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Community Uses of the Marcus Aurelius Arch in

Tripoli Before and After the Italian Conservation
by Reem Furjani

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DETAILS

Date:
May 23

Time:
5:00 pm - 7:00 pm

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A ‘Community
b o u t U s  Uses
Memb ofe the
r s h Marcus
i p  E vAurelius
e n t s  Arch
Library & Archive  Publications 

in Tripoli Before and After the Italian

Conservation’ byOReem
pen Access  Grants  Advanced Search
Furjani

This talk discusses the notion of authenticity in

heritage meaning-making by illustrating how local
communities identify and interpret value in cultural
heritage, and the effect of authoritarian
conservation on this process.

Focused on the Roman Arch of Marcus Aurelius in

the Old City of Tripoli (Libya) as a case study, it
traces a change in the ways in which the local
community used the Arch before and after the
Italian restoration in the early 20th century, which
intended to ‘re-monumentalize’ the colonial symbol
and orchestrate perceptions of it. This change is
uncovered by taking two sections in the timeline of
the Arch: the first from 13th-20th century
ethnographic records of local uses, and the
second based on current post-2011 field
observations, revealing a process of decay and re-
creation of meaning attributed to the ruin and
within which spatial transformation plays a central
role, both as a manifestation of community
interpretations and as a tool to condition them.

This illuminates that communities have context-

specific value systems and interests that underpin
their ways of dealing with heritage, and which can
differ from the systems of expert and Western
definitions of heritage that dictate practices today.

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About the speaker:


 Reem Furjani is a researcher on critical heritage
About Us  Membership  Events  Library & Archive  Publications 
studies and cultural policies from Tripoli, Libya.
She holds BArch and Honours Masters degrees in
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Architecture and has started a PhD on this same
subject. Her interests lie in the intersections
between critical sociology and management of
culturally significant spaces. Her research work
explores communal interpretations of heritage and
socially performative uses of it. She is Founder
and Director of Scene for Culture and Heritage;
Ambassador to ICOMOS General Assembly 2023;
Investigator at INHERIT Heritage Resilience
Network at Anglia Ruskin University; and Co-
Founder of the Mediterranean Association for Data
Interchange (MADI). Recently, she was a Fellow at
the American Institute for Maghreb Studies (AIMS)
and Member of the Steering Committee of the
Conference on Libyan Humanities with AIMS and
the US Embassy to Libya. She received the
prestigious Chevening Scholarship Award for a
Fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies
(OCIS) in 2022-23 and the Society of Architectural
Historians (SAH) Opler Grant Award in 2020.

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Roman Antiquities in The Fifty-Fourth Annual General

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