The Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage (2022)

Abstract

One of MoHoA's main aims has been to advocate for positive and meaningful change in the reconceptualization of what might constitute modern heritage through policy and practice. Central to this endeavor is The Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage. Conceived in the spirit of the Nara Document on Authenticity (1994), which successfully achieved a similar paradigmatic shift in the global conceptualization and assessment of authenticity, The Cape Town Document seeks to achieve a similar global consensus on the reconceptualization of modern heritage. Relieved of its Eurocentric, homogenous, universalizing, developmental, and colonial associations and references that framed its definition in the 20th century, MoHoA supports its recasting as a plural and planetary phenomenon that heralded the Anthropocene. The purpose was to encourage a fuller and more complete account of global encounters with modernity through the recognition and ascription of value to cultural experiences and expressions of the modern that have until now been overlooked, marginalized, or excluded from the existing canon of modern heritage. A draft of The Cape Town Document was produced after the first MoHoA conference in 2021 and published in the MoHoA special edition of Curator: The Museum Journal in August 2022. The following draft was developed following the second MoHoA conference in October 2022 and presented to UNESCO and its advisory bodies in 2023.