During the past days, from September 8 to 11, we, the Mediterranean UNESCO Chairs, discussed identities and diversity; inclusions and exclusions; what we ‘are’ and what we aspire to become. We discussed pasts and futures of Mediterranean. We discussed ‘be-longing’.
We agreed that the futures of Mediterranean heritage depend not only on what we preserve, but on how and why we imagine the future; on how heritage is understood, transmitted and reimagined; on whether or not we recognize the assumptions, hopes and fears that shape our anticipations; and on whether or not we engage with multiple possibilities.
What kind of narratives and memories are carried by the cultural symbols that accompany our daily lives? What assumptions do they generate that shape our mental associations? What other futures do they permit to emerge from the heritage they represent? What a society designates as heritage, and what it leaves out, is a statement about the future it intends to make possible.
As communities we need to acknowledge that our inherited ways of seeing might limit how we imagine our futures. We need to claim our agency to question inherited assumptions, expand our horizons of possibility, and participate consciously in imagining and shaping the futures of our heritage.