terrains, from the micro to the cosmic. It embodies polar opposites of organic and inorganic, unity and fractures, and myriad conditions in between. In its kaleidoscopic meanings, the crystal is also a metaphor for metaphor. From Greek metapherein, «to transfer», the etymology of the term suggests a passage, a change in state, a transference of meaning. Transposed to the heritage realm, the act of «carrying over» recalls the transmission of a legacy across spatiotemporal dimensions. The metamorphic and transformative potential of heritage metaphors is here intended in terms of a transduction: a movement from one state to the next. Originating from the sciences and appropriated in philosophical terms by Gilbert Simondon, transduction is here re-appropriated as a cultural technique and heritage practice. The ambiguity carried over in the transductive process seems to mirror the paradox of heritage preservation, suspended between impermanence and inertia. In this state of suspension, heritage reveals itself as never pre-constituted and never stabilized, and thus oriented towards the emergence of the new: new materialities and metastabilities. Drawing on these and other metaphors, a set of discourses emerge as counternarratives for a heritage that intentionally accommodates transience and decay. Against the reduction of heritage (hi) stories to a «single story», these counterdiscourses tend to dismantle established genealogies and subvert commonly accepted norms, towards the liberation of the built legacy from its still status or taxidermy, to use another metaphor stemming from the (non) living realm. Freed from any encapsulating imago – to borrow once again from the biological lexicon – heritage engenders sequences of perpetual becomings, becoming itself otherwise.