Kick-Off Danube Culture Platform in Vienna

The Danube Culture Platform plans a new cooperation of culture and tourism. The aim of the project is to convey historic places and events in a contemporary to an international audience.  European cultural routes will be supported and expanded. Well-trodden paths will be left, hidden cultural heritage revealed, contemporary artistic interpretations and new educational formats for historic sites and events developed. The platform seeks to discover old and new stories about the visible and invisible cultural heritage in the Danube region. These are intended to encourage the development of new cultural tourism offers for an audience of the 21st century. The project is placed within the context of the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018 and the submission of the Western part of the Roman Danube limes in Bavaria, Austria, Slovakia and Hungary to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2018.

The Danube Culture Platform was kicked-off on 20 April 2017 in Vienna. A public presentation at Ringturm, Vienna, outlined the themes of the project.

Photo: Rainer Prohaska

CULTPLATFORM_21 - KICK-OFF MEETING FROM APRIL 20TH TO 21ST 2017

CULTPLATFORM_21 - MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING OF PROJECT PARTNERS

First Workshop Discovering Hidden Heritage in Vienna

How can cultural heritage be treated and conveyed in a contemporary way for a 21st century audience? How can new narratives – stories that stretch over the entire Danube area – be narrated for old and new cultural heritage sites? On 20 April 2017 the cultural policy workshop “Discovering Hidden Heritage – Contemporary Approaches to Culture and Tourism” took place in Vienna. The purpose of the workshop, the first of a series, is to create a region-wide cultural policy network for exchange, discussion and reflection. The workshop concluded with a discussion among the more than 80 participants on the opportunities and challenges. Results are summing up the point of departure.

Photo: Rainer Prohaska

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Make the invisible visible

We understand the Danube region as a space of transformation, which is borderline and constantly moving at the same time. The cultural history of the river shows both sides of the medal: Social demarcation and permeability. It is one goal of the project to point out the transnational common grounds of this European life vein and make the hidden visible. Besides the common strategies of reconstruction and 3 D this hidden heritage and places of remembrance shall be made visible and connected with the present also through different artistic interventions.

Paradigmatic examples of how this could be done are Christian Boltanski’s „Missing House“ (1993, Berlin), Mischa Kuball’s „refraction house“ – a light installation in the former Synagoge in Stommeln/Pulheim (1994) or the project “Audioway Gusen” by the artist Christoph Maier (2007). A 90-minutes round trip through a typically residential neighborhood of an small Austrian town, which was literally built on the barracks of the concentration camp Gusen, a brutal conducted labor and death camp near to that of Mauthausen. After 1945 the story of the area was area repressed and “forgotten”, the former camp was privatized, subdivided, partially demolished and covered again with new buildings. Maier has transformed this monstrous fault line between today's dwelling-place and the hidden heritage into a troublesome audio-collage made of contemporary and historical reports as well as of and perpetrators' voices.

Photo: Holger Hübner / Hubertus Birkner

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Save the Date! 1st Transnational Project Conference

11 – 13 October 2017, Pécs, Hungary

The 1st Transnational Project Conference will take place on 11 – 13 October 2017, at the magnificent Kodály Conference and Concert Centre in Pécs/Hungary – organized and hosted by the Zsolnay Heritage Management Nonprofit Ltd, in close cooperation with the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts Baden-Württemberg.

The central topic of the Pécs conference will be audience development which is considered as a challenge for several cultural and touristic institutions and organizations in the Danube region, especially when it comes to the needs of existing and potential audiences of cultural heritage.

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Sustainable Tourism Development in the Danube Region: New Perspectives, Belgrade, Serbia

The Conference on Sustainable Tourism Development in the Danube Region: New Perspectives which was taking place in the framework of the International Danube Day was organized by the Ministry of Trade, Tourism and Telecommunications of the Republic of Serbia, in collaboration with the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) and Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH in the name of German Development Cooperation. The aim of the Conference was to lay the policy and strategic groundwork for the development of joint sustainable tourism products and marketing platforms in the Danube Region and beyond.

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