"Heritage out of Control: Inheriting Waste, Spirits and Energies"

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Stirring debates on what is worth preserving, what is dismissible and what needs to be dismantled, heritage has become a hotspot for political discussions as well as historical and anthropological research. Shaped by secular and religious structures of thinking that are rooted in imperial, colonial and national legacies, heritage sites have been important locations for establishing a common understanding of the past and present. It also operates as an upholder of the distinctions between the secular and the religious that are key to modern statehood. Focusing on the absences, affective dissonances and the ensuing silent consensuses produced by the materiality of heritage, we aim to destabilize the place-oriented, static and secularized notions that abound in debates on heritage. Exposing the power dynamics embedded in the spatial materiality of the secularized space of heritage, we would like to shift the focus onto the undesirables: spirits, energies and waste. The attention to the nonhuman agents affords us ways to disturb the material limits of supposed meaning-making processes and challenge the abstract public that heritage presupposes. We assert that this focus has the potential to destabilize the imposed genealogies and lineages that bolster not only the notion of heritage but also how it shapes understandings of the past, present and possible futures.