Contested Space – Contested Heritage. Sources on the Displacement of Cultural Objects in the 20th Century Alpine-Adriatic Region

The online edition investigates the transfer of cultural assets during the 20th century in the Alpine-Adriatic area, one of Europe’s core regions, featured by moving borders and ethnic conflicts. The volume presents more than 80 commented documents which throw crucial light on a multitude of settings, motives, circumstances, agents, juxtaposed authorities and mechanisms of power, trajectories, and consequences of transfer processes. The contemporary views the records express allow insight into procedural mechanisms, reveal bureaucratic implementations of political expectations, expose complicity on behalf of professional caretakers of cultural heritage and scholars, detail the mindset of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders, unveil agendas, and expose myths, legends and competing nationalist narratives. This research is to be considered within the context of present-day art historiography and museology, focussing on spoliation, circulation, provenance, and restitution of cultural assets, and in relationship with contemporary art, today reflecting on concepts of ‘migration’, ‘threshold’, ‘loss’, and symbolic ‘recovery’ of identities.