The presence in the absence: the performance and objects biography as memory activatorsThis paper addresses the consolidation of heritage based on the life cycle of cultural legacies evoked at the end of their life. In this context deals with the wear and tear, disappearance and destruction of three artefacts that interweave ideas of belonging, history and memory, from which one seeks to examine the dualities that enclose the ideas of life/death, body/soul and materiality/immateriality. The case studies dealt are a dress (museum), a sacred painting of an altar (church) and a fountain (public space). The reasons for this choice - of seemingly disparate artefacts - are related to the aim of highlighting different situations involved in the heritage approach to cultural assets, working from a singular prism: the performance of objects associated with cultural biography. Biography is therefore understood as life in potency and performance as memorial activation, which, in the sense adopted in this paper, would be the escape route of social amnesia.