Paper short abstract:

The principles of authenticity and integrity are at the basis of contemporary theoretical approaches to conservation. This paper will discuss the scope and complexity of these concepts from an ethnographic approach on a set of emblematic and historic architectures in northern Argentina.

Paper long abstract:

The concept of integrity, around the ideas of totality and intactness, and authenticity, related to inheritances, memoirs and their veracity, emerges from a temporality, that is, from a socially established conception of the events of time, within fundamentally western hegemonic frameworks. Architectures, for example, would have a beginning and an end that would establish a moment of totality, beyond events that may conjuncturally alter it. However, what happens to those architectures where becoming is the basis of their condition of existence? Is it possible to rethink these concepts, not only from the material features, but from the changing relationships between subjects and objects?

This paper approaches these questions based on an ethnographic and historical study of the towers in three colonial chapels, Susques, Uquía, Tabladitas and Coranzulí, in the current northern Argentina. Towers are highly emblematic architectures where it is possible to recognize complex intersection between Christian spatialities and materialities, and the logics of vernacular practices. From the analysis of different moments in the material becoming of these towers, it is possible to observe how totality is not established as an absolute stage, subject to conservation. Instead, it refers to moments, never definitive, within trajectories without the expectation of a pre-established ending. The addition and subtraction of its parts challenges the very idea of intactness and authenticity. An ethnographic approach to integrity from practices, and not only from material features, offers concrete possibilities for the conservation of these architectures.