Mapping Cultural Heritage Risks: from beauty to fragility

Dr. Beltrames society, aesthetic judgments about craftsmanship are increasingly accompanied by the formulation of preservation criteria for objects that are first and foremost conceived as fragile things. Heritage collections are preserved through the implementation of a set of continually changing measures that aim to minimize the risk of object degradation. These practices could be viewed as creating a new "art world" (Becker, 1982) linked to the objects constitutive material in the patrimonialization and artification (Heinich, Shapiro, 2011) of ethnographic collections. In order to stabilize the object, links are established between patrimonialization practices and those of laboratory sciences like chemistry, physics or biology and technology. Computerization allows the object's variations to be recorded, enabling patrimonial risk to be tracked and mapped. I explore how in these material ecologies the artifact/art objects are defined and controlled. This project aims also to analyze the changes in the field of material culture and museum studies.

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