Description
The project addresses two main issues such as the need of increased awareness of cultural diversity and its implementation into contemporary art and culture of Romania. The configuration and manifold uses of the living space reflect certain cultural values and ideas while the housing experiences are always influenced by the history of the community and the group’s development trajectory. At the public level, the low number of approaches in humanities and arts sciences translates into a low level of knowledge of the variety of living spaces and thus of the cultural diversity they encompass. The project seeks to increase awareness of the variety of housing forms and expressions, as an articulation of cultural diversity. The objectives include documentation of cultural diversity in Bucharest and surrounding areas through the lens of the variety of housing experiences, promotion of new works of visual art using multimedia tools and to develop a new model of non-formal education which will contribute to the understanding and appreciation of housing forms and expressions by 150 high school students. The research component will analyse housing as an interaction between people and space including the factors that best describe how people choose to organise their living space, in correlation with the socio-political, administrative, legislative and economic parameters and existing cultural patterns. Another component of the project involves the production of a work of visual art, a web documentary entitled “Housing Experiences in Romania”, which will combine several types of media expressions: photographs, video, text, audio, graphic design with web technologies. Each episode will be published at intervals of one month, on a platform. Educational workshops developed within this project aim to promote education through art and culture by employing innovative methods. The target groups : creators, artists and experts in the cultural field, students from art schools
Summary of project results
The project “Lived-In Homes. Cultural diversity of dwelling in Bucharest and the neighboring surroundings.” aimed to increase awareness of the variety of housing forms and expressions, as an articulation of cultural diversity. The objectives were to document and analyze the cultural diversity in Bucharest and surrounding areas through the lens of the variety of housing experiences, to promote cultural diversity by creating new works of visual art using multimedia tools and to develop a new model of non-formal education which will contribute to the understanding and appreciation of the multifariousness of housing forms and expressions by 150 high school students aged 14-18 years. The web documentary Bucharest Housing Stories, a seven-part miniseries about housing experience in contemporary Bucharest. The documentary is focused on different dwelling spaces and housing forms – blocks from the Communist period, new residential areas, ghetto neighborhoods, student dormitories, public space (homeless living), former nationalized houses and homes from suburban areas – and follows the diversity of experiences for 21 characters.. Two photography exhibitions (“Neighborhood Aesthetics: interior and exterior landscapes of the (post)socialist places” and “Tenant#21”) brought to public attention more invisible aspects of the cultural dimension of housing. 800 people participated at Housing Stories Nights and the two exhibitions had more than 2000 visitors. The online campaign reached over 500.000 people (through our Facebook page, the online platform
www.bucharesthousingstories.ro and through the support of 26 media partners). The web documentary was screened also at events carried out by local community groups in Bucharest and presented at Astra Film Festival (Sibiu) and Urban Eye Film Festival (Bucharest). The multidisciplinary research activity from street living to gated communities included eight ways of housing in contemporary Bucharest, involving sociologists, anthropologists, ethnologists, psychologists and students in architecture and urbanism. An intense media campaign was developed in order to promote and raise awareness about topics related to housing in Bucharest as a major point for understanding cultural diversity. The research had an important impact in the academic community as a good practice for a multidisciplinary project focused on a relevant topic for Bucharest cultural and social life.
Summary of bilateral results