Heritage at the Crossroads: Between Memory, Power, … and AI

Presenters of Memories and Heritage at the Crossroads at the XII AISU Congress, Palermo 2025.

From 10 to 13 September 2025, Palermo hosted the XII Congress of the Associazione Italiana di Storia Urbana (AISU) – a vibrant international gathering dedicated to exploring the city as a crossroads of relations, exchanges, and cultural encounters.

Among its many panels, Memories and Heritage at the Crossroads, coordinated by Marie-Paule Jungblut (University of Luxembourg) and Rosa Tamborrino (Politecnico di Torino), delved into how urban memory and cultural heritage are shaped – and reshaped – by transformation, resilience, and risk. The presentations took us from Rio de Janeiro’s seaside hotels to Naples’ UNESCO strategies, from Bologna’s innovative “potential atlas” to the fragile recovery of L’Aquila after its earthquake. Together, they revealed heritage not as a static inheritance, but as a contested arena of memory, power, and negotiation.

The session highlighted a new approach: heritage is no longer treated only as monumental preservation but as a lived, co-created practice. This resonates strongly with Henri Lefebvre’s theory that the city is not merely a functional space, but a socially produced and lived space – one where meanings are constantly renegotiated. Participatory mapping, storytelling, and community-driven re-significations showed how hidden voices and overlooked spaces can be integrated into broader urban narratives. A vivid example came from the EU-funded RESILIAGE project, which demonstrated how co-mapping and storytelling can reactivate memories, capture cultural practices, and support resilience strategies in cities exposed to environmental and social stress. By funding such projects, the European Union has recognized the urgent need for new, dynamic approaches to heritage that are flexible, inclusive, and future-oriented.

Challenges remain. Heritage is vulnerable – to disasters, commodification, and political appropriation. And while not the central focus of this panel, a new horizon is already visible: the impact of artificial intelligence. AI tools may help recover forgotten memories and unlock archives, yet they also risk flattening complexity and narrowing what counts as heritage. The crucial questions ahead are who builds and governs these systems, and whose stories they preserve – or silence.

At Palermo, AISU reminded us that cities are never neutral: they are lived spaces where memory is negotiated and heritage is fragile. Before the publication of the conference proceedings, there will be a publication of the abstracts, ensuring early access to the contributions. Together, these publications will extend the debates, so that the voices and insights shared in Palermo continue to provoke reflection and dialogue.

Marie-Paule Jungblut, PhD – University of Luxembourg, co-coordinator of Memories and Heritage at the Crossroads, AISU Palermo 2025

Good vs Evil? Rethinking History on a Chessboard

Is history a battle between good and evil? A game of ideology? A question of perspective?

In the first session of our Public History seminar, we explored these questions using Maurizio Cattelan’s chessboard installation Good vs Evil – a surreal tableau of historical, religious, and fictional figures locked in symbolic combat.

Students were divided into six groups, each analyzing different aspects of the chessboard. The initial reactions were revealing: many students instinctively saw a “good side” and a “bad side.” But that distinction didn’t hold for long.

From Visual Analysis to Historical Interpretation

To guide their analysis, each group worked with tailored worksheets focusing on one thematic dimension: political figures, religion, ideology, representation, etc. The worksheets posed questions such as:

  • Which figures do you recognize?
  • What ideologies are represented – or excluded?
  • What does this side of the chessboard suggest about power, memory, or morality?

At the heart of this exercise was a challenge:
Each group was asked to formulate a sentence completing this prompt:

“This chess game presents history as…”

This sentence wasn’t just a conclusion – it shaped how each group worked and sparked discussion around historical narratives, representation, and the ambiguity of moral categories.

Here’s what emerged:

  • Group 1: “…a repeatable pattern.”
    → The group questioned why Lenin and the Wolf were on the “good” side. Is revolution always heroic? Is the predator a misunderstood symbol?
  • Group 2: “…a question of perspective on what is good or evil.”
    → They debated the placement of Chronos and Trotsky on the “evil” side. Why is time or radicalism framed as dangerous?
  • Group 3: “…a clash between ideologies – West vs. East.”
    → A striking comparison emerged: Cruella de Vil (who kills dogs) was compared to Hitler (who murdered Jews). The group also noted the absence of Jewish figures, highlighting how erasure shapes public memory.
  • Group 4: “…a battle over dominant religions.”
    → This group questioned why Lenin is considered “good” while Trotsky is not. They also emphasized that “evil” appears on both sides of the board – a deliberate ambiguity?
  • Group 5: “…a complex game between good and evil.”
    → Their discussion revolved around ambiguity: good and evil are not absolutes but fluid labels, depending on who tells the story.
  • Group 6: “…a Eurocentric narrative.”
    → The group pointed out the absence of the Persian cultural world and broader non-Western perspectives. Even a seemingly diverse board can reflect a narrow lens.

Theory Meets Practice

As students debated their interpretations, we connected their insights to key concepts in Public History:

    • Shared Authority: Who decides what a figure represents?
    • Free-Choice Learning: What happens when there are no captions or explanations?
    • Problem-Posing Education (Paulo Freire): Can we use art to ask better questions, instead of rushing to answers?
    • Reflective Practice: How do our own assumptions shape what we see?

    What made this session powerful was not only the content of the discussion – but the way it unfolded.
    By working together in groups, students were not passively taught these theoretical concepts.
    They experienced them.

    Through dialogue, disagreement, and reflection, they engaged empirically with the very foundations of a contemporary Public History approach.

    A recurring insight across all groups was this:

    Our understanding of history is shaped by what we already know – and by what we’ve never learned to question.

    And Then Came the Banana

    To wrap up, we looked at another of Cattelan’s provocative artworks: Comedian – a banana taped to a wall.

    Sold for $120,000 at Art Basel Miami in 2019 and later shown at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in Dimanche sans fin (2025), the banana made headlines again when a visitor simply took it down and ate it.

    “You’re not buying the banana. You’re buying the idea.”
    –  Galerie Perrotin

    So – what is the idea?

    Like the chessboard, the banana asks us to confront our assumptions:
    What do we value as art? As history? As truth? Can artists like Cattelan be seen as public historians – provoking conversations about memory, identity, and meaning?

    That’s what Public History is about

    Not finding one answer – but opening many.

    Dr. Marie-Paule Jungblut
    Research and Development Specialist
    University of Luxembourg
    “Introduction to Public History” (1st Year BA History)

    Heritage in Motion: Walking, Sharing, Belonging

    Heritage is not only found in museums or monuments. It lives in motion – when we walk through streets, notice small traces of everyday life, and share stories that connect us to places and to each other. In Luxembourg, where many cultures and languages meet, fragments of everyday heritage a washhouse, a street corner, or even a soccer field soon to become housing – become touchstones of belonging and resilience. (Illustration: Former soccer field in Cents, Luxembourg; Nuno Laureano)

    Why Everyday Heritage Matters

    Everyday Heritage reflects ordinary lives. It connects memories across communities and gives visibility to what might otherwise be forgotten. These traces make us ask:  Whose stories are remembered? Whose risk being lost?

    Walking and Participation

    Heritage is not static – it is created through participation. Practices like critical autobiographic walking turn simple paths into spaces of reflection, linking personal memory with collective history and opening dialogue between past and present.

    Teaching Representation

    For the past three years, I, Marie-Paule Jungblut (public historian), together with geographer Tom Becker, have explored these methods with second-year history students in the seminar Representing the City of Luxembourg at the University of Luxembourg. We have co-created digital walking tours of the districts Cents, Hollerich, and Clausen, available on the free app https://izi.travel/fr.

    The project shows the value of teaching public history methods: students learn to represent heritage in participatory and creative ways, to give visibility to fragile traces, and to share authority with communities. Our transdisciplinary collaboration – combining geography and public history – demonstrates how diverse methodologies enrich both research and representation.

    Towards Shared Belonging

    By noticing and sharing everyday heritage, we strengthen connections in plural societies. Each walk, story, and student project adds to a collective fabric that values inclusion and participation. The resilience of a city may lie in keeping such small memories alive while embracing change.

    This is why teaching public history methods is crucial: it gives students tools to mediate between past and present, to work dialogically with communities, and to make history matter in public life. (Illustration: Former Slaughterhouse in Hollerich, Luxembourg, Fabio Dammicco)

    Grounding in Concepts

    Our work is guided by key approaches in heritage practice and education:

    • Dialogical History – understanding history as a conversation between multiple voices.
    • Shared Authority – recognizing that expertise is co-created with communities, not imposed.
    • Problem-Oriented Learning – exploring real challenges as starting points for inquiry.
    • Self-Directed Learning – giving students responsibility for their own research paths.
    • Reflective Practice – critically examining how we work and learn.
    • Interdisciplinary Perspectives – drawing on methods from different fields to enrich understanding.
    • Critical Autobiographical Walking – using walking as a method to connect personal memory with collective history.

    © Marie-Paule Jungblut

    Unusual museums – First promenade: the Musée Gaumais in Virton

    Among the most unusual exhibits of the small Musée gaumais is certainly the “Matrjoscha” Mother Mary. It is a wooden statue from the 18th century, originally from the church of Sainte-Marie. As the Queen of the Universe, Mary stands on a crescent moon. The statue has a cavity on the back of the Madonna that was closed with a wooden lid. For many years, nobody knew about this secret interior, because the statue had been painted white. All the greater was the surprise when an antique dealer from Eindhoven in the Netherlands, to whom the sculpture had come to by some detours, recognized it while cleaning. In the interior was another wooden statue depicting a seated Mary with the Christ Child (as embodied wisdom) in her lap. This second sculpture dates back to the 13th century and was probably located earlier in the village of Sainte-Marie, where it was worshiped. But how had a statue of the 13th century got into the interior of a 18th century statue? Did the inhabitants of Sainte-Marie cling on to their Madonna to such an extent that they did not have the heart to destroy her? This was customary in profanations when a sacral object was no longer needed. No matter the circumstances, the double Madonna from Etalle stimulates the imagination of every observer.

    Another extremely rare object of the Musée Gaumais is the Gallo-Roman relief stone, which shows the front part of a Gallic mower. The teeth of this contraption plucked the ears and threw them into the back of the machine. Throughout this process, the chaff remained lying on the ground. The stone was found in Montauban in 1958. The exhibit was declared one of the treasures of Wallonie in 2010. It is displayed in the museum’s new building, which opened in 1992.

    The charm of a bygone era can be found in the Musée Gaumais’ folklore collection housed in a former Franciscan monastery. This part of the museum invites the visitor to dive into a kitchen, a living / bedroom, called belle-chambre and the curiosity cabinet of a local savant.

    The clothes of the mannequins suggest that most of the exhibits are pre-World War I objects.The answer to the question of whether the women’s underwear hanging on the bedroom closet is still politically correct in 2017 is up to the viewer.

     

     

     

    Not known to many visitors is the Battle of the Frontiers at Longwy, which took place 22 to 25 of August 1914 on the line Montmédy-Longuyon-Longwy. With an exhibition that includes a single room, the Musée Gaumais commemorates the dead of the struggle for Virton. The exhibits are mainly military devotional objects that have been transferred to the museum by private collectors. The presentation does not inform the visitor much about the circumstances surrounding the actual battle and its impact on the course of the war. However, it does illustrate the significance of the casualties for the collective memory of the inhabitants of the Gaume.

     

    In my personal opinion, the musée Gaumais in Virton is definitely worth a visit.

    Opening hours: Wednesday to Sunday 9.30 a.m.-12 a.m. and 2 p.m.- 6 p.m (1st of March – 30th of November and during Belgian school holydays)

    Do we need gamographs?

    Museum people know that every historical exhibition needs to be curated. The curator is responsible for the content of an exhibition, makes the choice of the objects, writes the texts. He coordinates the exhibition project and, together with the exhibition designer he decides about the dramaturgy of the show. Museum experts André Gob and Noémie Drouguet argue that the curator is responsible for the museography* of an exhibition.

    The fact is that many of today’s people spend a substantial amount of time playing entertainment games. Beside the commercial games, so called “serious games” have emerged. These are games are created for a primary purpose other than entertainment. As in any commercial game the players pursue a quest, in which there are both protagonists and antagonists. They must overcome obstacles to achieve a reward. The quests of serious historical games will familiarize the players with basic methods of historical and archaeological research.  As they play the game they will analyze data and draw conclusions. They will be investigators examining the information provided in the course of the games.

    To some extend we can compare serious historical games to interactive historical exhibitions.

    Like commercial games, serious games are created by game designers. But who curates the content? Isn’t there a need for a new type of public historians, that we could call “gamographs”? The gamograph would be responsible for the content of the game, would advise the game designers on the historical settings and many things more?   What are the skills needed to become a gamograph?  And who is going to teach these skills to history students?

     

     

    *André Gob, Noémie