L'estetica del quotidiano. Corporalità ed economie di sopravvivenza tra gli scultori della Maison des artisans di Bamako (Mali)

Abstract

In my paper, I propose regarding the acts of production behind “tourist art” as “cultural heritage”, as they are indicators of adaptation strategies paramount to innovation and cultural reprocessing. From this perspective, I differentiate between the principle of materiality associated with UNESCO World Heritage selection criteria and the principle of corporality evident in Michael Herzfeld‟s analysis of Cretan policies on the making of heritage (Herzfeld 2004). The principle of materiality includes a spatial-temporal conception that rejects the contemporaneousness between “the work” and the acts of production, the latter being assimilated to an “anti-modern” corporality (Herzfeld 2004) of social actors. Malian cultural policy on “heritage establishment” is based on such a principle and, owing to the international African art market‟s monopoly on aesthetic criteria, determines the exclusion of economic survival strategies and marks of identity of airport art sculptors. Contrary to this perspective, the principle of corporality that I propose includes a social meaning of cultural heritage according to which the human body is considered a holder of capital of the «social relations of work» (Jackson & Palmer-Jones 1999). Through the reconstruction of the sculptors‟ production network of Maison des Artisans in Bamako, a social aesthetic emerges through which iconographic innovation comes from the economic precariousness and hierarchical relations governing the workshops.