How to keep heritage alive through design
Read in Indonesian
What do you consider as a part of your heritage? Some might say a specific food, some might think a song or dance, others might name a site. There is really no wrong answer when it comes to this, as your heritage is what you would consider to be a part of your cultural identity and different people would give different answers. It could be anything we culturally relate to — both tangible and intangible.
So, how would you feel if your heritage is destroyed? Lost?
This is a question thrown by a short video about heritage by UNESCO in 2016. The video then showed the repulsion on their sources’ face. The people in the video expressed that they would not like it and even take it as a personal offense if anything were to happen to their heritage. That is a good question to ask, especially to us, the culturally rich nation.
Nikkie Wester, a freelance textile designer and future heritage specialist, showed this video in the first part of the Center for Culture & Development - The Netherlands’s (CCD-NL) webinar series, Heritage in Design: How Design Keeps Legacies Alive.
“In short, officially, cultural heritage is a collective name for monuments and collections with great cultural-historical significance, both the tangible and the intangible elements combined, forming the identity of a city, a country, or a group of people,” she concluded.
However, she gave another difficult question to answer: “What if any building or crafts or art is considered to be not of any significant importance anymore? Is it suddenly no longer a cultural heritage?”
Imagine one day waking up and having people abandoning rendang as one of Indonesians’ staples, or to people agreeing to just destroy Borobudur temple to make a new one. As we imagine these scenarios, we might take the offence personally and feel that it is way too unlikely for both to be discarded that way. We are too proud for that, some might think. However, we have always been neglecting and abandoning our cultural heritage.
Image: Lorentz National Park in Papua, Indonesia by Raiyani Muharramah/Shutterstock
Lorentz National Park in Papua has always been endangered by illegal logging and illegal hunting. In 2018 alone we lost about 11 local languages, and we only cared about rendang when someone tried to claim it or when someone decided to highlight it. These things are happening around us all the time, but do we really care about it? Does not caring about it cancel them as parts of our cultural heritage?
According to Wester, our current, ongoing culture and customs wouldn’t have been here if it wasn’t for the culture and customs of our predecessors. They are the ones who created what shaped us today, and everything that they left behind is a crucial part of our cultural evolution. At this point, it has become our responsibility to carry on and develop these heritage even further. Quoting from a source in the UNESCO video: “If we destroy the past, we will destroy the present, and there will be no future.”
Dismissing our heritage means destroying our cultural identity, ethnically or nationally, in the long run because it would also mean that we are made of what our predecessors made way back. And, in this process, it should also be acceptable to put personal perspective in the current.
Wester gave The Five Suns: A Sacred History of Mexico (1997) as an example. She showed the part where they were telling the legend in the history of agave in the country that is a hand-drawn animation inspired by Aztec iconography. This film shows how inspirational folklores and traditional designs are even in the present time.
This fascination is found also in the works of Fernando Laposse, a London-based Mexican designer. He explored all types of Mexican traditional crafts, which happen to be sustainable. He draws inspiration from traditional designs, materials and methods, which he implemented in a more contemporary style that is more relevant to the present time.
There are also many other designers all over the world who implemented their cultural heritage in their works so that, in a way, their cultural heritage lives on.
Kenyan fashion designer Sunny Dolat and The Nest Collective joined forces with about 55 African designers to present their designs at N’GOLÁ Biennial of Arts and Culture that was held in São Tomé in 2019. Through the collaboration, they were making a statement about the continent.
They wished for a new beginning for the continent and to show the power in their unity. In this project, through their modern designs, they managed to show a wide range of colours and designs of Africa. After the exhibition, the artists talked about how important it is to preserve one’s cultural heritage and how to do it. They put emphasis on getting involved in the culture itself and to empower the people in doing so. This way, they managed to show themselves to the world in a different way.
Cultural heritage is not a still, idle thing. When taken care of properly, it could grow and flourish beyond even the cultural limitations. However, when taken for granted, it would shrink and even disappear for good. This is still the case for us, Indonesians, who only take notice when our heritage is already gone or collapsed.
Or, when somebody decided to reintroduce it to the world and we would be so busy arguing “why him of all people,” or “why that one of all heritages,” or many other whys. Most of the time, we are just waiting for other people to come up with something and criticise them instead of doing it ourselves.
Then again, it’s probably our cultural legacy as well – to take the abundance of heritage for granted, to just chill since they can’t go anywhere anyway. What if somebody decided to claim it? We go keyboard-warrior them.
Watch the webinar here