23 YEARS IN THE SERVICE OF ROMANIAN HERITAGE AND COMMUNITIES
≡
June 2024
For ten years now, Pro Patrimonio houses and places have been actively and constantly opening up to nearby youth communities through programmes of exploration and creative use of local resources, through direct reference to the heritage object. The houses have been, in turn, photographic subjects, „characters” in animated films made by the children, disguised as models, games, story points on cultural trails in the village and the city, the subject and index of a very wide and varied range of creative and practical activities. They have become the context for meeting and forming communities, an opportunity to relate to a model from the past to help us shape a better future.
Enough has gathered around this process that we decided it was time to add to the basic ideas – heritage house and children exploring through play – a visual identity that will accompany the kits and caravans in the field from now on. All these years, „Education for Heritage” has proved to be an identity programme of the Pro Patrimonio Foundation, as a role model, which has crept persistently into all the projects carried out. It needed a brand and we are glad that this has happened now that the programme is celebrating its 10th anniversary.
We thank the Creionetica team for accompanying us graphically with understanding and empathy throughout the project „Heritage Kit and Caravan – Houses and Communities Working Together”.
Also, as part of this project, we also included a product designed by the Education for Heritage Programme Coordinator, architect Andreea Machidon. It is the „Exploration Map of Câmpulung Muscel, Berechet Map”. It is now available in the „Useful” section of the Pro Patrimonio Foundation website. The Berechet Map was created during the organization of the festival celebrating the cultural and natural heritage of Câmpulung Muscel – „3 Doors, 3 Countries” – and used on many occasions by the children community of the city. It invites locals and visitors alike to take a leisurely stroll and works up the appetite for getting to know the place and the people who have lived there.
„Heritage Kit and Caravan – Houses and Communities Working Together” is a project realized by Pro Patrimonio Foundation, supported by the Romanian Order of Architects Stamp Tax and co-financed by AFCN, with the support of UiPath Foundation.
Read also:
Kit şi Caravană de Patrimoniu. Pregătiri.
Kit şi Caravană de Patrimoniu – Case și Comunități care Conlucrează
May 2024
In these first months of work for the heritage education project for this year, work is going on under the surface to produce the materials with which trainers and children will explore the Enescu House in Mihăileni,Botoșani county; Country House Viscri 18, Viscri,Brasov county; Golescu Villa, Câmpulung Muscel Town, Argeș county; Neamțu Mansion, Olari village,Olt county; the Church of Urși,Vâlcea county and another surprise house. Ideas and ways to spark children’s imagination emerge from team discussions.
We wonder, for example, what people, sounds or stories have clothed the heritage buildings chosen for the six kits for children? Aristocratic families, bankers and important politicians of their times passed by Golescu Villa in Câmpulung Muscel, the Neamțu Mansion in Olari or the P.P. Carp Mansion in Țibănești. We shall find out how the Saxons arrived in Viscri, how the Church of Urși is still inhabited by angelic figures and which musical personalities have been with George Enescu at the Memorial House in Mihăileni.
At the same time, we ask ourselves about our roots and try to build our own family tree.
Our friends are our extended family and we try to use the monthly meetings to shape and define as best and creatively as possible the community of work and play that will form around the kits and the Heritage Caravan, starting in August this summer.
Our Caravan defines and weaves together the network of historic homes and communities in which the Foundation works. In the caravan, some of the core team and a team of experienced volunteers set out for a total of about 20 days in the fall to five destinations of exploration and play spread out in places steeped in history.
Each host home and garden opens to an audience comprising mainly of children for two days with exhibits, specific workshops, prize contests, culinary tastings, and movie night.
“Heritage Kit and Caravan – Houses and Communities Working Together” is a project realized by Pro Patrimonio Foundation, supported by the Romanian Order of Architects Stamp Tax and co-financed by AFCN, with the support of UiPath Foundation.
For a year and a half, from the beginning of 2024 until June 2025, the Heritage Education program has been enriched with more workstations and offers 125 children from rural areas and beyond the opportunity to learn directly through experimentation and creativity about the heritage of architecture, local memory and identity, nature, buildings, relationships between people and cultural values.
The project entitled “Heritage Kit and Caravan – Houses and Communities Working Together” has two components that have proven over years to be very important: remote interventions through heritage kits and on-site interventions through workshops, camps and community days within the heritage caravan.
25 children from 5 communities in different counties (Botoșani, Brașov, Argeș, Vâlcea and Olt) will form mixed working groups with a local coordinator, they will meet twice a month for six months to work together on the stories of six emblematic heritage buildings in Romania (with at least one example from their own neighborhood). The stories received in the pack will be complemented by numerous practical challenges that question and challenge the groups of children to rethink life in the community, the nearby natural setting and the individual spaces they use in relation to examples of good practice received and then constructed by themselves.
The first six examples of kits tell the stories of: the Enescu House in Mihăileni, Botoșani county; Viscri 18 peasant house, Viscri, Brasov county; the Golescu Villa, town of Câmpulung Muscel, Argeș county; Neamțu Manor, Olari village, Olt county; Urși Church, Vâlcea county and a surprise house.
Each kit pack dedicated to one of the six places contains: an interactive exploration booklet of the house, a slice of the large map puzzle of Romania, a pop-up construction and the house itself that lights up.
The caravan is designed for direct interaction. It brings together project coordinators and trained trainers for two successive camp sessions and community days in all five Pro Patrimonio communities. Workshops, cultural, sporting and culinary competitions, exhibitions and film evenings will invite both children involved in the program and curious and eager family members to participate.
The kits, camps and community days aim to be an engaging cultural product, demonstrating that the collaborative heritage stories of architects, designers, historians and environmental specialists can work together in an understandable educational package and generate ideas and solutions for creative development and the enhancement of quality life for individuals and groups, using existing cultural resources in innovative ways.
The camps and community days at the end of the project give us the opportunity to generate a sense of belonging to a community and instill the idea that the power to change lies in one’s own hands.
***
Over the last ten years, through its trans-annual and interdisciplinary “Education for Heritage” program, the Pro Patrimonio Foundation has been promoting education of and for heritage wherever the Foundation physically intervenes.
The over 40 workshops initiated by Pro Patrimonio in these years are mainly aimed at children aged 7-14 years old, in vulnerable situations in the communities where the foundation carries out projects for the rescue, conservation and rehabilitation of architectural heritage (Golescu Villa in Câmpulung, Neamțu Manor in Olari, Perticari-Davila Manor in Argeș, George Enescu House in Mihăileni, etc.).
The activities are organized annually in the form of practical workshops and aim to educate and teach directly, through experimentation and creativity, about architectural heritage, local memory and identity, nature, buildings, relationships between people and cultural values. Projects such as “3 Doors, 3 Countries Festival” (2018), “The Heritage Caravan” (2019), “Enescu House Days” (2020), “School of Landscape, Art and Sound” (2021), “My Village Story” (2022), the “Heritage in a Package “ kit series and numerous one-off actions in the sites where we work, have shaped and consolidated over time a functional working strategy.
“Heritage Kit and Caravan – Houses and Communities Working Together” is a project realized by Pro Patrimonio Foundation, supported by the Romanian Order of Architects Stamp Tax and co-financed by AFCN.
