 Okay, okay, welcome back from the break. I would like to introduce our next speaker, which is Professor Brita Rudolph, who has been very supportive of this project. We're very grateful for her support. She's actually the academic advisor in the World Heritage Studies Program for Innovate Heritage. And actually, myself and Katarina, who were formulating the idea originally, found the work that Professor Rudolph was doing to be a great inspiration and has been a part of the discourse that we've been having around how contemporary interpretations and dialogues around heritage can exist. So her work around heritage as a form of poetry is not so much of a scientific, hard-fixed fact, is something a bit more fluid. For us, this was a very strong connection with arts and creativity. Her focus was a bit more on topographies of faith. But actually, it's interesting, there's been a thread somehow also through our curatorial work of this conference with arts and creative expression and faith. So those kind of things that are a bit more free-flowing, harder to fix and anyway. So we are very excited that she agreed to give our opening keynote. So without further ado, I'd like to welcome to the stage Dr. Brita Rudolph, thank you. Well, thank you very much for the introduction. Good afternoon, everybody. And please allow me to start my lecture in joining the previous welcome notes in thanking the organizers and welcoming you to the conference here to the conversations in Innovate Heritage. When I was first approached by the group of students who organized this impressive event for you, the topic triggered my interest. But honestly, I was really wondering if this very ambitious project could be realized in such a short timeframe as they had decided to do and was initially absolutely no funding available. So I'm glad today to see that they have done a tremendous job in fact and that they have made this conference possible with important partners, with fascinating speakers and with exceptional artists featuring during the event. And in light of this, I cannot start with anything else than congratulating the organizing team for what they have actually achieved and thank all participants for having found their ways here and for joining us today and for the next two days in reflections and debates on Innovate Heritage, conversations between the arts and heritage. Now let me move on to my paper as I have been asked to present it to you today and it is entitled Heritage as Poetry. By this I do not mean to speak much about heritage poetry despite the fact that the organizers have kindly put Bahrain next to Germany and my name in the program indicating my slight relation to a region in which heritage poetry in fact is much more significant in everyday life as perhaps in Central Europe and in other parts of the world. In fact, heritage poetry in some countries of the Arabian Gulf has even been listed on the representative list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity at UNESCO and even more heritage poetry is so popular in this region that it has become the very basis of the only, I emphasize, the only TV talent show in the region comparable to what you see in Germany as searching the new superstar or searching the new top model. In fact, it's searching the poet of the region and that's what is currently the most popular TV show in the region. You don't believe that a show of young talents reciting traditional poetry can draw in the masses? Well, it does at least in the Arabian Gulf and I'd like you to share having a quick look in how it actually looks when the next superstar is not a singer, a pop singer or a top model but a traditional poetry reciter. So the beginning of the show you see here and I'm just commenting a little while showing you some of the images is a show that is being produced in the United Arab Emirates featuring traditional Arab heritage poetry and candidates, as in the same talent shows all over the world, compete in presenting their poems to an audience both in the studio and on the TV screens at home and as in similar shows, there's also a jury-present value and the quality of the poems that are being presented. So the candidate I've chosen for you today is a candidate from Bahrain just to make reference to the country that is named next to my name and you just see him presenting here some of his poems. And a jury, as you can see, valuing the candidates' performance. Amazon-comparable shows you may have seen the jury commons in the end and the candidate will need to reach the next round to then perhaps feature in the final and become the poet, the superstar poet, if you wish so, of the region. Now, this fascinating synthesis of heritage and popular culture would certainly be worthwhile, a paper in its own right but as I said, it's not heritage poetry I'm focusing on today. I would rather like to rest with the question on whether what you've just seen was indeed heritage or was it art or none of the two or perhaps both? Is it just a popular TV show? How could we justify one or the other attribution as heritage or arts? Today I would like to explore with you why both art and heritage but as a heritage professional I will look more at the heritage because it's my field of expertise and it's the area I feel a little more comfortable in have been misdefined for centuries as being products rather than processes. And I will try to explain why I think that the definition of a product does neither do them justice and should perhaps all together be avoided. Now, this requires a little look back at established heritage definitions before we will move on to newer forms of definitions and conceptions that might qualify for both the arts and the heritage such as cyclical construction processes and the very concept of poises. Now, heritage definitions have strongly been influenced by international discourses of UNESCO and other global agencies which provide much assistance in defining what heritage is, how it is to be perceived, and how it is to be preserved. What Laura Smith has simply called the AHD or the Authorized Heritage Discourse. This discourse has long lasted on the dichotomies between firstly culture and nature and more lately has added a second dichotomy which is that of tangible and intangible heritage. The divisions seem in a way self-explanatory and have been underlined by several international conventions such as the 1972 Convention on World Heritage or the 2003 Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage as well as several Charters and International Recommendations. However, to understand why these categories are not particularly helpful in understanding the relation between arts and heritage, we have to become aware of their obvious Western, in fact, the Eurocentric word few which is deeply embedded not only in UNESCO objectives but in general and also in the very key concept, in the very key concepts, forgive me, in general and also in the very key concepts that the titles of the conventions that I spoke to carry forward and I apologize for the images being so hardly visible but I think they're just the support of the lecture in any case. The basis, the fact that these concepts seem so self-explanatory to us until questioned by a speaker in a conference such as this lies in our personal educational biographies and the fact that we grew up in Western education systems where natural sciences were clearly separated from humanities and word views were conveniently predefined for us, in fact, since more than 2000 years. The basis of our perception of nature and culture is the approach of Greek philosophers or namely of the so-called philosophia naturalis and already to the Greeks, the concept seems so self-explanatory that even Plato and Aristotle who debated literally everything essentially agreed on a number of binary oppositions with which we continue to operate today and I think these binary oppositions are quite interesting in the relation between arts and heritage as they divide perception from reality as well as nature from custom which is basically culture and the production spirit of those arts and heritage. It may help to refer to one particular book of Aristotle which defined our understanding of not only culture and nature but all the four concepts we look at today which is the book of physics and there he writes, one thing that exists of things that exist, some exist by nature, some of other causes. By nature the animals and their parts exist and the plants and the simple bodies such as earth, fire, air, water for we say that these and the like exist by nature. Now the wisdom of Aristotle considers so obvious that it would be superfluous to prove it in his words that nature exists, it would be absurd to try to prove for it's obvious that there are many things of this kind and to prove what is obvious is not the mark of a man who is able to distinguish what is self-evident from what is not. Because for him the word nature is applied to what according to nature and the natural in the same way as art is applied to what is artistic and the word of art is a clear opposition and heritage here like art Aristotle considers a product of culture and not of nature. Now through Aristotle we arrived at nature, the natural state of existence as opposed to culture, the accustomed, the cultivated, the educated and the man created. And it is surprising how little has in fact changed over the past 2000 years until the early 20th centuries when anthropologists still kept dividing so-called nature people, primitive, uncultivated, from so-called culture societies in the West. And unfortunately the very inheritance of this concept is also still present and colors the UNESCO objectives. For example laid out in its constitution which stipulates and I quote that the wide diffusion of culture and the education of humanity for justice, liberty and peace are indispensable to the dignity of man and constitute a sacred duty which all of the nations must fulfill in the spirit of mutual assistance and concern. However we've nowadays learned to interpret this as meaning exchange of cultural knowledge to enrich and to enhance our understanding of each other rather than the culturalization of the other. Yet the core dichotomies at the basis of the international heritage definitions, the division of tangible and intangible for example as much as culture and nature is likewise an Aristotle legacy that hasn't changed or been questioned up to today. Aristotle who presented his voluminous works which categorize all discreet entities and describe their properties divides all substance at the first level into the material and the immaterial. So basically the tangible and the intangible. He also proposes further divisions of existence later on such as the animate and the inanimate. A dichotomy far more meaningful to many than for example, culture and nature. However it seems historical arbitrariness that Western academic approaches have not expanded much beyond the very first level of Aristotle and categorization of existence and that the dichotomy of animate and inanimate has unfortunately never become relevant to international heritage activities. If it had, I believe we would perceive heritage considerably different and might find it much easier to see the parallels between heritage and arts. Now to understand this link a little better, it might be beneficial to turn towards another philosopher of the past century, Martin Heidegger who in his essays, the origin of the work of art and poetically man dwells reflected much on the commonalities of heritage in arts which for him were best expressed in the common acts of creation or preservation or dwelling. Two key statements of Heidegger here inspire my considerations on the process rather than product oriented nature of all heritage expressions, not only intangible heritage, for this seems largely agreed upon nowadays which are the following that I would like to share with you. Now he wrote, what is created cannot itself come into being without those who preserve it. And preserving the work means standing within the openness of being that happens in the work. This standing within of preservation however, is a knowing. My aim is not so much to elaborate on these ideas but to contribute to the knowing of heritage as formulated here, a standing within or as I would term it according to the German expression selected by Heidegger, inne wohnen, a dwelling in heritage which is its preservation as a nurturing of rootedness and culture. It is essential to attain this goal from a perspective of a holistic conception of heritage. And so the overall objective of my paper today is to propose a revised conceptual framework which overcomes hopefully the previously discussed internationally approved categorizations and divisions and which according to my perception, could remove these international categorizations which are in a way threats to the preservation of heritage and cultural diversity. But what could bridge the gap between these categories? Between heritage as product and process, between creation and preservation, the gap between perhaps heritage and the arts even? There seems to be one question heritage and arts in fact, have in common or which could be framed by a common approach, the approach of semiotics or semiology. It is the question, what does this expression or what does this work signify? And to whom? And the consideration of heritage as well as art as a reference system for knowledge, for memory, for meaning, often transmitted by narratives. The conception we find widely distributed among anthropological authors nowadays, such as Clifford Geertz and his culture as text. But heritage as well as arts in such an approach can be seen as either as social construction or a material evidence, but in both cases it relates to social dynamics in a process of semiosis or rather art and heritage itself becomes the semiosis. What does that mean heritage becomes semiosis? It was actually already stipulated in Heidegger's concept of preservation as dwelling and as knowing. But let us look perhaps a little deeper into heritage construction processes to understand how this can be applied to a heritage and perhaps even an art creation process in general. Although I admittedly did not fully reflect on whether the parallel between heritage and the arts can be continued throughout my arguments, I'm just so much more familiar with heritage than arts, but let us see what our artists feel about it later on. Now the complex process of heritage construction and reaffirmation, the evolution of heritage so to say, is best described in a circular or even a cyclical process. And if such process were to be illustrated with keywords indicating the individual stages of the process, I would probably speak of those six keywords you see here. Values, significance, meaning, identity, knowledge, legitimation, values, and so on. Imagined as a circular structure. I will try to limit myself to an extremely brief introduction of the individual elements and I hope I can elaborate any remaining questions later during the more dialogical parts of these conversations that we have come together for. But since it seems possible in a cyclical structure to start at any position of the structure, I just commence at the bottom today with knowledge or rather with the objectivation and accumulation of knowledge. Now knowledge here as internally justified belief as a result of reflection on certain things in combination with the following two stations or keywords, legitimation and values, identifies a sub-process in the heritage construction cycle which we can call value definition perhaps. Legitimation, the binding element of the sub-process forms the basis of the value judgment by ascribing cognitive validity to the objectivated meanings gathered as knowledge. Now the values emerge from preconceptions or better, pre-knowledge, a temporarily validated state of mind which often unconsciously formulates its standards. The term values does not signify the existence of values but more the process of creating, negotiating and validating these values. And the synthesis of values attributed to one particular representation can be called significance but in the reflective process reveals meaning. And meaning explains the connection of values or significance to the cultural representations or expressions in form of narratives to what we actually perceive as heritage. And here our circular class, FORX, in that meaning can either immediately provide information for the generation of new knowledge and thereby perhaps close a smaller circle or contribute to the formation of identity. And identity, like values, requires projection screens not simply as signifiers, forgive me, not simply as signifiers but rather as an anchor for their preservation or in Heidegger's word of knowing of identity constituting narratives. So in the process of projecting not only values but also identity, this is this structure that one would be looking at. David Leventhal has highlighted here that we mainly value heritage as our own and not anyone else's and not like anyone else. So even the valuation of heritage is in a way an individual process indicated and influenced by social processes or as Turnbridge and Ashworth confirm that all heritage is someone's heritage and therefore logically not someone else. The circular or cross-linked circular system closes here. Heritage generates knowledge, knowledge legitimated will function as a basis for new value establishment and so on. And it seems a fascinating coincidence or at least for those of us who believe in coincidences that this circle resembles the hermonotic circle of continuous anticipation, interpretation, understanding, and assertion as has been developed by Martin Heidegger himself and carefully enhanced by Hans-Georg Gadamer. Now if we understand that discontinuity of this circle which ensures the constant reaffirmation and reconstruction of heritage is the key aspect of heritage creation, then the main threat to heritage would be the breaking up of this cycle which I would call semiological degradation or the loss of the interrelations between the different elements in the cycle. And here is where the actual break to the established international heritage convention approaches perhaps comes into the picture because here neither the conservation of the physical substance or the safeguarding of performances and practices via documentation can be preservation in the sense of a standing within or dwelling or knowing in heritage as Heidegger suggests. A preservation of standing within or dwelling emphasizes solely the continuation of this cycle with its constant recreation, its constant reaffirmation of all elements through knowing and through thinking. And the threat that combines the cycle here, the medium of movement and transmission are narratives which communicate the various elements and link them together. And heritage is semiosis in this context needs to be seen as narratives. Heritage expressions without their narrative or meaning giving elements remains only products which are incomprehensible and which remain incomplete. And it is the focus of these narratives and meaning giving structures of heritage that offers the basis to approach heritage from a different angle, to see expressions as continuous processes which are inspired, which inspired me in fact to also think of a revised methodology for heritage identification. And I think that's what the introductory part referred to as having inspired this conference. So I would briefly refer to this particular methodology as well. So what I'm proposing leads us slowly to the core of the argument and the key aspect of the conversations of this meeting that is I propose to identify and interpret heritage just like arts and in no other way. Contemporary heritage analysis at present is predominantly expression bound. This means heritage professionals in both tangible and intangible heritage fields study heritage expressions, document their features and successively interpret their meaning. Now what I would like to propose is an inverted approach more predominantly applied in studying the arts to study the ideas, the conceptual formation of the heritage construction cycle, the continuous processes of heritage creation and only subsequently identify how these ideas and meanings have become localized. Doing so does not only require negating established heritage categories but also denying the existence of heritage expressions so far perceived. This approach I refer to as topological analysis and I'll explain in a moment how I've arrived at this term. And in fact, this is the last section of my paper today in which I would like to introduce both its terminological and conceptual implications and relate them back to what I've called heritage poetry or heritage as poetry. Now this new ideas leads us back to 2000 years ago where we've started to the realm of Aristotle and his contemporaries because I've opted to apply their language even if not their concepts and they would likely reject the conceptual implications I burden on their terminology. But the terminology that I have borrowed is the terminology of logos, the Greek term for an initial concept, for a creative principle, for an originating idea taking place and I've linked this to topos, place. The Greek, sorry, the Greek term for place. Now here the place, topos, however is not solely to be understood in a spatial or in a geographical sense but conceptually and that's actually where the English term topic comes from where something belongs to. So it's conceptually and it indicates the belonging, the place something takes and our understanding and the meaning making process that is related to it. So very simplified, the combination of these two which I have then termed topology is the interlink of the concepts and can be understood as a process of an idea which creates meaning to take place or once again shortened heritage as ideas taking place. But then what else is art then ideas taking place? How otherwise is art understood, seen and interpreted? Topological analysis aims to approach heritage and it could perhaps also approach arts in describing the ideas and narratives that give meaning and recognize them as a continuous process of creation or as I shall soon call it, a process of paracists. The object we aim to identify is no longer an expression or a product or even a process but an interrelation of different concepts and processes or at least three elements identified, an idea, a meaning making process and a location. And qualification for such an exercise is no longer technical expertise in heritage expressions like those who produce and value technical expertise in heritage expressions but the ability to meaningfully communicate and see heritage expressions like those who produce and value would see them. Hence the best heritage professional is a heritage dweller and the best interpreter for art is in fact the artists. The skill to become a dweller in heritage is perhaps best described as active listening as transcultural empathy as reflective narration skills and the task of the researcher suddenly becomes to understand and to convert a heritage narrative to assist local narratives of identity to become global narratives of understanding. The transmission of these narratives would contribute to the knowing of heritage or rather to the knowing of the individual meanings related to heritage. But how does this relate to dwelling again? Now dwelling in heritage as Heidegger used the term can perhaps be understood as the localization of identity in these heritage meaning processes and at the same time dwelling in heritage is the active and creative utilization of heritage in the fulfillment of aims and desires in life. And heritage preserved in the dynamics of knowing and dwelling means that it's constantly innovatively recreated, reaffirmed and reconstructed in the process of meaning giving and utilization that defines heritage as heritage. And this again in Heidegger's words is an act of poesis. Now please allow me to return to the two quotations of the German philosopher I had shown you earlier or at least to one of them, which is the second, preserving the work means standing within the openness of being that happens in the work and the standing within of preservation however is a knowing. Now preserving heritage as standing within as knowing of heritage defined as the constant reconstruction recreation of ideas and identity. And here recreation has to be understood as a continuous ever renewing creation in perhaps the sense of and we're back to the Greeks, Plato's poesis, which here is described as poesis translated as creation or passage of non-being into being, all poesis is poetry and the processes of art are all creative and the masters of all arts are in fact poets. Now the permanent reconstruction of narratives of identity therefore is preservation and continuous recreation in the process of cyclical reconstruction at the same time but is also poetry. And this recreation and the preservation that Heidegger probably spoke of when stating what is created cannot itself come into being without those who preserve it is a continuous poesis of heritage or again in his word the preserver of a work belongs to its creativeness with an essentiality equal to that of the creators. Latest here, if not long before I might be stepping a little outside the comfort zone of our artists in putting the preserver at an equal level than the creator but indeed the only difference between heritage and art that I could identify is perhaps the claim of the initial originator or creator among the continuous creators. However in my approach, although perhaps of different levels, they are poets alike. And poesis is action that originates from a concept of intentionality which is a result of what Heidegger has referred to as poetic sinking. Now in his theory he opposes this poetic sinking, poetic creation from what he calls logical thinking and thereby seems to confirm the distinction between logical analysis and creative inspiration which is also in the 2000 year old division of natural sciences and humanities perhaps. But he insists that the two approaches can be imagined in separation but they support each other in existence. And in his words again, the sinker pronounces being, the poet, artiste, the holy and that they most look alike in the care of the word. Now the creation of logos arises from poetic sinking and heritage construction initiated by logos is a form of poesis and the product of poesis then like arts, like music, like technology, heritage too is poetry. Now the conceptualization of heritage as poetry might cause confusion with regard to my plea for a holistic concept of heritage that I started at the beginning and it seems necessarily excluding the typology of natural heritage which we have also included in the considerations of our conversations here. Indeed I admit I have not given so much attention to natural heritage in the preparation of this paper but perhaps an extended definition of poesis as is offered to us by Heidegger again can accommodate an even wider concept of heritage construction than the product poetry seems to suggest in the first place. That means a concept of heritage that might be able to combine intangible, intangible, cultural as well as natural heritage. Now Martin Heidegger further defines Plato's poesis as simply a bringing force and he writes, it is of utmost importance that we think about bringing force in its full scope and at the same time in the sense in which the Greeks saw it. Not only handcraft manufacture, not only artistic or poetical bringing into appearance and concrete imagery, it is a bringing force, poesis. And through this also, the arising of something out of itself is a bringing force, a form of poesis. Fuses is indeed poesis in its highest sense for what presence is by means of fuses has the bursting open belonging to bringing force. For example, the bursting of a blossoming to bloom and a number of other examples he mentioned that I didn't include here. Now fuses as poesis could perhaps be interpreted as then intangible natural heritage or as Halliburton in his interpretations of Heidegger's text Poetic Sinking tends to support. Such theory allows for poetry requiring poets but also so to speak a poetry without poets. The blooming of a blossom, the coming of a butterfly from a cocoon, the plummeting of a waterfall when the snow begins or melts or in my words all heritage can be poetry. However, in all processes of poesis, it is the active recreation, utilization and valuation of heritage which narrates and which reaffirms identity and it's the main principle which means dwelling in heritage and which contributes to preservation of heritage. And here topological analysis can contribute as a form of re-narration. As re-narration that transforms local narratives of identity to global narratives of understanding and this is what perhaps is meant by means of poesis and why not do it by means of traditional poetry. Thank you very much. Yvonne? Thank you very much. If anybody has any questions, the way we have the lecture set up is that there is actually a short enough time so that there is time for Q and A after every lecture and as well as having a break. So if anybody has any questions for Dr. Rudolph? Yes? The artist of the best interpreters. Maybe. So the question is by Professor Schuster. Why does she think that artists are the best interpreters of heritage? Is that what you said? Of art. Of their art. Okay, I'm sorry, yes. If you assume that art is a process of intentionality then only the artist would be able to identify the initial intention which doesn't necessarily mean it's the best interpretation of the products or the art that is being perceived later on but at least it's a specific original interpretation that only the originator can offer us. So perhaps the best is not the right terminology but it's the artist has a unique view to the interpretation of art as opposed to anybody else. Would you want me to put it on the screen? Sorry. Yeah, I guess there's a question about value and knowledge and agitimation and meaning and well, all of these things and how they relate to each other and one of the other kind of threats I think to the circle is the question of capitalism and the economy and the knowledge economy and the creative economy and the heritage economy and how they also act as limitations or shrink these absolutely beautiful words that you put together in the way in which you've talked about heritage and this dwelling in and the time one has to dwell within heritage and value it and perceive it. So yeah, so I just wondered if you would be able to talk a bit about those threats or if you perceive them to be threats because they tend to just I think destroy any other kind of potential perceptions of value. Right, I wouldn't initially agree necessarily that there's threats although I see that apart from a breaking up of the circle an additional threat could be a manipulation of the circle by certain groups taking influence on valuation concepts, legitimization concepts, meaning making processes. The question that needs to be asked is when does such manipulation become a threat and when is it just the innovative character that heritage takes where communities and valuators redefine heritage, recreate heritage and always bring their own views into the interpretation, into the meaning making processes. Heritage never really remains the same over a long time. It is a dynamic process of continuously changing values, significances and knowledge products. However, I believe that there are possibilities of outside influences into this process that are deliberate in order to follow economic or political aims in trying to modify heritage perceptions and that's perhaps something that would not be intended in the process of heritage recreation. But it's difficult to draw the borderline on what is the constant dynamic that heritage creates in itself and where this dynamic is taking over by intended manipulative forces. Okay, it seems to have time for one more question but I don't see anybody holding up their hands excitedly for another one. So perhaps we have a little more time for the break then. Okay. Okay, thank you very much. Yeah, so we'll return at what is three, four o'clock for Shaheen Morali's lecture. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.