Art expert Maria Bilasevschi warns of risk of digitization cutting people away from heritage reality

Art critic and curator Maria Bilasevschi warns of the risk that cultural heritage will become "just a decorative setting" for the collective memory if people only see iconic buildings on the internet and do not get in direct contact with them.

"Today we are used to looking at various information about heritage, especially on the internet or in mass media, without getting in direct contact with it. And, leaving aside the superficiality of the information, I believe that a major risk is that in the future everything surrounding us, whether we are talking about 18th-century churches or public monuments built at the end of the 19th, or in the early 20th century, will end up being just decorative elements lacking the substance and the history that otherwise defined the city of Iasi and Romania itself, and we will end up trivializing what visual culture means. Reality isn't always the same with what we see on the phone or laptop screen," Maria Bilasevschi, president of the Iasi branch of the Union of Visual Artists, told AGERPRES.

A lecturer at the Visual Arts Faculty of the 'George Enescu' National Arts University of Iasi, an art critic and curator, Maria Bilasevschi also argues that, although digitization saves the memory of the heritage, it risks breaking the people's connection with the reality and the spirit of the place.

On the other hand, she acknowledges the benefits of heritage digitization, which could help rebuild certain disappeared monuments sometime in the future, at least as mockups, and also emphasizes the importance of research and direct participation in cultural events for "preserving the truth."

This week, over 20 academics and local administration representatives from Italy, France, Portugal and Finland participate in a European conference on the digitization of cultural heritage, an event organized in Iasi September 1 - 5 within the framework of the CHARME - Digital Cultural Heritage Activity acRoss Multiple European Regions project.

The project is carried out by the Iasi municipality in partnership with four other municipalities and a university: Pavia City Hall (Italy) - project leader, Poitiers City Hall (France), Coimbra City Hall (Portugal), Turku City Hall (Finland), the University of Pavia (advisory partner), and the Lviv European Integration Bureau in Ukraine (discovery partner), which have all been collaborating for over five years now within the European Campus of City-Universities Alliance (EC2U).