Culture and Cultures

Redefining culture and heritage

Eugen Nasta, 03.12.2024, 14:00

The Designers, Thinkers, Makers Association has created a program labelled “Culture and Cultures”. Its eventual aim is to highlight Romania’s cultural heritage. The program also seeks to revitalize Romanian culture, with special emphasis on promoting UNESCO sites and the local values, more often than not less well-known to the public.

Initial steps have already been taken, to that effect, with the completion of the audio tour of Biertan.

Architect Alexandra Mihailiciuc is the Association’s cultural programs coordinator Here she is, telling us where they started from and what the stages of the programs were.

“This program, “Culture and Cultures”, we thought it out as some sort of cultural revitalizatio we have built in a bid to protect and capitalize on the values of Romania’s cultural heritage. It somehow speaks about culture, about the various ethnic cultures, but also about culture in its basic accepting, connected to the ground, that is about the territories around the house, the manor house, the village.

Which means it’s equally about the care for our nearest but also about the care for the farthest, since they are tied by an umbilical cord. And the ultimate purpose of such a program, actually, is to use as many means as possible for the creation of a good climate, good for culture, and, at long last, good for the quality of life. Besides, one of the key components of this program is the education for heritage. We realized it matters for al social layers and for all ages.

And I won’ t be mincing my words, saying that from our point of view, it is one of Romanian society’s emergencies. We see, around us, how much is being destroyed, how little the communities take responsibility for the heritage, how little it is loved and understood and how little it is capitalized on.

This program has several cultural projects. The project we’ve carried this year, “Heritage Lab. Connecting the Dots”, is just one of the projects of this programs, which also has three streams: education, research and design.

Architect Alexandra Mihailiciuc, the Designers Thinkers Makers Association’s cultural programs coordinator also gave us details on their work:

“This year we have sought to think out the program which special emphasis laid on the cultural heritage of Transylvania’s Hills, especially of the UNESCO village of Biertan and the village of Chirpar, in a bid to highlight this valuable cultural heritage of the region and get the lay public acquainted with all that is unknown yet valuable, so, in a way, with everything that somehow exists yet it is not capitalized on. And we thought it would be better to begin with a UNESCO site, since UNESCO sites are the spearhead of world heritage, humankind’s most cherished treasures. And yet, with us, in our country, they haven’t just as yet been appropriated by the collective mindset. “

A summer school followed, themed “Heritage Lab”, a school with a theoretical component whereby students surveyed the UNESCO sites, wrote about them, made their drawings, created interpretation materials, yet the school had a practical component as well, that of working with their own hands, where they learned how the traditional historical plastering is made, with lime, with sand, how the correct brick-based masonry is being made, architecture students needing these labs, these construction sites, so they can be prepared for their professional future.

Alexandra Mihailiciuc once again:

“ We have created two audio tours for the Biertan site and the village of Chirpar, bi-lingual, Romanian and English, and here we are, we even succeeded to launch the digital tour of UNESCO Biertan’s fortified church, with a program which, I believe, is multifarious, including the presentation of the project, going through the stations for the area’s relevant projects, but also an organ concert.

The space was flooded by Transylvanian music of various timeframes, belonging to the Romantic period, somehow in tune with the age of the organ in the fortified church. But the novelty of it all was the fact that that organ concert actually turned into a musical workshop or into a musical living room, just like that, revolving around the organ, where we’ve been explained the working system and where little sound incursions have been performed, into the multiple qualities of this instrument.

Those who came could go through the rest of the stations scattered all around the village, since that’s exactly the underlying idea, for us to invite tourists to discover not only the fortified church, but also everything around it, considering Culture and Cultures.

And that is how they can take the journey, visiting one station after the next, about UNESCO and the sister churches about the village apothecary, which seems to be the first such store in rural Transylvania, about customs and traditions, about the multiculturalism of the place, about decorations, about, why not, Via Transilvanica cutting through the centre of the village. “

Then an exhibition follows, about the precious Chirpar ceramics, the Stork Culture Workshops in Bucharest, a string of exhibitions, of film screening evenings, of architecture and craftsmanship and of workshops, also related to cultural heritage.