Whose authenticity and values count? New understandings and ethical futures for replicas

The intellectual and practical treatment of replicas is disjointed and fragmented in terms of museum and heritage practices: replicas and their originals sit between places, collections and sectors and are subject to inconsistent, different and divergent practices, which may well include inertia and invisibility. At its roots, their treatment is a product of the questionable or secondary authenticity and value associated with replicas. Practising new thinking about replicas, informed by alternative understandings of their contemporary authenticity and value, is an ethical consideration for museum and heritage practitioners. It also opens up new possibilities when seeking to employ replicas in ethically sensitive local and global contexts for considering the past, present and future of historic replicas. Co-produced, cross-sectoral principles and guidance developed in 2020 that invite new futures for replicas, whether analogue or digitally generated, and their research context, anchor this chapter’s discussion.