Donata Levi, Michael Wedekind
Contested Space – Contested Heritage
Sources on the Displacement of Cultural Objects in the 20th Century Alpine-Adriatic Region
This online edition investigates the transfer of cultural assets during the 20 th century in the Alpine-Adriatic area, one of Europe’s core regions, featured by moving borders and ethnic conflicts. The volume presents more than 80 commented documents which throw crucial light on a multitude of settings, motives, circumstances, agents, juxtaposed authorities and mechanisms of power, trajectories, and consequences of transfer processes. The contemporary views the records express allow insight into procedural mechanisms, reveal bureaucratic implementations of political expectations, expose complicity on behalf of professional caretakers of cultural heritage and scholars, detail the mindset of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders, unveil agendas, and expose myths, legends and competing nationalist narratives. This research is to be considered within the context of present-day art historiography and museology, focussing on spoliation, circulation, provenance, and restitution of cultural assets, and in relationship with contemporary art, today reflecting on concepts of ‘migration’, ‘threshold’, ‘loss’, and symbolic ‘recovery’ of identities. The book is the outcome from a European research project (TransCultAA) funded by HERA - Humanities in the European Research Area. > versione italiana
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Donata Levi
Donata Levi teaches History of Art Criticism and Museology at the University of Udine (Italy). Her main fields of research are art criticism and museology from the 18th to the 20th century as well as the history of the protection of art heritage. -
Michael Wedekind
Michael Wedekind has been a Senior Researcher at the Central Institute of Art History (Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte) in Munich (Germany) since 2016. He is chiefly researching 19th and 20th century history of Central, South and South-East Europe.
