As of 10 December 2025, the Una Europa Alliance has launched its third virtual exhibition, “Dissonant Legacies: Engaging with Difficult University Heritage”, available on the Unveiling University Heritage in the Digital Era platform. This digital journey invites viewers to confront the most challenging aspects of Europe’s academic history, addressing themes such as colonialism, totalitarian regimes, discrimination, and museum practices that today call for renewed ethical reflection.
The exhibition is curated by Prof. Patrizia Battilani, from the Department of Economics at the University of Bologna, and Dr. Filippo Marco Espinoza, researcher in the Department of Interpreting and Translation and teaching collaborator in the Department of Economics. Together, they coordinated a collective, transnational effort aimed at critically engaging with the difficult legacies preserved in university archives, museums, libraries, botanical gardens, and collections.
For centuries, European universities have contributed to the growth and circulation of knowledge. At the same time, many academic institutions have been involved—directly or indirectly—in historical dynamics tied to colonialism, discriminatory policies, and authoritarian regimes. Objects, artefacts, and documents that bear witness to these complex stories form what we now call “dissonant heritage”: materials that challenge the present and demand new interpretive approaches.
“Dissonant Legacies” explores precisely these shadowed zones, offering a narrative pathway that does more than display objects—it places at the center the ways in which those objects are interpreted, narrated, and made accessible to contemporary audiences.
The making of the exhibition was a collective undertaking involving numerous research units across the Una Europa universities. The result is a mosaic of stories and curatorial approaches addressing the memory of totalitarian regimes, the decolonization of collections, the ethical management of human remains, and the reinterpretation of “silent” objects lacking clear provenance but rich in critical significance.
This international dialogue allowed teams to share good practices, develop new forms of mediation, and identify strategies to make university heritage more transparent, inclusive, and critically informed.
With this third exhibition, the Una Europa Alliance strengthens its vision of university heritage not as a static repository of the past, but as a dynamic resource that must be continually reinterpreted. “Dissonant Legacies” encourages audiences to view historical dissonance as an opportunity for growth and awareness, laying the groundwork for new forms of cultural and academic participation.
The exhibition is now available on the Unveiling University Heritage in the Digital Era platform, which already hosts the two previous exhibitions created by the Alliance.
