SPECTACULARIZATION OF HISTORIC SITES TAKEN TO AN EXTREME DEGREE: THE UNTHINKABLE RECONSTRUCTION PROPOSAL FOR ROME’S COLISEUM. / ESPECTACULARIZACIÓN DE LUGARES HISTÓRICOS LLEVADOS A UN GRADO EXTREMO: LA IMPENSABLE PROPUESTA DE RECONSTRUCCIÓN PARA EL COLISEO DE ROMA.

Natália Miranda Vieira-de-Araújo





REUSO 2015_ VALENCIA
III Congreso Internacional sobre Documentación, Conservación, y Reutilización del Patrimonio Arquitectónico
SPECTACULARIZATION OF HISTORIC SITES TAKEN TO AN EXTREME DEGREE: THE UNTHINKABLE RECONSTRUCTION PROPOSAL FOR ROME'S COLISEUM.
ESPECTACULARIZACIÓN DE LUGARES HISTÓRICOS LLEVADOS A UN GRADO EXTREMO: LA IMPENSABLE PROPUESTA DE RECONSTRUCCIÓN PARA EL COLISEO DE ROMA.

Natália Miranda Vieira-de-Araújo

Post-graduation in Architecture and Urbanism, Department of Architecture and Urbanism, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte - Brazil





ABSTRACT
Unfortunately, imagetic exploitation of cultural heritage is not a recent trend. We have witnessed the proliferation of stances that lead to the "spectacle society" as defined by Guy Debord, from the creation of "disneyfied", artificial and out-of-context scenery to the reconstruction of monuments and historic areas. Concern with the economic return of interventions in historic sites, allied to the development of the tourist industry, grows alarmingly in times of crisis. Europe´s economic difficulties aggravate this preoccupation, specially in Italy, due to the extraordinary dimension of this nation´s heritage. This article intends to discuss an extreme case: the real possibility of partial reconstruction of the Coliseum, as part of a larger project that also intends to build a structure to cover and transforming it into "an accessible square, open to various activities". In this article we discuss this intervention by relating it to the importance of restoration´s theoretical-methodological framework as basis for a coherent line of action, capable of guarantee the preservation of cultural goods as documents available to future generations.

Keywords
Reconstruction; architectural intervention; ruins; spectacle society, tourism.







FETICHIZATION OF HISTORY THROUGH THE CREATION OF DISNEYFIED SCENERIES
The fetichization of history in contemporary times has led to a phenomenon that manifests itself in the creation of architectural sceneries that either recreate lost historical contexts or forge others that never existed. Baudrillard (1995) alerts against the intrinsic power of images and signs that, in the end, provide us with a quiet shelter from reality.
Thus, we live protected from signs and refusing reality. Miraculous security: when contemplating the world´s images, who will distinguish this brief irruption of reality from the deep pleasure of not taking part in it? Image, sign, message, everything we consume, is tranquility itself sealed by distance from the real world, that illudes, more than disrupts, the violent allusion to the real (Baudrillard, 1995).
This sign-provided reality is responsible for the immense success of enterprises like Disney World. Michael Eisner, director of Walt Disney Company from 1984 onwards, admits that architectural design is able to "weave a plot of long-term enchantment" (Eisner apud Castello, 1998) similar to movie picture´s magic. This can be defined as "meta-reality urbanism" (Castello, 1998), where we build places that offer something beyond our day-to-day reality. This mixture of phantasy and realism forms "Disney´s reality". This meta-reality urbanism is no longer a privilege of our well-known thematic parks; our cities are more and more filled with thematic landscapes (Vieira, 2000).
This way, spectacularization and fetichization of history reaches contemporary architectural production as well as our built heritage.

TOURISM, HERITAGE´S ECONOMIC EXPLOITATION AND THE RESULTING INTERVENTIONS
Development of present-day tourist industry is linked to a series of factors that circle around the phenomenon of globalization, e.g. Increases in people´s leisure time and increased mobility. Carlos (1996) points out that entire cities undergo transformations in order to attract tourists, and believes this process is leading to inhabitants feeling alienated, as everything is turned into spectacle and the tourist takes the role of a passive spectator.
In an intense search for "something special", cities undertake large-scale manipulation of familiar patterns in an urban vocabulary full of revitalizations, rehabilitations and recyclings. From this moment on, the city is formed by fragments very different from each other, at the same time that many similarities between distinct cities are noticed. In other words, "an increasingly homogeneous system at global level, although hierarchized and fragmented at local level" (Boyer, 1988). This widespread patrimonialization of social life has identifiable effects in several practical aspects of the present-day city, among which we highlight the relation between patrimonialization, tourism-promoting policy and the kind of project put forward in these preservation policies.
Dourado (1995) alerts to the fact that many of these revitalizations, rehabilitations, renovations, "re-etc", "advance in an indiscriminate and invasive way upon ancient buildings, affecting, almost always irremediably, the buildings they intend to preserve". The border between "sheer invention" and the discipline of restoration is hard to define.
At this point, we identify in many cases the lack of knowledge and a broader analysis about restoration´s theoretical-methodological framework as basis for a coherent line of action, capable of guaranteeing the preservation of cultural goods as documents that must be available to future generations and as material pillars to collective and individual memory.
We understand restoration not as an action to "freeze" cities nor as an attempt to return to a supposed elected "original", but as a "critical act" that respects the stratification of time registered at the cultural good that one aims to preserve, at the same time considering its necessary incorporation to the contemporary city´s dynamics. In this sense, it is necessary to adopt theoretical-methodological principles and techniques to make sure these goals are achieved. We highlight Aloïs Riegl´s theoretical contributions - he formulated a theory of values at the beginning of the 20th century - and Cesare Brandi´s 1963 theory of restoration. Brandi´s contribution goes well beyond theory, since it comes from practical experimentations brought about during his 20 years as head of Rome´s Istituto Centrale per il Restauro (ICR).
Brandi's principles of legibility, distinctiveness and minimal intervention have demonstrated, through years of experimentations (by the author and his followers), that its application still represents a very important set of practical tools for interventionist practice in the material aspect of buildings with recognized heritage value.
In spite of the undeniable importance of statistics, tourism cannot be evaluated only quantitatively. Changes that result from this practice are also qualitative, interfering in urban space´s configuration and in the way people deal with it. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze all these aspects (Ribeiro et alii, 1996). The question gets much more complex when we talk about cultural heritage. As we cannot simply accept that heritage and tourism are incompatible, and being aware that globalization favours increasing homogenization of spaces, it is necessary to analyze this question. "Tourism, if it respects this plural dimension of culture, can be a fertile source of renovation, otherwise it will only stimulate and disguise the pasteurization demanded by the market" (Meneses, 1996: 92).
"Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption, is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal" (Debord, 1997: 112). Thus, it seems evident that tourist activity must be redirected to "rediscover itself as intelligibility that should make fruition dynamic", something that will only be achieved if the "simple decorative and estheticizing of the foreign land as a post card" is left behind (Ferrara, 1996: 23). "To know the foreign land as a strategy of self-knowledge is a basic element in the course of cultural globalization; however, it demands more intelligent participation than consumerist fruition" (Ferrara, 1996: 23).

3. ROME'S COLISEUM: THE ZERO DEGREE OF HERITAGE, OF TOURISM, OF SPECTACLE
If we think in worldwide terms, which city would come to our minds as the most representative of the preservationist and patrimonial question? I dare say that, in most cases (including specialists and non-specialists), Rome would be the one. If we consider this iconic Rome, what would be its icon of the icons? That is a difficult question when it comes to Rome, but, for certain, the Coliseum would be among the first ones on the list or, even, at its very top.
In other words, Coliseum´s dimension as an object of intervention is hard to comprehend in relation to its heritage-related repercussions. It certainly demands great responsibility towards this cultural good of gigantic dimensions, directly proportional to its monumentality and worldwide representativeness.

Rome and, more particularly, the Coliseum, already face quite a dramatic situation concerning the mass tourism imposed on them by their condition of "worldwide icons" that implies all the problems mentioned in the previous sections as to the relation between tourism exploitation and cultural heritage, especially in periods of economic crisis.
Figuras 1 e 2: The Coliseum and the mass tourism. Photos by Betânia Brendle, 2015.

Nevertheless the search for the spectacle seems to be endless. The surprising news about the possibility of reconstruction of part of the Coliseum (1) sounded as a bad joke which claimed for investigation. Unfortunately, the nasty discovery was that such an idea had really been uttered by the archeologist Daniele Manacorda in july 2014 and considered plausible by the italian Minister of Culture Dario Franceschini. As he supported the idea in a comment posted in october 2014 in the tweeter which says "one only needs a little courage", the minister started a worrying and simplifying debate for a highly complex matter.
Manacorda starts an article of his published in the journal Archeo with the following challenge: "why doesn´t the Coliseum turns back to the arena that used to receive games and spectacles? Such an operation will do no more than returning meaning to the monument (…)". He goes on explaining that the idea came to his mind via a promotional tourism publication about the arena of a famous roman amphitheatre in El Jem, in Tunisia, which was transformed in a golf court and offered as a tourist attraction. The superficial and uncompromised manner to deal with an intervention proposal in a cultural good of such importance and singularity as the Coliseum is really shocking.
According to a piece of news released by the international press, assessors of the Ministry of Culture of Italy are "favourable to the recent proposal for reconstruction of the arena", since, in this way "a greater opportunity for comprehending and taking advantage of the structure".
Besides that, they defend that, once recovered, the Coliseum could be the stage "for cultural initiatives compatible with the correct conservation of the monument". As one can see, the discourse concerns the possibility of its economic exploitation with no reference to the complexity involved in considering such interventionist possibility and its consequences for the materiality of the building and its documental aspect; the Coliseum as the material support of collective memory.
Going back to the comment about Rome as heritage-city and the Coliseum as the icon of the icons, one could say that concerning the recognition of the importance of preserving ruins, the Coliseum has always been the paradigmatic example, accessible to any lay person, of the reasons for preserving a ruin, with all its historic and ancient values as teaches Riegl. Does it make sense to reconstruct something which carries such meaning? As Giorgio Croci states, "it is so important in its presence that transforming it in a place where you perform an opera is below its dignity. The image of the Coliseum exists beyond its practical use. It must continue an icon, a point of reference with all its history and its past." (2)
In his article, Manacorda highlights the magnificent work done in years of excavation and studies of the monument to conclude that the moment has come to give it back to its "original function". "which problems does rebuilding the arena involve? Honestly, I see none: giving back the subsoil its underground condition means nothing more than offering people the possibility to visit it, walking into a maze, but this time it makes sense, because it goes through it as before, when it was part of a functioning mechanism (...). To give the subsoil new life is also to give the arena new life, the very meaning of each amphitheatre, today and yesterday, a place - the word itself says - it is possible to see from the surroundings what happens in the centre. And what can never happen in a place that doesn´t exist? The destruction of the arena turned the Coliseum into a surreal place".
It is interesting, however, to point out that his argumentation, despite coming from an unpretentious consult to a tunisian touristic publication, criticizes mass tourism. "Its reconstruction will allow it to be, again, in a few years, a place that will receive not only banal visits from massified tourism, but a place that, in its unique position in the world, receives - on technically compatible ways - each possible event in contemporary life. It would be good to inaugurate the new arena with a judo or greco-roman fight contest, or a children´s choir, or maybe a poetry recital (....)". With this proposal, the archaelogist understands that his proposal points to something different from a mass tourism-based non-place. How is it possible to agree with a line of thought where an intervention based on recreating a scenery that no longer exists, with no reference to any principle related to the conservation aspects of this expressive cultural good, of incalculable value to all mankind, may be heading for something beyond the creation of a non-place?
The controversial spanish example of Teatro de Sagunto, despite the court ruling that demands its (also debatable) reversion (3), does not seem to have reached the pedagogical character defended by Martinez (2012), referring to "what cannot be admitted, by no means, in the restoration of archaelogical findings". Martínez (2012) questions the possibility of reversion and defends its maintenance as an example of what must not be done. Had we followed this path, maybe we would no longer need to face this kind of debate for the Coliseum. Martínez (2012: 254) sees the stance toward Teatro de Sagunto in Valencia as a characteristic action of post-modernity, where the ruin is used as an excuse to the creation of a new work, "an unacceptable action from the point of view of respecting the monument´s historical, artistic and cultural value, closer to the practice of collage or recycling, so frequent in today´s plastic arts world, but unsustainable in the context of monument restoration".




4. FINAL CONSIDERATIONS
"Society of spectacle´s" radical alienation is experimented in such a way that the more one contemplates day-to-day spectacularity, the less one lives. The more we identify with the dominant images of need, the less we understand our own life and our own desires (Debord, 1997). On the other hand, Baudrillard alerts to the need to transcend the speech of "artificiality" and "falsehood" in order to properly understand this new logic of society. In fact, the work of propagandists results much more from our willingness to be seduced than from their desire to seduce. As Baudrillard (1995) comments, "the truth is: advertisements do not deceive us, they lie beyond true and false, as fashion lies beyond ugly and beautiful or as the modern object, in its function as a sign, overcomes the limits of useful and useless(...) The art of publicity consists mainly in the invention of persuasive statements that are not true nor false".
Harvey (1990) also points out the different connotations associated to the phenomenon of spectacle, either as a formula for social control ("bread and circuses"), or as an aspect of a revolutionary movement. The author revises the urban spectacle at american cities from the 1960s to the present and observes that in that decade mass movements of oposition were responsible for this spectacularization of cities. However, he demonstrates that, from 1972 onwards, completely different forces start to take advantage of the spectacle for different objectives. Harvey presents the case of Baltimore as a "typical and instructive" example. Seeking to rescue something around which to build the idea of the city as a community and to fight "late 1960s civic descontent", Baltimore fair city was created. Its initial goal was to promote the city´s ethnic diversity and celebrate coexistence. Little by little, however, it became more commercial and less familiar. As a result, the harbor place, a seaside complex with several hotels, aquarium, convention center, science center, yachting marina and more: "pleasure citadels of all kinds"(4). All this spectacle ends up hiding real facts, like the empoverishment of most neighborhoods in Baltimore. Harvey concludes that "circus is a success even without the bread".
Many critical studies alert against this lack of real life in our society, but a substancial part of the population is seduced by this process of construction of sceneries and non-places without realizing the shallowness of it all. Between theory and practice there is also a great distance; even after realizing the artificiality of this post-modern life, who will be willing to risk themselves at real life, apart from those who do not have the option of participating in artificial life? As Subirats (1989: 98) says: "but modern man will finally applaud the world´s mediatic composition if, it its esthetic finishing, it offers him the necessary symbols for the self-satisfying of an existence dedicated solely to the exercise of watching the spectacle. After all, the spectacle is more gratifying than independence of judgement, conscience of our own inner irreality and experimenting the world´s conflicts.
Within this complex entanglement of contemporary relationships lies cultural heritage, with all its complexity of treatment, if we wish to reach results that guarantee the transmission of values to future generations. In this sense, the need to adopt clear interventionist principles and technical procedures adequated for the knowledge of the asset.



NOTES
1.http://www.gazetadopovo.com.br/mundo/conteudo.phtml?Id=1524557&tit=coliseu-de-roma-sera-recuperado - published in 07/01/2015.
2.http://www.gazetadopovo.com.br/mundo/conteudo.phtml?Id=1524557&tit=coliseu-de-roma-sera-recuperado.
3. Harvey (1990) remember us about many exemples of these kind of new urban spaces as Faneuil Hall, in Boston, Fisherman's Wharf, in San Francisco, etc..
4. "(...) La situación actual en la que se encuentra el teatro es sumamente complicada. En enero de 2008 el tribunal supremo confirmó a la generalitat de valencia (la administración local) el plazo de 18 meses para ejecutar la sentencia de derribo decretada en abril de 2003. Esta ratificación ha producido una gran inquietud social en la ciudad, puesto que muchos saguntinos se oponen hoy por diversas razones, económicas y sociales (el derribo, que se cifra entre seis y nueve millones de euros, debe realizarse a costa del erario público y el teatro se usa habitualmente para eventos culturales, además de ser visitado por numerosos turistas), encendiéndose al mismo tiempo de nuevo la polémica en el medio cultural, hasta tal punto que se ha hecho público un manifiesto firmado por artistas, arquitectos e intelectuales en contra del derribo, por considerarlo "um ataque a la independencia y la libertad del mundo de la cultura" (es necesario
Precisar que entre los firmantes aparecen figuras del mundo del espectáculo que carecen de conocimiento alguno en materia de restauración del patrimônio artístico)" (Martínez, 2013:255).

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