Traditionally, museums have had a hegemonic role as agents for the heritagization of material remnants of the past. However, given that museums exist within particular contexts, they are subjected to ideological and political structures and biases that affect what is exhibited and what is not, and therefore, the stories about the past that are told and given prominence. These politics of inclusion/exclusion, in turn, can have an impact on what’s promoted and perceived as heritage. In the case of Chile, like in many other cultural contexts, museums have tended to prioritize historical discourses over memory narratives, which emphasize great figures and their endeavors. As a consequence, working-class identities and domestic life are usually marginalized from museum discourses, and therefore, not incorporated into what is understood heritage (Smith, 2006; Waterton, 2010). Nonetheless, these stories sometimes find a place in historical fiction TV media, like the Chilean TV show Los 80, where the sets recreate domestic spaces, such as living rooms and bedrooms, of the 1980s and infuse them with an intimate narrative that details the everyday life of the working- and middle-class during the country’s turbulent dictatorship years. In the show, material culture of the time is exhibited and contextualized, resembling -to a certain degree- what would be done in a traditional museum. However, once we consider the circumstances in which these objects are encountered by viewers, the screen as a form of mediation and fiction as a discursive practice become significant factors for analysis, especially in terms of heritagization. In 1995, Andreas Huyssen argued that “the gaze at museal things … resists the progressive dematerialization of the world which is driven by television and ... virtual realities” (p. 34). Nonetheless, considering the exponential growth of mediated forms of accessing the past and their potential as agents for cultural memory (Erll, 2008), as well as the politics of exclusion within heritage discussed above, Huyssen’s claim requires revision. Moreover, several authors have claimed that aspects that are conceptually linked to heritage, such as identity and community, are dependent on creativity, selection (Gilles, 1996) and imagination (Anderson, 1991). This allows us to comprehend heritage as a creative act as well (Harrison, 2013), where fiction takes on a significant role. Thus, by considering Los 80 as a lieux de memoire (Nora, 1989), this work aims to posit TV media as an alternative form of musealization for marginalized pasts and study its heritage-making potential. It intends to do so by reexamining Huyssen’s claim and analyzing the tension between materiality and dematerialization within audiovisual media, as well as the role played by fiction in the construction of a ‘heritage’ discourse about the past in a mediated context.
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Juan Pablo Vilches holds a BA in English Literature and Linguistics from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (2013) and a MA in Cultural Heritage Studies from University College London (2016). Currently, he is an Instructor at the Department of History and Social Sciences, School of Liberal Arts, at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (Chile), where he teaches courses in the Core Curriculum program as well as electives on heritage, memory, history, and visual studies. He has previously received a full-tuition scholarship to carry out postgraduate studies abroad from the Chilean government.
This study aims to posit TV media as an alternative site for the heritagisation of aspects of the past that have been historically ignored by traditional means for heritage like the museum. It will focus on the Chilean TV show Los 80, a historical fiction series about the everyday experiences of a middle-class family during Chile’s dictatorship. Through the examination of the use of material culture and its connection to narrative, this study argues that a television series can musuealize and construct an aspect of the past as heritage, which suggest a more inclusive epistemology of heritage.