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Those who ask how social entities relate to the past, enter a field defined by competing interpretations and contested practices of a collectively shared heritage. Dissent and conflict among heritage communities represent productive moments in the negotiation of these varying constructs of the past, identities, and heritage. At the same time, they lead to omissions, the overwriting and amendment of existing constructs. A closer look at all that is suppressed, excluded or rejected opens up new perspectives: It reveals how social groups are formed through public disputes upon the material foundations of heritage constructs.
Taking the concept of censorship, the volume engages with the exclusionary and inclusionary mechanisms that underlie the construction of heritage and thus social identities. Censorship is understood here as a discursive strategy in public debates. In current debates, allegations of censorship surface primarily in cases where the handling of a certain heritage constructs is subjected to critical evaluation, or on the contrary, needs to be protected from criticism or even destruction. The authors trace the connection between heritage and identity and show that identity constructs are not only manifested within heritage but are actively negotiated through it.
Since the end of the 1950s, Italy has focused part of its modernization on the erection of public works. Due to corruption, mafia, and further malpractice, this form of development has occasionally failed, producing a high number of constructions that have remained unfinished for decades. In 2007, the group of artists Alterazioni Video constructed an informal survey in the form of an on-line tool open to public contributions, which revealed that there are 395 unfinished public works in Italy from which 156, approximately 39.5%, are located in Sicily alone. In view of such a statistic, Alterazioni Video opted to coin the term ‘Incompiuto Siciliano’ – literally ‘Sicilian Incompletion’ – to refer to unfinished public works as a formal architectural style. This re-interpretation, which aims to convey the recovered dignity of these ‘modern ruins’, considers unfinished public works a type of heritage with the potential to represent the entirety of Italian society. Furthermore, it goes as far as to say an unfinished public work is ‘Incompiuto Siciliano’ despite being located in another of the Italian regions.
This doctoral dissertation embraces the artists’ argument to develop a complete study of Incompiuto Siciliano by embedding this architectural style/artistic project within the main debates on modern ruins at present. This is important because it is expected to contribute to the revalorization and eventual recommissioning of unfinished sites by validating Incompiuto Siciliano in the realm of academia. Furthermore, this work aspires to be a worthwhile source of information for future investigations dealing with cultural interpretations of incompletion in any other context – a not unreasonable goal considering how unfinished works are one of the key urban topics after the 2008 financial crisis. Hence, this doctoral dissertation uses Incompiuto Siciliano to discuss a different perspective in each of the five chapters and, though these can be read as independent contributions, the objective is that all chapters read together, form a clear, concise, continuous unit. And so it must be said this is not a dissertation about unfinished public works in Italy; this is a dissertation about Incompiuto Siciliano as an artistic response to unfinished public works in Italy – which clearly requires an interdisciplinary analysis involving Urban Studies, Cultural Geography, Contemporary Archaeology, Critical Heritage and Visual Arts.