2023-08-29 22:08:42
“The same thing happens with heritage as with Norwegian, they don’t speak it. If they don’t teach you, you can’t learn it.” Pilar Martínez Arce’s reflection comes to dismantle the cliché that young people are not interested in history or their legacy. “If you live experiences related to the past, reality changes completely: you link heritage to a personal, own experience.” And a large part of the work of the association that she chairs is based on this idea, heritage for young people, a collective born in 2015 with the purpose of showing the heritage of our ancestors to the new generations. After the outbreak of COVID and the difficulty, during the pandemic, of carrying out group outings and activities, the group focused on creating scholarships so that young people can talk to young people about our monuments. Since then, the association has given budding cultural managers, future graphic designers or photographers in training the opportunity to demonstrate that heritage can be (is) a source of employment and a future, in many cases also linked to the world. rural.
At the Argelès-sur-Mer Memorial: “French and German youth know more about the Civil War and Francoism than the Spanish”
Further
The adventure of making heritage attractive to adolescents —of beginning to dismantle the cliché that the past is boring— began a little over a decade ago. “I realized that the visits to the monuments were designed for people over 50 years of age.” Pilar Martínez, “the only elderly person” in a group in which the protagonists are the students, detected that “the length of time and the language” of the activities around historic buildings was a real barrier that had to begin to be broken down. “The guides usually appeal to a sensitivity that implies a certain vital experience,” she points out, “impossible” for children of 10 or 12 years.
The diagnosis was a big step, but where was the magic recipe? How could a generation surrounded by a multitude of stimuli and cultural and leisure alternatives be involved in heritage? “Young people connect with heritage if they do so through their interests,” concludes Martínez Arce after a decade of experiences. “They cannot be passive subjects, which is why we ask rappers to tell us about monuments through music, those of urban dance, through dancing around an architecture that they had rarely noticed… When you propose that they be in the foreground, they discover something new and they assume it”. In not a few activities of Heritage for young people —a national association based in Navarra— they have confirmed the diagnosis and the solution. “Why didn’t they tell me about this before at school?” they reflect.
“They are interested, but they don’t know it.”
Almost without wanting to, the young woman from Pamplona, María Odériz, stumbled upon the problem. On a tour of some 70 historic places in Spain and New York —thanks to a scholarship from the Heritage association for young people— she frequently heard the false cliché that young people are not interested in heritage. “There are speeches about the things that young people should like or not, but when I have taken my friends to visit a temple, they have been delighted and, since then, they have asked me for ideas for excursions,” explains Odériz, who told the For 23 years, he has chained important experiences in cultural institutions such as the Botín Center in Santander or the Oriental Institute in Chicago, and now he is preparing to continue his training in Paris.
In his future dedication to heritage management, he will surely remember the experience of the Iter Culturale project, by the group led by Pilar Martínez Arce. The trip through five Spanish communities —Navarra, La Rioja, Castilla y León, Aragón and the Basque Country— and a specific trip to North American museums in New York has allowed Odériz to investigate “how heritage is sold”, what discourses museums use and how the visitor reacts to them. The experience has served, among other things, to gain the interest of the hundreds of young people who have followed their posts on networks such as Instagram or TikTok. Although, from the association they asked him to take a step further, from the virtual world to reality. “Social networks are very good, but we are more interested in moving people, that they go to the places”, explains the person in charge of the group. A commission that allowed María Odériz to extract a lesson: “That someone close to you recommends a visit gives you peace of mind, because you know that they have the same criteria as you”, she reflects.
But the value of the trip also lies in the contrast detected in the United States, where the young student from Navarre came into contact with the Metropolitan Museum. In The Cloisters —the sub-site that collects a multitude of vestiges of European medieval art— she was able to observe the reaction of North American visitors to buildings, sculptures or paintings that are far from their cultural identity. “When I spoke to the Education Department at The Cloisters, they told me that every visitor who comes to the museum has a different experience, because no two people in the United States are the same,” reveals Odériz. What she was able to observe for herself is that the public “had the perception that what they were visiting was important, but they were unaware of it”, an understandable fact if one takes into account that the North Americans have grown up far from the old Spanish stones or French. “Seeing a French cloister next to a German carving is difficult for a person from Wisconsin,” she exemplifies.
“They lack the context
As a result of the North American experience —from which those responsible for Heritage for Youth highlight the exquisite treatment of the curators and the rest of the personnel of the centers towards the Spanish student— another finding of enormous value emerged. “What we have they don’t have in New York: they lack the people, the context,” reflects Odériz. “When I have visited churches in rural areas, I have been able to share an hour of conversation with the neighbors of the town, with their guardians; this experience is impossible to transfer to a museum”, points out the young woman, without failing to recognize, however, the value of the current solutions devised in museums by her managers. “They can play audio, but it’s impossible to recreate the fact that a person tells you the story of his town,” she adds.
In search of that context, precisely, a team of young people traveled a couple of years ago to the forgotten province of Soria, in whose region of Pinares the the recording of the documentary From the waters. It was about taking the place of the people, the people of the towns, living with them, earning their trust, recording their testimonies before the cameras. The film, which faithfully and closely portrays daily life in the heart of depopulated Spain, finally convinced the group Heritage for Young People of its true objective. “Our dream is to generate scholarships to work on the dissemination of heritage and, in this way, also make the skills of our young talents known and that they can find opportunities in the world of work,” says Pilar Martínez Arce. “Today we know who the cameras behind the documentary are,” she adds, alluding to a kind of symbiosis: “They are the spokesperson for the association, we are a speaker for them.”
Heritage —that which young people do not like, according to the cliché— thus becomes an opportunity for the future, a real quarry in which to explore employment niches. “We tell our scholarship recipients to be humble, but, at the same time, to rule out working for free under the pretext of writing a resume,” reveals Martínez Arce. A recipe that they apply to the association’s projects, whose participants obtain an economic consideration or, in the case of María Odériz, the opportunity to visit dozens of heritage places in Spain and the United States with expenses paid to obtain the training experience described.
Volunteering as an experience
The rest of the collective’s activities follow a similar line: convincing adolescents of the value of the past, transforming it into an adventure. This is the case of volunteering, such as the one lived in the Zaragoza town of Maluenda, where the participants were able to photograph and digitize the belongings of the parish. “These were not objects of historical value, but they were important for the inhabitants. In Maluenda we live in the houses of the neighbours, we live with them, we visit the Mudejar architecture… They said: this is wonderful”, recalls the president of the association. The key was that “they did not go on a guided tour, they went to experience the heritage,” she concludes.
And yet, many museums in our country remain empty. “Fail the marketing”, They think from the collective. That is the reason why the Museum of Evolution (MEH) draws many more visitors to its imposing glass building than the Museum of Burgos, “beautiful”. The difference is the “enhancement”. Today, it is unthinkable that authentic museum jewels of the country attract the visitors they crave without long-term work, taking advantage of, for example, social networks. A tool that is also helping to break down the damn cliché: that young people do not like heritage. They are the ones who will end up tearing it down.
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