Digital resources between infrastructures and standards
Prof Dr Antoinette Maget Dominicé (University of Geneva), Director of the Centre universitaire du droit de l'art and co-holder of the UNESCO Chair in International Cultural Property Law
Sign up now for an exciting journey into modern cultural preservation: the renowned provenance researcher will talk about current challenges in dealing with collection objects at the interface of digital infrastructures, legal norms and social debates.
A look at old inventories shows how cultural objects have long been described primarily in terms of their materiality. This information was used to identify an object, but not to interpret it. Even the image of an object – a sketch or design, then a photograph – was material. The different meanings of an object, the invisible elements, remained hidden.
The development of digital resources poses the question in a very different way, as the physical object is flanked by a variable meaning and documentation in different formats. Furthermore, its preservation, ownership and possession pose new challenges in the wake of efforts to challenge the authority of memorial institutions.
The lecture will address this question through a number of case studies that will encourage reflection on the potential of digital infrastructure, the framework of legal norms and identity claims.
Prof Dr Antoinette Maget Dominicé was appointed Junior Professor of Provenance Research and Values of Cultural Property at the Institute of Art History at LMU Munich in 2018. Since 2024, together with Marc-André Renold, Honorary Professor at the University of Geneva, she has been co-holder of the UNESCO Chair in International Cultural Property Law. She is a member of various academic committees and regularly lectures at the Universities of Zurich, Paris-Nanterre and Lucerne.
She obtained her doctorate in 2008 in a cotutelle programme between the University of Paris 11 (public law) and the KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (art history). She then obtained her Certificat d'aptitudes à la profession d'avocat in France in 2010 and worked in several research centres and museums in Paris. In 2013, she moved to the Faculty of Law at the University of Lucerne.
In her teaching, she develops projects related to practice, both scientific and museographic, and recently organised an exhibition in Lucerne following a course at the University of Bern (Hans Ernis Tafeln für die UNESCO – 06.2022–06.2024).
In addition to various publications at the intersection of law, heritage studies and art history, she is currently preparing an edited volume on Art, Culture and Heritage, co-edited with Sophie Vigneron (University of Kent) and Janet Ulph (University of Leicester). In December 2023, a special issue of the journal SAACLR on the illicit trafficking of cultural property was published in collaboration with Andrzej Jakubowski (University of Warsaw).