Over the past 10 years, I have been involved in research projects across a range of areas in the humanities and beyond. All have music at their heart, but engage with diverse fields and applications including heritage (particularly the GLAM sector and DIY archives), memory studies, creative practice, social justice, needs of cultural communities, and health and wellbeing. I am now working on developing a scholarly nexus where these areas meet, and have begun with the development of the concept and method of ‘creative heritage’ (Istvandity 2021), which I will explain in this entry.
The notion of creative heritage originated from a hybrid project stemming from my work refreshing the Queensland Jazz Archive for the John Oxley Library Fellowship at State Library of Queensland. Integrating heritage work, artistic and archival practice, the Trading Fours project commissioned new jazz music compositions from Queensland-based artists who were provided recently recovered heritage material (recordings, photos, text, oral histories) relating to local jazz histories. The eight resulting compositions were recorded and performed by Queensland jazz musicians, providing an opportunity for music communities to both shape and access new ways of understanding a relatively obscured cultural past. The generation of new works invited by creative heritage practices both challenges the notion of traditional preservation practices that might ossify cultural heritage, and brings to the fore a method for doing something about it. These new works are set apart from recreation or re-enactment practices for the way in which the method assists practitioners to create original works that stand alongside heritage collections and community knowledge, inviting the view of heritage as something that is always ‘becoming’ in the present (Haldrup and Baerenholdt 2015). A key factor that defines ‘creative heritage’ practice is the involvement of relevant communities in cultural heritage projects, particularly in the production of creative practice elements.
Creative heritage as both concept and method has the capacity to invoke innovative thinking and action across a range of scholarly and practical applications, intersecting with numerous fields. In my continuing scholarship I am developing creative heritage as an anchor for a new nexus of community-based academic work across the fields of cultural heritage and heritage industries, and turning attention to the wellbeing of culturally and linguistically diverse communities that might be evoked through creative heritage, and the development of applied creative practice from a range of disciplines – not just music. This approach has further intersections with broader ideas of creativity and creative process, where this might unfold in unexpected places, and works alongside efforts at decolonising collecting spaces and other cultural hubs. In the context of the ITRC, I am hoping to further enrich this nexus with colleagues, and to work on new projects supporting cultural communities to invigorate heritage collections with memory, knowledge, and creative practices that also support their personal and collective wellbeing.
References
Haldrup, M., and Bærenholdt, J. O. (2015). 'Heritage as performance.' In The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Heritage Research, edited by E. Waterton and S. Watson, 52–68. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Istvandity, L., 2021. Creative heritage: An approach for research and practice integrating heritage and the performing arts. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 27(11), pp.1149-1162