Heritage and the Cruelties of the Replaceable

An unusual collection can be found in a castle somewhere in Austria. Called the Schloss Loosdorf, the site was written in the magazine called “The World of Interiors” and shows the Neoclassical structure and its display of shards, or broken ceramic vessels and plates. History saw the castle occupied first by the Nazis and later by the Russians at the end of World War II. The Russian soldiers discovered the prized ceramic collection of the castle and soon they started breaking them, according to the story, and throwing them.

The entire collection was destroyed and only the rare wall prints of the castle were spared.

Instead of throwing the shards and consigning them to the dustbin of memories and forgetting, an artist starts to array them on the floors of the castle. The closest that art critics could describe the work is to call them am “installation.” Or they could be called “Found Objects.”

Indeed the shards, the broken pieces were “found.” Photographed, the broken pieces became, as the magazine article said, “Shattered Proof.”

Lined up on the floor, clustered and heaped on top of each other, the colors broken forming other patterns – the broken ceramic pieces are telling stories that are different when they were whole and possessed of different functions. Decorative and/or utilitarian, the pieces point to different narratives.

The writer, Michael Huey, talking about the unusual exhibit, opens his essay, “Shattered Proof” with these: “A friend once advised me: ‘Everyone is replaceable.’ While I agreed in principle, it seemed to be there were certain people one might never wish to replace. I was thinking of someone, recently deceased who had been so remarkable that I intended to keep a space in my heart for her – to afford myself, in effect, the luxury of roping off a little area in memoriam, no matter how full the rest might become.”

With reference, perhaps, to the palace and the castles that are being ransacked and destroyed, Huey continues: “It would be, I thought, like shutting off a suite of rooms in a large palace and only entering into them on special occasions, and even then only with ceremony, rueful fondness and in full consciousness of their significance.”

I do not have to venture to Northern Austria, to castles with broken ceramic shards, and look for shattered proofs. This city we call our own is continuing daily proofs of what we shatter. The good thing about Schloss Loosdorf is that it has kept the shards and lined up them for remembering. We do not have shards. What we have are the disappearance of so many things, each site and each building containing meanings for some people and none for the many.

Walk from the Naga Metropolitan Cathedral and marvel at the loss. The old houses are gone and where they stood you do not have even ruins. What you get are makeshift stores in different stages of poverty and dilapidation, and shops in aesthetics that do not have a heart for art. From where do we claim this centrality of the city? Is this by geography or by claimed ascendancy?

But then it is really difficult to talk of heritage. The notion of preserving houses and places have become a discipline and, as such carries with it the burden of intellectualization. Where dances are merely danced, now they are studied for being indices of identity and politics. Where houses are places to call home, they are now searched in and out for reflection of ideologies.

There is also a matter of choice. What to preserve in Naga City? The dilettante or hobbyist would always point to old houses. This is the festive site of antiquarians: preserve and display the old lamps, the old clothes, the baul. If one is powerful and acquisitive, then some old jars, Ming plates are arrayed on shelves. It does not matter if the artifacts come from other places. They are treasures of the Past, always mystified.

I call this “Eskaparate Museology.” Put the breakables inside aparador where we cannot touch them. Write copiously outside about them and forget about their context, their sources, their linkages

We forget sometime that in those acts – of preserving and remembering – we are really propping up the lifestyle of the elite. These are classes propped up by feudalism, a system that pushed down the benefits of the many, enslaved them even, so the upper class can benefit from them who are kept below.

As an anthropologist, I have nothing against collecting artifacts. They are poetry to me and politics. That is the problem, because to most, collecting and setting up museums are poetic enterprises only. People forget that there is politics – in the dirty and in the material sense of it, too – in collecting and preserving.

In fact, one should ask: “where does this affliction, of collecting come from? There is no clear indicator of the answer. Suffice it to say that collecting has the mark of the colonialist’s trail. Say it, too, the science/art of anthropology has a past, a colonialist past. The first anthropologists were missionaries, soldiers, navigators, mercenaries, travelers. Colonizers all, their mind could demarcate the boundaries of the New World by collecting objects and animals and even people from the territory.

Colonized, we have the virus of collecting. The template of the colonialists is stuck in us so we look for the images of those who have “enlightened” us. We desire to preserve their abodes or anything that looks like their homes. We search for anything that would link us to non-brown forefathers. Our model is Europe. Our ignorance is tremendous of our neighbor, the Malay mode.

We see nipa huts and we banish them soon into the replaceable. When we “rope off a little area in memoriam,” the areas we rope in are small, limited and meaningless to many. We cannot go beyond the Magellanic. We dare not venture back into the forest that was declared sinful and pagan. We are scared to listen to sounds more ancient and thus are not able to step a little into the future.

Maybe it is time to stop collecting and start creating. The shards will have use then. The old songs can inspire as well. The epic, fake or retooled, can be appreciated once more for what they should mean to us and not as the first sample of vanity publishing. Then Handiong can be freely questioned and Oriol be re-examined for gender. Baltog can be wisened and Yling be allowed some musical, critical eye.

Then we, Heritage Studies experts all, can smile and smirk and say “Winner!”