Auratic distance: art’s role in heritage production

The paper examines how collaborative art practices with traditional craft practitioners negotiate distance and intimacy to elevate traditional crafts as heritage practices. Addressing this question contributes to a broader theoretical concern in decolonising geographies of heritage: how relational inequalities shaped by class, caste and race are reproduced or disrupted in creative re-presentation of the past. Drawing on fieldwork in Chitpur Road, Kolkata (2017–2019), the paper develops three interrelated forms of distancing: temporal, aesthetic, and socio-economic, as conceptual tools to theorise heritagisation. It interrogates the reinforcement of colonial categorisation between ‘contemporary artists’ and ‘native craftsmen’ through two collaborative art projects. It argues that heritage-making operates as a double-bind: while aspiring to collapse these distances, heritage is produced if the distance between these categories is maintained. This is illustrated when a hand-pulled rickshaw is transformed into a shared heritage object through art’s auratic intervention. Challenging Walter Benjamin’s conceptualisation that reproduction diminishes aura, the paper shows that when art mediates everyday objects, aura is produced, not lost – further creating distance. These findings advance debates on the politics of heritage-making and creative geography, revealing how art performs to address inequality by recognising the ordinary. At the same time, it reinscribes intersubjective and relational distance, estranging what was once intimate.