How International is World Heritage?
At the Hanoi Conference of Forum UNESCO – University and Heritage we received an invitation from Prof. Dr. Marie-Theres Albert who has been the UNESCO Chair in Heritage Studies in Cottbus from the very beginning.
The Brandenburg Technical University celebrated its 10th anniversary of World Heritage Education in Cottbus. International experts from Australia through Bahrein to Canada (Christina Cameron, permanent consultant of the UNESCO) were present at the event, including current and former university students, doctorandi, post-doctors, the leading persons of the UNESCO and its advisory bodies (like Mechtild Rössler, Chief of Europe and North America Section, Mounir Bouchenaki, director-General of ICCROM).
The meeting was made remarkable by almost two hundred participants, forty presentations, a Chinese shadow puppet theater, Zimbabwe folk music and a piano piece written specifically for the occasion. Delivering a presentation was an honour, that we were also granted for our lecture entitled Technological Attempts for Heritage Education. This section was chaired by a Nigerian architect, a Cottbus alumnus whose French student gave a presentation on graffities, then a Ukrainian PhD student talked about Multidisciplinary Presentations of Church Values.
Among the presenters, the Italian descendent Swiss Art Historian dealing with the Aftereffects of the Bosnian War befriended a Korean painter who lives in Helsinki and is an expert in Religion History. The conference has assumed intangible heritage inseparable from the built and natural heritage including cultural landscapes and expressed urgent need for complex new methods in most territories of the preservation work.
The meeting was also outstanding in the informal atmosphere and mutual interest in others’ research fields irrespectively from age, rank and geological origin. It was a noteworthy demonstration of heritage education, hopefully making a tradition to be maintained among the representative experts of the area.
Photos: Brandenburg University of Technology, MultiMediaCenter (MMZ), Marko Schneider