I think that's the biggest victory: victory despite the state
The relationship with the community becomes a carousel when you start an action to protect the heritage, says Luiza Zamora, from Association 37.
In a world where the word "heritage" remains foreign or at least meaningless for most of us, Luiza Zamora, art historian and cultural instigator, contributes to various initiatives in the field of heritage protection, conservation and promotion. Over the years, he has reported situations of spaces worth saving and has promoted lesser-known heritage segments.
Tell me a little bit about the first initiative you had in the field of protection, heritage conservation (is it Art &Street delivery)? How did it come into being? What was more complicated at first? What went easier from your experience?
Art&Street Delivery was not really an initiative in this field, but it was a good scene for debates about heritage and urbanism, the city and the quality of urban life, art.
But my first attempt at heritage was not one in the literal sense of protecting and preserving monuments, but it was rather an endeavor to electronically preserve a heritage that cannot be restored, at least during my lifetime, and which I chose to archive in memory of hard drives. I chose this path, simpler, because I know how valuable this documentation is from the perspective of one who from time to time still writes about heritage and faces a lack of complete visual information. I started by photographing houses of cultural value in the countryside from the simple finding that here they perished faster than in the city. Many of them do not have the status of a monument, not that this would necessarily protect them, and fall prey to the need for "progress", to forget a past that is most often associated with poverty.
Apart from a few aficionados and specialists in what is called heritage, a foreign word of meaning among people, almost no one of the inhabitants of villages and towns knows anymore to look at the old houses, to see them and understand their beauty. They are nowhere on the road between the glorification of some national culture enthusiasts and the perplexity of the people who inhabit them and between whom they live. It's enough to look from one end to the other at a village, a street, a neighborhood as they are if not torn down at least limp, shrillly sided with new buildings, painted, built on windows, or simply deserted.
What do you think are, at the moment, the big hurdles for NGOs in this area? Will there be more/less support, interest from the authorities, from the community?
The biggest obstacle is the lack of real cooperation between the state and the non-governmental sector, the lack of interest in heritage on the part of this state incapable of seeing in its own heritage a resource not only cultural but also a financial one. To this I would add the human resource working in the field of heritage protection: insufficient and unprepared. Here and there there are people who honor their profession, who do not give up in the face of bureaucracy and institutional ineptitudes, and who are looking for solutions as part of what we call heritage to reach other generations. I think that we should not stop in thanking the non-governmental organizations in the field and the local communities that defend their cultural resource in the face of the lucrative initiatives of local mayors and entrepreneurs, because we owe them to an overwhelming extent the survival of fragments of cultural identity.
Even taking pictures is not so easy because sometimes you get to the police, sometimes you are run with the bat because you do not know who allowed you to take pictures from the street, a house. There's still this need for supreme authority that decides for you, you can't do something on your own and there's still the fear that someone is coming to take your house. Most clearly, this need for authority is expressed through the blessing you need in the case of ecclesiastical heritage. You can't wake up a researcher to photograph national heritage churches without allowing you a high.
What's the most important achievement for you in the field? Both for you, your organization, and at the sector level?
I do not know if I can mention notable achievements in this area. Rather, I would say that we have shouldered various initiatives in the field of heritage protection, conservation and promotion, we have reported "cases" to those who have the tools to save and we have promoted lesser-known heritage segments.
The years of activity at Igloo magazine and the establishment there of the permanent section dedicated to heritage were the years of discipleship, when, monthly, we went, documented and photographed together with my colleague Șerban Bonciocat houses, mansions, cules, wall and wooden churches trying to bring to the present traces of the past, to invite contemporaries to remembrance and to incite them to rediscover a history of architecture, as I did poetically and visually in the album Cule. Fortified boyar houses in Romania. I continued this note on my own through a series of albums about an area less on the tourist or affective map, but, which is slowly discovered, can be a revelation both as a built heritage, immaterial or natural. The Wood editorial series. Stone. The wall was conceived as a triptych about the wooden and wall churches, the houses, the mansions and the cules of northern Oltenia, an area not only with the most wooden churches in the country, but also with ecclesiastical edifices with exterior painting. Isn't it that when you think about wood, Maramures comes to mind or churches painted on the outside, you think of Bucovina and not of Oltenia?
But at the sector level, the achievements are truly notable for the immense effort that a handful of professionals have made in managing to save fragments of the legacy that the absent state mentions only in speeches and strategies from collapse. Without these persevering enthusiasts we would not have had Rosia Montana today in the UNESCO heritage, standing fortified churches, restored mansions. I think that's the biggest victory: victory despite the state.
If you were to look into the past, what does the relationship with the community look like? Did you feel that you were supported in your mission? If so, does this support also translate into concrete actions (involvement through volunteering, donations, etc.)?
The relationship with the community is like a carousel. Being a reflection of the small-scale society, the relationship is subject to the turbulence of the way, but we choose to keep in mind the positive experiences, and one of the most notable such examples is the community gathered around a small wooden church in a Vâlcean cemetery. In 2008 we had started documenting for a large project of research and promotion of the heritage on the two slopes of the Carpathians, from four counties – Gorj, Valcea, Hunedoara and Sibiu – and in one of the documentation trips we gave, in a cemetery full of greenery of a cobblestone wooden church, in a ravine and supported with stakes to stay among us. Approaching I discovered under the roof left a wonderful construction that had painting on a thin layer of plaster of great artistic value, especially since in this area there are too few painted wooden churches, none of them of the same level.
I was wondering how such a church could escape from the radar of art history and all I knew how to do better was to tell about it and show it to my teachers and to the architect Șerban Sturdza, then president of the Romanian Order of Architects. And thus began the 12 years of works of conservation, restoration and valorization of the wooden church in Bears, Valcea, with the support of a large community of individual and institutional donors in the country and abroad, with volunteers from different corners of the world and with the support of the local community that gathered around this monument supporting the specialists who came here with their labor, with dishes, with hosting. Needless to say, the state wasn't here, but it was the people. The recognition for all this consistent effort came last year when the ProPatrimonio Foundation, the one that bore the brunt of this project, won the most prestigious European prize in the field of heritage, but also that of the European public, Europa Nostra. It is also a recognition of the contribution of the local community to the success of this project.
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