The shipyards and the port of la Seyne Sur Mer (Var, France) for the memory of two legacies, one historical and the other ephemeral

Abstract

Seyne sur Mer, a former industrial port city with its shipyards closed in the 1980s, is completing the physical erasure of this heritage, which had nevertheless built the identity of this city for over two centuries. Moreover, since their closure, these places have been invested by what was first considered as vandalism and which has since become part of the history of contemporary art in a process of “ratification” (cf. the origin of this concept among art sociologists in the 2000s, in particular Nathalie Heinich,): graffiti and mural works, now known as “street art” or “urban art”. They are therefore the subject of two erasures: one heritage related to the history of a port and the industries that shaped its landscape, the other ephemeral related to the works that, for their part, gave new life to these places. Within the framework of a transdisciplinary work (history of science and technology, history of art, anthropology, science of information and communication, art and heritage conservation) carried out on the basis of the testimonies and photographic and written archives of the actors in both fields (former employees of the construction sites and artists), the question of the conservation of these archives to safeguard the memory of these two heritage sites was raised. We present here the current state of this work and the first concrete achievements it has generated on the Internet (web-documents, databases, etc.) as well as in concrete demonstration projects (exhibitions, events, etc.). Another aspect of this work will be briefly shown: what about the multimodal indexing of databases under development to allow their access for queries from researchers in the history of science and technology, industry, port cities, and art history.