Introduction to section mixed media and public art

Abstract

This entry introduces the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict's section on Mixed Media and Public Art, two broadly defined domains in which questions of conflict and heritage take center stage. It lays out some of the main ways in which conflict, in its various forms, is represented, thematized, triggered, staged, and negotiated in mixed media and public art as well as adjacent forms of cultural expression in which art and activism are often entwined. The entry presents the main themes that the contributions to this section broach and highlights some of the overarching preoccupations that connect these entries despite their wide geopolitical range—from Greece to Pakistan and from Lithuania to Argentina. Mixed media and public art, it is argued, can reinforce conventional approaches to heritage and in some cases even spark discriminatory, exclusionary practices involved in heritigization. But these forms of cultural expression can also open up new, experimental expressive modalities that push the limits of traditional approaches to heritage geared at conservation, and inspire novel, dynamic approaches, approaches that reckon with marginalized subjects excluded from processes of canonization and elitist views on heritage. They can accomodate the complexities of intersecting contemporary crises (humanitarian, political, environmental) that call for new (at times anthrodecentric) approaches to heritage; move beyond reductive, stereotypical modes of representation; and turn “heritage” into an agonistic arena on which different voices can confront each other, opening up the future to different, alternative scenarios.