ABSTRACT
Heritage sites play an important role in generating and transmitting heritage. Human bodies featuring in the exhibitions of the European Heritage Label sites can be understood as emotionally charged sticky objects in this process. While bodies as sticky objects evoke emotions in audiences, the emotive quality of an object can also create stickiness during and long after a heritage visit. The bodies of visitors can also be understood as resonating membranes, through which affective experiences in heritage sites penetrate, reverberate, and become creatively transformed and expressed. Visitors’ photographs present a form of affective and embodied practice that stimulates reflection and triggers acts of meaning-making during and after the visit. The representation of bodies in the exhibitions of the sites as well as the visitors’ bodies as vehicles of embodied knowledge and as containers and conductors of affective experiences facilitate the generation of empathy with the historical experiences of others. Both may contribute to reinforce a normative discourse and maintain specific ideological ideas, power positions, and categories of people. However, because of their potential of generating empathy, they are also capable of producing notions of solidarity and acceptance in a heterogeneous polity such as the contemporary European Union.
