DIVERSIONS 
MEETING 29-O5-2019, DE KROOK, GENT
13:00 - 17:00

Start with a round of introductions

Kris Rutten, UGent
Welcome!
Currently instrumental approach to culture - and intangible heritage - within the European Union. 

Introduction to De Krook: urban regeneration project; the idea of an 'opera house of the future' starting in 2000, but that didn't happen...
2005: 'the library of the future' (Krook) was built
https://dekrook.be/wat-is-de-krook/project-de-krook

How can the institution create critical mediations of arts and culture that take technology and societal stakes into account? 

Cultural heritage needs to perform both diversity AND unity. Kris has written an article on this topic that will be updated for the first DiVersions publication.

Elodie + Femke (Constant)
DiVersions exhibitions will take place in October 2019 in Pianofabriek and in spring 2020 in De Krook, in Gent.

PianoFabriek (location of the first exhibition): has a good connection to the area, the publics are mixed -both as a community centre and an artistic research place. 

Overview of the thematics and projects involved in DiVersions:

- highlighting the co-existence of multiple orders; difference, contractiction
- confronting the rationality/coherence of building an archive with intuition and sensitivity
- create a space for tangible and intangible cultural artefacts for the future
- experimenting with the conditions of collaborative work between humans, and between humans and machines

The role of the Royal Museum of Art and History struck Elodie: property, right to access, rationality behind the archival process

What is the Belgian context? Example of Belgian museum of Central Africa which re-opened after stating that it underwent a process of decolonisation; is this actually possible?
https://www.africamuseum.be/en/about_us/mission_organisation

Redefining the direction that DiVersions should take:

Importance of the notions of conflict and difference

The publication of DiVersions: attempt to root it very clearly in a Belgian context, and also to show this change of direction. It will be axed on a wiki and made by OSP (nice! :) who from OSP is involved? Probably Sarah Magnan and Gijs De Heij! ahhh! fantastic!! thank you ;) Yes! We are superexcited as well!!! :)

3 axes: 
- a series of texts (not academic, but constructed on the wiki and produced from there), potential for digital archives as a site for decolonial practices

> Elodie will write a texte on Paul Outlet - L'afrique aux noirs (his first publication - colonial text)
https://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/index.php?title=L%E2%80%99Afrique_aux_%E2%80%B9noirs%E2%80%BA

> Just For The Record will adapt a text they have already written

> Interview of Serge Lemaitre plus translations 

> Interview with Amir Sarabadani (developer working at Wikimedia)

> Michael Murtaugh - a text about the algorithms that resolve conflicts on etherpads -  what counts as a smooth collaborative experience? 

> A contribution from Sarah from Immateriële Erfgoed

> A text from Seda Guerses (member of Constant and involved in questions connected to privacy, flux of data, etc...)

- documentation of artist projects from the wiki

- glossary

Femke does a 'painful' ;) introduction of the projects:
some artists will work on one project, some on two versions of the same project, some on two different projects...




Sarah Kaertz, Werkplaats Immaterieel Erfgoed
https://werkplaatsimmaterieelerfgoed.be/visie/

What is intagible heritage?
not the building
not the landscape
not the object
not the object or the subject of the sentence, but the verb. IH is the doing

the intangible is in the doing

Heritage that is alive!
Meaningfull for those who are involved
Dynamic and up to date
Transmitted from generation to generation
Exists in different forms and sizes
Safeguarding is caring: giving your heritage a future

Intangible heritage: oral traditions, performance art, festivals, festivities, rituals, knowledge about the universe (how to deal with the land)

About WIE
- grew from another location in Bruges, out of the box projects
- highlighting the power of intangible heritage in the heart of our contemporary and super-diverse ways of life.
- change of name that came with the change of website
- works with UNESCO 2003 convention
- support of the Flemish government

Sarah: the starting idea is beautiful, but you know, as soon as there is a list, things happen psychologically...

They try to focus on heritage in Vlanders, not Flemish heritage

If there is no room for involvement, evolution, then it fits rather into folklore... it's not always to clear. Sarah gives an example of a Mariachi band plaing in a restaurant that wants to keep doing this the same way because it is 'how they've always done it'
There is a thin line between what is folklore and what is heritage.

Henna drawings are brought up as an example of intangible heritage

Website
https://immaterieelerfgoed.be/nl
- launched in November 2018
- accompanied from the transition from NGO 'tapis plein' to NGO 'werkplaats immaterieel erfgoed'
- from official website with project website to a more bottom up website
- now there is more in the back than in the front, so it's more friendly
- sometimes there are empty spaces
- there is Google translate 
- UNESCO categories + a few other that they added, like 'Food and Drinks'
- Inspiration example 
- Methods and Things
- News: you can subscribe to the newsletter and see things in Flanderen
- How to highlight practices that are already on the inventory, withut creating a hierarchy; they want to have a broad view on what there is
- government used website; they are easily in contact with each other, but it also causes issues with for example the language, how do people know who they have to write for for certain issues?
- they decided to have a moderator that gives feedback; limited back and forth, but it's there (* versions are changing)
- practices that are controversial: Aalst carnaval - threatened to be thrown off the list because of antisemitic displays; they will contextualise the discussion
Some controvertial 'heritage':
https://immaterieelerfgoed.be/nl/erfgoederen/aalst-carnaval
Sinterklaas discussion: Colleagues made a book with a new version of Sinterklaas and Piet. 
https://immaterieelerfgoed.be/nl/nieuws/piet-en-sint-en-het-slimme-kind-een-nieuw-boek-met-actueel-sinterklaasverhaal
De cultuur rond het Belgisch Trekpaard (cutting the tails of horses)
https://immaterieelerfgoed.be/nl/erfgoederen/de-cultuur-rond-het-belgisch-of-brabants-trekpaard

Highlighting the nice parts in the newsletter and deleting the parts that are not so nice

Self-marginalisation of cultural practices that cannot or will not comply with new norms (animal rights, for example, with the 'brabants trekpaard' and the cutting of their tails) 

Example, at the end of the page:
De gemeenschap rond de cultuur van het Belgisch (of Brabants) trekpaard leeft het decretaal verbod op het blokstaarten van paarden na. Indien er op deze website beelden met blokstaarten te zien zijn, dateren deze van voor het in voege treden van dit decreet.
(trans. The community around the culture of the Belgian (or Brabant) draught horse complies with the decree banning the block tailing of horses. If images with block tails can be seen on this website, they date from before the coming into force of this decree.); 

There is not really a protocol on how to decide what goes in and what doesn't; the team which is relatevely new decide togehter. There are guidelines from UNESCO for example, but they are sometimes not enough or exaustive.

Bart Magnus and Sam Donvil, PACKED vzw, Centre of Expertise in Digital Heritage
https://www.packed.be/en/

Working with Wikimedia platforms: why? 
https://be.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Belgium
- opening up digital heritage and arts collections 
- new ways of thinking: crowdsourcing, serving your audience vs classical proprietary way of thinking 
- community effort: aiming for consensus if possible, documented dissensus if not 
- versions are documented, contrary to collection management systems 

Wikimedia Foundation: different chapters on local levels, hosts content created by volunteers ==> ecosystem

Looking at the link between these three:
Wikimedia Commons (images, video, sound)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Wikidata (records)
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page
Wikipedia (articles)
https://www.wikipedia.org/

The serendipitous exposure to collections that's not in the mind of heritage collections; they would like people to stumble upon this content. Example of painting introduced in The Last Supper becoming very visible due to the association between different platforms that feed each other.

Example of the discussion page on Wikipedia's Jezus (traditioneel-christelijk) page: Why are there two versions of Jesus? [There's also the historical figure of Jesus, no?]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_(disambiguation)

Nomination for deletion page : notability, promotional content, unsourced...discussion ensues

Example of Zwarte Piet page
Discussion: "Zwarte Piet is possibly racist"... possibly?!... clearly so.

Another example:
    Pretty Ladies (the page that Loraine made during DiVersions 2016 :) nice! Lot of dicussions at that moment about the representation  of women in museal collections ;) indeed! rushing to see the talk page now that it's two years later!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Ladies_(female_figurines)

Wikimedia Commons moving towards structured metadata in 2019: links pages together through unique items.
'a collection of 54,066,850 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute'
- image repository
- photograph, video and audio recordings
- metadata
...

Wikidata
'the free knowledge base with 57,030,639 data items that anyone can edit.'
Wikidata acts as central storage for the structured data of its Wikimedia sister projects including Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wiktionary, Wikisource, and others. 
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Introduction
- structured datasets
- linked open data : links with Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and with authorities
- multilingual 

Issue with Jesus' location, which is set to Heaven. Wikidata doesn't like this because Heaven doesn't have geocoordinates.
Siblings of Jesus: set to 'none'.
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q302

Importance of Missingness
- wikidata nor google offer the complete human knowledge 
- do we know what we are searching for? 

They made a query to Wikidata to get a list of institutions that have the work of James Ensor whose work is entering public domain.

One of the two uploaded a painting owned by his family

Table 1
https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/diversions-2019-2905-table1


Table 2
https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/diversions-2019-2905-table2