This article analyzes the various maintenance practices and their different time trajectories in the specific setting of heritage, or what we would define as “maintenance of memory”. In particular, we are interested in the different associations of artifacts-maintainers (Latour, 1984) in taking care of the memory and the different temporalities that they enact (Barad, 2014) either as “representation” (for example as the setting of movies) or “exhibition” (for local events not connected with the original historical context). Furthermore, the article investigates the entanglement of power and maintenance (Jackson, 2014) in the resulting hierarchies that time(s) and the materiality of their supporting spaces eventually exhibit. For example, some areas considered at low maintenance can be simply “repaired” for occupation by science and technology fairs or events, while other areas are considered as electives for replicating and enacts the duration of the “original” time-space or generating new possible time-space representation reflecting the values exhibited by the original time-space materiality. To this end we consider the case of a heritage site, the house-museum Villa Necchi Campiglio in Milano, Italy. Completed by the architect Piero Portaluppi in 1935 for the Necchi Campiglio family, part of the rich industrial middle class of Milano in the 1930s, the house presents different association artifacts- maintainers and different time representations resulting from the maintenance work carried out over the years. The interpretive study is based on interviews, observations, and an analysis of archival materials on the history of the maintenance of the site. The research aims to provide a situated understanding of the unfolding of multiple-time configurations enacted in spaces that aim at the “maintenance of memory” and how the intra-acting in these different times are combined, kept apart, or hierarchized, in the materiality of the associations of the diverse artifacts-maintainers as well as in the appropriation of spaces-time representation that enact the maintained-house museum. 

References 

Barad, K. (2014). Ma (r) king time: Material entanglements and rememberings: Cutting together- apart. In P. R. Carlile, D. Nicolini, A. Langley, & H. Tsoukas (Eds.), How Matter Matters Objects, Artifacts, and Materiality in Organization Studies (pp. 16–31). Oxford University Press. 

Jackson, S. J. (2014). Rethinking Repair. In T. Gillespie, P. J. Boczkowski, & K. A. Foot (Eds.), Media Technologies (pp. 221–240). The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262525374.003.0011 

Latour, B. (1984). The Powers of Association. The Sociological Review, 32(1_suppl), 264–280. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1984.tb00115.x