23 YEARS IN THE SERVICE OF ROMANIAN HERITAGE AND COMMUNITIES
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Between August 14 and 22, 2020, the Enescu House opened its doors to the community!
We celebrated the end of the restoration site with a wide range of workshops and activities dedicated to children from Mihăileni and a piano concert by pianist Raluca Ştirbăţ on August 19, George Enescu’s birthday.
Around 20 children from Mihăileni benefited from an intense eight-day program dedicated to the exploration and creative transformation of local resources. The experiments were aimed at children’s befriending the idea of built heritage having as landmark and object of study the Enescu House itself. The whole project was enriched with meals with the team, sports and board games and evenings with animated films dedicated to the whole community.
At the first inquiry into the community, the children received each an Explorer’s Notebook that accompanied them in the mapping exercise of the elements that define the surroundings of the Enescu House – materials, craftsmen, objects, built spaces, natural spaces, stories, customs, recipes or plants. The work on the Notebooks was the basis for the first two workshops for the construction of a series of interactive local maps with elements of objective presentation, proposals and visions adapted to the requirements of the inhabitants and personal hiding places in the form of stories.
On the day dedicated to sound, through games and exercises the children observed the vibration of various elements in their immediate vicinity, tested voices and instruments, built handcrafted musical instruments and tuned their energies in an impromptu orchestra.
Within the workshop dedicated to the architecture specialist, the children built a house-lighting fixture with 5 layers of walk-in and creative understanding of the Enescu House: golden plan and proportions, component materials, specialized terms and graphic representations, the main section of the house and the interior in its past and future of phase.
In the role of landscapers, the children proposed scenarios for arranging the courtyard of the Enescu House and created structures from woven twigs for future climbing plants.
The team researched the history of the house, proposing together with a specialist an animation with its story and some moments George Enescu spent in Mihăileni.
The celebration of the official opening of the Enescu House brought together the children at the concert in the form of hosts and hopeful helpers in organizing the event.
The works and research gathered, the sports games practiced in all the afternoons in the backyard and the friendships made during this time were used as a pretext for a big final exhibition and a series of competitions with awards. The festive day created an opportunity to gather a large audience, curious about the children’s work and gathered the teams in sports competitions, fun games, ingenious rehearsals and dancing choreography. The badminton competition took place with a generous audience of parents, relatives, friends and neighbours, but also with tempting prizes. The children-parents culinary test gathered 15 local dishes, judged with great seriousness by all the tasters present on a musical background offered by a local children’s orchestra from Vicov.
The eight days were real educative and creative rehearsals for children, an opportunity to make friends with serious tools, such as: motosaw, drills, saws, pyrography tools or carving knives and playful challenges, local stories and reflections.
Starting with the first day, the children claimed the term workshops and turned it into a camp. No one was interested in the lunch break at home and everyone preferred to stay in the backyard for continuous game sessions or help offered to the team for various chores. The house courtyard was not large enough for the daily requests from children from all over the community to participate in the events, but the rules of distance imposed by the pandemic forced us to limit the number of participants, but also to promise that in better times we will put more workshop places available.
By the end of this year we intend to leave room for a surprise DIY kit, a future online exhibition of works and explorations from this summer, a presentation film for the project and a future digital map with the craftsmen around Enescu House.
None of this would have been possible without the basic team: Andreea Machidon and Mihai Petrescu set off with: trainers – teammates Luiza Simion, Ana Maria Apostoiu and Irinia Novac; specialized trainers Andreea Tincea – sound and Smaranda Ilie – animation; film specialist Alin Iacob; graphic specialist: Mona Petre; ANIMEST team; the school management from Mihăileni and the local coordinator Adrian Hariga.
The “camp” at the Enescu House started in 2020 and we all hope that it will be an event that will enrich the place every year.
“EventFullDays at the Enescu House – cultural-musical explorations and exercises” is a cultural project realized by the Pro Patrimonio Foundation in partnership with the UiPath Foundation and co-financed by AFCN.