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IN2PAST develops its activity around 5 thematic lines:
IN2PAST’s TL1 advances the use of science and technology to ensure the sustainable preservation, dissemination, and management of tangible and intangible, movable and immovable heritage.
By integrating interdisciplinary approaches that adopt a holistic view of heritage – combining social sciences with invasive and non-invasive scientific analysis, along with digital surveying – valuable data is generated. This data drives various applications, including the creation of digital twins and the use of AI, enabling predictive models that enhance the preservation, dissemination, and management of cultural heritage.
Aligned with contemporary scientific and societal priorities, TL1 aims to establish best practice guidelines for conservation and restoration methodologies, contributing to the development of informed policies for heritage preservation and management.
Legenda
© Lab2PT
This thematic line promotes fundamental, applied and transversal research, and draws on the interdisciplinary composition of the different IN2PAST R&D units. It promotes social cohesion, and territorial and demographic balance through the valorisation of heritage, landscapes and social innovation.
The capacity of the R&D units will be used to analyse, interpret and enhance the landscapes and their ecological and cultural landmarks as heritage resources that can foster economic and social development. We contribute from the study of the past to the construction of the present and the future through heritage as a cultural resource.
Our major subthematic areas are: 1. Heritage, Memory and Societal Challenges; 2. Representation of Heritage, New Technologies and Transformation of the Territory; 3. Natural, Rural and Urban Heritage, Communities and Sustainability; 4. Cultural landscapes as heritage and future.
Being with the body in space, sensory group experimentation and movement in the urban landscape. ‘Pedras Festival’, by the artistic collective c.e.m (Centro em Movimento), Mouraria, Lisbon, 2017.
© Ana Moya
Thematic Line ‘Museums, Monuments and their Collections’ promotes reflection and analysis on the challenges posed to cultural research and exhibition practices.
Guided by IN2PAST’s multidisciplinarity, it favours collaborative initiatives between researchers, cultural institutions and society, seeking to mitigate territorial asymmetries and to produce an integrated knowledge of heritage, aware of issues of diversity, artistic practice, materiality, ethics and sustainability.
Aligned with current scientific and societal agendas, it stimulates critical thinking about collection procedures, classification and display of artefacts, and considers the digital turn as a tool for action in the areas of conservation, documentation and research of cultural objects.
‘Shadow Play’, by Hans-Peter Feldmann.
© Julian Stallabrass
An archive, as a collection of materials of historical relevance, or the place or site where those materials are kept, is a memory institution. Textual, graphical, visual, audio, and mixed materials – which are the traditional categories in physical archives – together with other cultural artefacts are massively being transferred into digital objects.
Digital presentation facilitates access and understanding of single objects in a contextual way. However, digitalization faces critical issues of technological obsolescence, requiring the creation of sustainability strategies.
Memory institutions and the objects, physical or digital, they collect and itemise, broadly understood as archives, are, therefore, the focus of this thematic line.
Research will address pressing concerns about memory institutions, stemming from transverse problems raised by preservation (including the crucial selection of memory objects, digitization, conservation – especially preventive conservation – and restoration of materials), sustainability, funding, trusteeship, and access, to advise on criteria for public policies and ethics in this area.
Legenda
© Autor
The global increase in cultural circulation and competing uses of the past raises new issues concerning the making of social identities and memories. Encompassing cultural, political and scientific threads of research, this thematic line aims to discuss and critically promote inclusive societies, including Portugal’s colonial and anti-colonial legacies, as well as its current forms of exchange with the Global South.
TL5 will focus on three major areas of research: 1) Promoting critical forms of historical memory, including the role of citizenship in the memorialization of violent pasts; 2) Translating inclusive citizenship into the making of diasporic archives developing more pluralistic transnational memories, including popular culture; 3) Inserting Portuguese state policies in international debates on difficult memories, ranging from ongoing work on the memory of fascism and other forms of authoritarianism to the memories of colonial violence and anti-colonial struggles.
Photo of the ‘archive’ of the former Companhia do Búzi in Beira, Mozambique.
© Ruy Blanes
2025 © IN2PAST. All rights reserved.
IN2PAST – Associate Laboratory for Research and Innovation in Heritage, Arts, Sustainability and Territory is funded by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I. P. under reference LA/P/0132/2020 (DOI 10.54499/LA/P/0132/2020)
