Heritage Landscapes vol.27

The marvellous, the bewildering. Mysteries and curiosities. History, art, science, geology. A kind of gallery that allows you to explore and connect archives, storerooms, libraries, various materials with the one common trait of being in the public domain. All in a magazine. It is called The Public Domain Review.

Founded in 2011, it presents itself as an online magazine and non-profit project based on public domain and royalty-free materials. But The Public Domain Review is a reference point for the dissemination of historical and artistic materials.
It contains essays of the highest scholarly and narrative quality where scholars, writers, curators, archivists and artists recount public domain materials and sources with a distinctive slant. It contains collections of images and works of art, audio and film that, as they say, open up glimpses of light and curiosity. Another section offers ‘Conjectures’: experiments in the form and method of writing about historical sources; essays that move unconventionally between imagination, archives and data.

Some titles? Here I Gather All the Friends: Machiavelli and the Emergence of the Private Study; From Fire Hazards to Family Trees: The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps; Vanity of Vanities: Fool's Cap Map of the World (ca. 1585); Antiquities of Mexico (1831-48).

A subtle, careful, slow and profound way of exploring the past, its materials, its stories, its universes, beliefs, forms, imaginations.

In 2004, Ben Wood imagined a museum where he would collect old, rare, strange, iconic mobile phones, so as to bear witness to the passing of one of the inventions that affected people's daily lives the most. Since 2019, with colleague Matt Chatterley and a team, he has begun to put together the collection and create the virtual museum The Mobile Phone Museum. It currently contains over 2,800 models, with more than 250 brands. The museum can also be explored thematically, such as the ‘Ugliest Phones’ that deserve a look, a smile and a touch of nostalgia.

Since 2 January, the Netherlands has made partly available for consultation a national archive with important content: documents on 425,000 people accused of collaborating with the Nazis during the Second World War. The archive is called CABR, Centraal Archief Bijzondere Rechtspleging, and contains 32 million pages of interrogations, diaries, and registers. The files, for privacy reasons, are not indexed and can only be consulted by appointment, and relatives of the accused can ask for the materials to be obscured, although their names can be seen on the archive website.

The research centre Forensic Architecture, of Goldsmiths, University of London, has recently published its project A Cartography of Genocide. It is an analysis that collects and recounts, data after data, the attacks on civilians and infrastructure by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip. The site offers an interactive map that traces the historical memory of all armed attacks since October 2023, with the aim of reconstructing their scope and identifying their most significant patterns. An archive of the recent past, done with precision and method, with an 800-page report to complete the study, showing incidents, attacks, sources.

Credits: The Public Domain Review; The Mobile Phone Museum; Centraal Archief Bijzondere Rechtspleging; A Cartography of Genocide, Forensic Architecture

Legend24. The Legacy of Success: Shaping the Future, was held last November, at Gallerie d'Italia - Milan, dealing with the important topic of generational transition for companies and how heritage can help in crossing time and reaching the future.

It was a memorable and emotional moment for us and for the audience. Andrea Montorio, CEO of Promemoria Group, opened the day with a reflection on the topic, introducing the importance of the role of heritage for a company aiming for excellence and overcoming the challenge of time.