The second coming of Palmyra. A technological prison

Abstract

[ ]the visible rejection of Syrian refugees across many European countries, contemporary with the free circulation and consumption of the replica, undermines efforts to construct a global discourse that addresses the human scale of the Syrian conflict (Cunliffe 2016;Thompson 2017) [ ]the apparent applause that this replica has received across the world evokes the strong rejection of the reproduction of the Ishtar Gate in Babylon, Iraq, which was disassembled through excavation to be reassembled in Berlin in the 1930s [ ]calling for decolonizing practices in heritage preservation must revolve around an exploration of the channels of authority and expertise that give shape to specific safeguarding narratives, rather than focus on repackaging preservation strategies under new codifications and techniques that result in the same colonizing process of heritagization nonetheless