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Short abstract:

In science museums, artefacts’ material aspect provides tangible, solid technoscience representations. The concept of "intangible heritage" challenges this assumption, addressing sociomateriality in constructing science history and culture. I take a particle accelerator restoration as a case study.

Long abstract:

I consider the restoration of a 1950s Cockcroft-Walton accelerator inside a science museum under the framework of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) (UNESCO, 2003). This anthropological concept can be applied to the tangible domain of science collections, considering care practices (Alivizatou, 2012). In our century the concept of cultural heritage has undergone a process of rethinking inside many institutions. Referring to intangible assets such as dance, language, crafting techniques, ICH challenges Eurocentric assumptions about monumentalising tangible goods; it reconfigures heritage’s materiality as a function of performative traditions, perpetuated and renewed throughout generations; it appeals to subjectivity and to memory maintenance, enlarging and deconstructing how we understand heritage (Bortolotto, 2013; Turgeon, 2016).

Observing the work on the accelerator illuminates a memory transmission charged of affection as well as of scientific notions, involving a plurality of actors and epistemic cultures (Knorr-Cetina, 1999): laboratory technicians, restorers, curators, filmmakers. This “heritage community” (Tauschek, 2015), debating about the original artefact’s aspect, crafts its supposed “authenticity” (Jones & Yarrow, 2013; Geindreau et al., 2016). The artefact is cut out from the domain of common things and transformed in a museum object, but this "singularization" does not happens at once: it involves circular processes, aimed at the transmission of intangible cultural values along with material assets (Kopytoff, 1986, Dominguéz Rubio, 2016). In science museums, considering the ICH framework helps to reconfigure historical narratives in a less, universalistic direction, disclosing in public contexts the intimate situatedness of technoscience and of its representations (Casonato, 2024).