The historical built stock of the city is the surviving testimony to that society’s past, bearing traces of historical events, containing sites of collective memory and monuments of past achievements; a tangible, material, publicly and constantly visible ‘archive’ that reflects and shapes the identities of its inhabitants. Therefore, it becomes an important field of intervention for every authority that wishes to shape the society it governs. Beyond the opportunity of building new monuments, preservation, excavation, demolition and reconstruction are important methods of redefining the heritage and past of the nation, and have all been very popular areas of action for national and imperial entities.
REPLICIAS explored questions at the intersection of architecture with national politics, by focusing on copies, revivalisms and reconstructions of heritage on three different scales: the city, the building and the artefact. It addressed these topics by adopting a micro-historical approach, using specific case studies and moving from them to the larger context and to broader theoretical discussions. The region of study (Greece, North Macedonia and Turkey) has a series of shared historical layers from antiquity to the present day, but has been parcelled into nation-states with exclusive definitions of identity. Competing historiographies have charged different parts of cultural heritage (ancient Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman among others) with claims of exclusivity or superiority, and monuments still get involved in heated debates today. At the urban scale, REPLICIAS examined how the reconstruction of selected buildings in Skopje (such as the replicas of the National Theatre and the Officers Hall) fitted together with other revivalist architectural interventions of the previous government, in order to redefine the urban identity of the whole city. At the building scale, it focused on the reconstruction of selected Ottoman buildings in Istanbul, such as the medrese of Hagia Sophia. On a much smaller scale, the project turned to the relationship between museum artefacts, their copies, and the museum buildings that house them: it looked at the Alexander Sarcophagus in Istanbul and its copy in Skopje, and the Parthenon Marbles in London and their copies in Athens, and the architecture of the four museums that contain them.
The project had three overall objectives:
1. To study and unearth the individual histories of copies and reconstructions, the stories of their making and their changing meanings across time and geography.
2. To understand the positioning of reconstructions within their material and social context and the involvement of various spatial actors participating in the politics of heritage.
3. To analyse the produced national narratives and their proposed definitions of empire and nation and to map the connections of the examined objects to other points of reference within or across national contexts.
REPLICIAS pointed out that the production of copies and replicas (of either objects or larger buildings) is not new, but is increasingly available due to technological advancements and the dominance of visual consumption and populism. The research underlined that copies and replicas are broad categories that include both meaningful, carefully crafted objects and controversial, questionable undertakings. Copies and replicas have important histories, which might intersect but mostly diverge from the histories of the originals. Their roles in the present can be very controversial: building reconstructions in particular, create new matter and new evidence based on little information, and are therefore very open to manipulation or distortion. This is especially problematic in contexts where transparency and democratic procedures are not guaranteed.
