Műemlék-helyreállítások tegnap, ma, holnap (A 27. Egri Nyári Egyetem előadásai 1997 Eger, 1997)

Előadások - Herb STOVEL: Authenticity, as it he Nara Document and as relates to the restoration of historic monuments

Nara was perhaps the most international of the various meetings which have developed to discuss this subject. There were only 60 people present, but they represented all cultures and all continents. There were speakers from all the different kinds of heritage from monumental to vernacular. We tried to make a bridge with the past, so we invited Reymond Lemaire, the principle author of the Venice Charter also to participate in this discussion and so for one week we had a very wild and chaotic debate which was very difficult to focus. The working groups stayed up intil mindnight or until one o'clock three or four evenings in a row to try enbridge the distances which occured in the different presentations and finally, on the very last morning we found consensus on certain number of principles. And just to summarize very briefly what the keypoints that came out of that process are for the conservation field: The first one, is really the question of definition. In this document authenticity recognised as the essential qualifying factor concerning values. In other words authenticity is not a value. Authenticity modifies values, qualifies values, but it is not by itself a value. It should be based on respect for cultural heritage in different cultural context, different types of heritage in different context, in interrelationship between cultural and national heritage. That part of no. 2 is easy to understand, everyone can accept, that yes, we should respect that, we say that automatically, but there is a cathch in this, because we often find ourselves talking about the need to respect shared values. And others in the debate, perhaps who are a little more conscious say, that values are not necessarily shared in all sociétés, in all cultures. It is too idealistic to speak of shared values. The recent history of the Balkan region of Europe is an example of how values are not shared and may never be shared among cultures. If values are in conflict, what are the obligations of the conservators? It is perhaps to respect co-existing values. Not to ask people to take values of the other, but to respect values that are different and will remain different, not to choose, not to say that this set of values are more important, than others, but to respect differences, differences of opinion, of background. A third point that came out very specifically in the Nara Document is that there can be in this discussion no fixed criteria, that the criteria, that we use to define authenticity must come in each case from their cultural context. Perhaps the fourth point, that was made, using the language of this document is that different informations sources by which cultural heritage may present information to the public are listed and described. This is important, because conventionally in the conservational world the attributes that we have focused on are as important as the static ones: the question of material and design. And through this discussion this list of attributes was extended to include dynamic qualities. Qualities, linked to process, to tradition, to function, to use. If to ask something about the importance of this document, if I stand back almost three years later and say, „Is this an important document, was the discussion worthwhile, is the result useful?" I think there are some answers. It convincingly and conclusively extends our concept of heritage from the monumental heritage of the Venice Charter to a much wider range of newly appreciated heritage in different cultural context and of different heritage types. And there is no doubt, that it is the first effort in the conservational world in the thirty years since the Venice Charter to try to codify a new set of universal values which would have some legitimacy in the conservational field. I am not prepared to say, that the job that was done was bad, or good, time will judge the quality of the work, but I can say that a third point a third result gives the document some importance, it begins to give practical conservation people a working framework for decision making. What are the elements of framework? First of all there is a definition. This definition is not in the document, but it runs through the thinking of the document. And the definiton makes a link between the values of the sight, the attributes through these values are expressed and the degreee of completeness,