Rethinking «dissonant heritages» of the old & new world

Can dissonant heritages in Europe offer a pathway beyond linear provenance studies and challenge the colonial foundations of cultural heritage frameworks? Can exogenic artefacts and materialities, today housed in museums, collections, churches, and treasuries, generate decolonial practices between academia, museums, and Indigenous communities? This project proposes an integrative approach that interconnects historical analysis with anthropology, museology, material-oriented sciences and cultural heritage studies through sustained dialogue with native experts and communities. It aims to investigate the complex lives of dissonant objects and materialities of exogenic provenance through time and space. The research addresses the historical substance and changing presence of these dissonant heritages and unravels the plurality of agencies that have made, experienced, singled out, monopolised and reconceived objects. The project explores colonial asymmetries and power relations embedded in materiality and argues for competing patrimonialisations across worlds. It maps dynamics of endurance and decay, destruction, subtraction and collection, shedding light on Indigenous creative resistance, which shaped cultural heritage in multitemporal dynamics between past and future. The project addresses dissonant heritage-making in its shifting tensions with knowledge and religion. It aims to retrace value-creation practices outside conventional property and exchange logics while uncovering invisible agencies embedded within the colonial archive. In this context, missionary material engagement is regarded as a complex and mobile space of action between object destruction and safeguarding in which multiple actors interacted, conflicted, and negotiated. This study investigates the relationship between material objects and immaterial knowledge and explores interdependencies and intermedial dynamics with travelling missionary paper-assemblages within which exogenic objects were entrapped. The project concentrates on the interconnected space of Rome as a privileged site for mapping the dynamics of exogenic artefacts within the tension between Papal universalistic claims and the shifting positionings that various actors continuously renegotiate and challenge. Moving beyond Romes traditional role as a "centre of global collections," this research adopts an entangled perspective to investigate how objects undergo processes of reproduction and re- sedimentation across multiple temporalities and historical re-appropriations. By rethinking cultural heritage through a non-Eurocentric lens, this study unravels tensions between object endurance and multiple desires for permanence, prompting critical reflexivity on the academias and historians role regarding decolonisation and dissonant heritage-making.