Her interest in the architectural heritage started to develop 10 years ago, when she initiated a volunteer based research project, The Mourning Houses project. The educational foundation was consolidated at ENSA Paris-Belleville where she studied for 2 years the contemporary approach on the recent architectural heritage within a DSA specialization program. In 2013, she published the RePAD Guide, the first Romanian guide for the rehabilitation of the architectural heritage.
Her interest in photography gave birth to documentary projects such as 'Bucharest, the little Paris?', for which she received a creation residency at the Romanian Cultural Institute in Paris and brought her some interesting collaborations, such as the one with The French Institute in Timisoara and the French Architecture office, Encore Heureux, for the 7th edition of SurExpositions.
As a junior architect, she experienced both, large scale projects with Lauster & Radu Architects (Bucharest) and LAN Architecture (Paris) and small scale, with A A Feraru Architect et Urbanist (Paris).
Probably, for being considered a young professional with good perspectives, Forbes magazine included her name in the Romanian top 30 under 30, the 2014 edition.
"We bring our creative thinking and make full use of contemporary art language and interactive cleverness to translate deep historical research projects into accessible experiences for future communities.
Our work is focused on the integration of the cultural heritage in the urban development process. We pay particular attention to the social aspects involved and the multidisciplinary approach in the sustainable evolution of urban and rural communities.
Gathering a wide range of knowledge, we merge our expertise as researchers, practitioners, advocates or public officers and develop new fields of study by raising daring questions and producing new tools.
We truly believe that investing in heritage is not just an option. It’s one important responsibility. It’s not something related to a specific profession, but to the human nature, to how we grow as society. We don’t invest for better consumption, but to find the proper way to emerge further. We don’t protect heritage for the sake of it, but for understanding how we can better evolve.
Together, we can prepare a better future for our past.
Sessions in which Loredana Bruma participates
Saturday 4 June, 2016
Sessions in which Loredana Bruma attends
Friday 3 June, 2016
This forum will explore the current directions of critical heritage studies and what makes ACHS distinctive. Panel members will discuss what the term critical means to them, and what directions they would like to see develop in the future. To help develop an open dialogue, the session will also give considerable time to contributions from the audience.
Saturday 4 June, 2016
What if we changed our views on heritage? And if heritage has already changed? While, on the global scene, states maintain their leading role in the mobilization of social and territorial histories, on the local scale, regions, neighbourhoods and parishes have changed. Citizens and communities too: they latch on to heritage to express an unprecedented range of belongings that no law seems to be able to take measures to contain, often to the discontent of...
This festive event will offer delegates a taste of one of the iconic dishes of Montreal, the smoked meat sandwich, imported by Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe in the early 20th century. In particular, the tasting will allow a discovery of the products of the renowned international institution Schwartz's, the Hebrew Delicatessen for which Montrealers and tourists alike are willing to wait in long line-ups. During the tasting, “Chez Schwartz,” a documentary produced by Garry B...
Most of what we experience as heritage emerges into conscious recognition through a complex mixture of political and ideological filters, including nationalism. In these processes, through a variety of devices (museums, scholarly research, consumer reproduction, etc.), dualistic classifications articulate a powerful hierarchy of value and significance. In particular, the tangible-intangible pair, given legitimacy by such international bodies as UNESCO, reproduces a selective ordering of cul...
Sunday 5 June, 2016
Movement, stillness, and creation will be combined during this walk as participants are encouraged to attune themselves to the environment through conscious emplacement. We will awaken our sensory awareness by experimenting with deep listening, observing impermanence and slow walking. Weather permitting, participants will also be invited to create a cyanotype photogram with found materials. An in-situ photogram is an image made in collaboration with the environment and enhances our a...
Much is being made of the perceived breakdown of the nation-state, which was historically configured as a “container” of heritage formations, adopting and perusing local traditions where possible but oppressing them where deemed unsuitable. Migration is seen as eroding the rigid boundaries of this configuration, potentially liberating identities and heritages in the process. This session addresses the relationship between critical heritage and redefinitions of self, other, community and place...
With his expression "ceci tuera cela," Hugo established almost two centuries ago a strong link between words and stones as transmission vehicles of human memory. We heritage experts would be inclined to consider stones as more reliable than words, what semiology seems to confirm: stones are clues, and clues are, according to Roland Barthes, tangible proofs of “what has been.” But the inspector Columbo has often shown how we can play with these clues, and Umberto Eco would easily forgive us th...
In endeavouring to answer the question "What does heritage change?" this proposed session, "Fashioning Heritage," will call for papers that critically examine the way in which one of the main functions of dress is to locate or position individuals and communities in space and time. The temporal realm can be conceived as personally transitioning from and through certain life stages, being culturally defined as well as conceiving gender differently by dress and textiles. Transitions are visuall...
With regard to the main question of the 3rd ACHS Biennial Conference, "What does heritage change?" the convenors of this session propose ethnographic evidence of contradictory spheres of value by showing how encounters between official rhetorics of heritage and borderline/illegal ethics and objects produce social change. In particular, they explore, through an inclusive approach, the social and political constructions of heritage by questioning the aesthetic dichotomies of beauty/ugliness, pr...
"What does heritage change?" is a multifaceted question to which the answer(s) are in primary respects related to real-life negotiations among different groups of citizens, cultures, races, ethnic groups, sexual identities, and social classes about received, official and/or widely accepted or accomodated intangible attributes, cultural traditions, historic monuments, buildings, and other transmitted or revived historical legacies. Heritage designated by and for whom, for what motivations, an...
Directed by Tom Fassaert and presented by Marc Jacobs. ___ Doel, a Belgian village near the Dutch border, is disappearing quickly and deliberately. Not because of the four old nuclear reactors on its territory, but because the Flemish government decided that the village might block projects for new docks for the Antwerp harbour, plans developed since the 1960s. In the 21st century this process of officially encouraged depopulation is coming to an end: 2500 inhabitants i...
Monday 6 June, 2016
La Pointe: L’autre bord de la track / The Other Side of the Tracks (COHDS /Public History Students, 2015 - bilingual) takes walkers into a working-class neighbourhood that has undergone massive deindustrialization and is now gentrifying. Pointe-Saint-Charles is also known for its place-based activism and strong neighbourhood identity. Produced by the oral history students in Steven High’s Working Class Public History course, working closely with two other cl...
There are many different kinds of migrants in the contemporary world. They include the familiar figures of refugees or undocumented migrants, associated with and suffering from exclusionary practices, poverty, silencing or repressions; skilled migrants with economic resources but lacking the tools for cultural and social integration; migrants or second generation migrants returning to their homelands and becoming "strangers" there; people moving to several countries as global nomads, etc. An ...
Questions about the repatriation of cultural property, issues of access and exclusion in the World Heritage system, intangible heritage practices in conflict with human rights norms, or the ways in which the international human rights regime is interpreted as a form of cultural heritage itself: rights are now considered relevant in a broad variety of heritage situations. This is reflected in the incorporation of references to human rights in a series of key international heritage-relate...
Cities are growingly being faced by social, economic, cultural and environmental challenges imposing health and social risks. Rapid urbanization, population growth, climate change are only some of the major global challenges that a 21st century city needs to respond to. The current challenging global environment has led to the development of new approaches to the concept of "sustainable city" a city that caters for current and future generation. For instance, the idea of smart city (a city th...
The Manifesto of the Association for Critical Heritage Studies (2011) argues for a more critical approach to heritage: heritage from below, writ large, in service of society. The integration of heritage and museum studies with those of community, development, memory, planning, public history and tourism is urged in the Manifesto, as is opening up to other disciplinary traditions such as anthropology, political science and sociology, for dialogue and collaboration on external research and poli...
The field of heritage has emerged as a key site of reflection. Influenced by shifts in the academy (e.g., post-colonial, post-structural and feminist theories), heritage scholars are bringing increased attention to the deployment of heritage as both a conceptual category and a contested field of power and discourse. Nevertheless, significant challenges remain in communicating what comprises the theoretical and methodological toolkit of heritage studies. Scholars are still mapping out the nuan...
In a collaborative and image-rich conversational presentation, “Teaching/Learning/Living Post-Industrial Ecologies” outlines the potentials and problematics of “The Right to the City,” a multi-year transdisciplinary curriculum initiative that brings graduate and undergraduate students from Concordia University to Montreal’s historic South West borough. Through our tethered teaching, four professors have asked, “what does it change for the university to teach/learn on-site with the resident...
Involving communities, visitors or the public is frequently presented as one of the major tasks of museums and heritage sites in current global movements toward new collaborative paradigms (Golding and Modest 2013; Watson and Waterton 2011). Co-production is a highly current issue, and a proposed emancipatory solution to the authorized heritage discourse, which seemingly has reached a critical juncture. Scholarship has echoed calls from communities for more direct involvement in the presentat...
Le patrimoine fait aujourd’hui l’objet d’attentions autant que d’agressions et de destructions. Cela peut s’expliquer par les difficultés de son identification ou de sa conservation. Cela peut plus profondément s’expliquer parce que, dès le départ, il célébre un événement ou conserve une mémoire qui peut être ou devenir une source de dissenssions et de conflits politiques. Enfin, sa reconnaissance suscite des gains économiques pour les uns mais des pertes pour les autres. Mais peut-être...
To celebrate our film series dedicated to heritage, sponsored by the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland and the United States Chapter of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies, this event will spotlight the iconic Sugar Shack, which is rooted from Quebec to New-England and which is both the place of maple syrup production and of friendly gatherings during the maple syrup season. In a festive atmosphere, delegates will be invited to taste one of the essential of...
Directed by William Shewbridge and Michelle Stefano USA; 35 mins Presented by Michelle Stefano ___ After 125 years of operation, the Sparrows Point Steel Mill (Baltimore, Maryland) finally closed its doors in 2012. The film, “Mill Stories”, examines the importance of the mill from the perspectives of former workers and community members while connecting their story to the larger narrative of industrial boom and bust. The film seeks to amplify the voices of forme...
Tuesday 7 June, 2016
(Guided visits to Two Exhibitions, Centre d’histoire de Montréal- bilingual) – The Centre d’histoire de Montréal presents Dans le Griff that takes visitors into the neighbourhood of Griffintown, as depicted through the lives and memories of the Mercier family. Their life stories will take us down the streets of an industrial sector that has undergone quite the metamorphosis. Griffintown is one of the oldest industrial and working-class neighbourhoods in Montreal. In the forefro...
This session proposes a critical and epistemological reflection on sustainable urban heritage conservation. Recent research on the management of urban heritage following its conservation process is characterized by a growing number of studies that aim to provide an overview of how to assess the sustainability of existing practices. This dominant focus of the research has contributed to the development of indicators and approaches to sustainable development in this field. In addition, it has a...
L’art contemporain, lorsqu’il est en relation avec le patrimoine culturel, que ce dernier soit bâti ou qu’il mobilise d’autres matériaux ou supports, tend à reconfigurer les rapports de la société à ses patrimoines et à son histoire. Il est ainsi à même d’ajouter, de modifier, de détourner ou même de transformer les valeurs historiennes ou esthétiques communément associées au patrimoine culturel d’une nation, d’une région ou d’un groupe social ou ethnique; y compris d’ailleurs en ce qui conce...
The second half of the 20th century saw the affirmation of national and international heritage administrations run by teams of experts that mutually validated each other’s knowledge and findings. The emergence of new forms of heritage, new collections and international networks related to museums, or other heritage structures, has led to the development of numerous new or reformulated specialities. In the last two decades a new ideal of heritage has gained ground, one based on communities ...
Heritage has multiple, concurrent origins. It is performed and produced by individuals, groups and organizations, or institutions on various scales. It is a transformative process and thus closely connected to the transitional. In heritage, transitionality may be usefully conceptualized under the rubric of the liminal, which at its core anticipates change and transformation, structure-agency relationships, affect, and human experience—all significant issues in recent theoretical debates in th...
While intangible cultural heritage is an important factor in maintaining cultural diversity in the face of growing globalization, there is still little appreciation of its value. UNESCO endorsed the importance of intangible cultural heritage not only as a cultural manifestation but also, and more importantly, as a wealth of knowledge and skills that are transmitted through generations. We invite paper contributions that address multiple ways of understanding, recognizing, valuing, and p...
An experiment in moving memory, this live event bridges public and academic space to re-imagine knowledge exchange, creation and impact. Around the globe the planning of large-scale memorial-museum projects concerned with violent histories are frequently marred by conflict, omission, and competitions of victimhood. This problem also extends to scholarship on genocide and memory. “Moving Memory: difficult histories in dialogue” is a collaborative multi-sited research exhibiti...
Extant scholarly literature has been documented on heritage and tourism. However, the strong links between heritage and leisure, a broader concept than tourism, have long been neglected. The notion of heritage has pervaded in a variety of humanities-related fields, among them is leisure, which demonstrates the lived experience of locals, and provides indispensible meanings and identity for communities and individuals. And both heritage and leisure root themselves into cultural fabrics of soci...
State dominance in heritage management has been a key area of attention in critical heritage studies. There is now a large body of work discussing how this dominance may result in the prioritization of national perspectives and interests over local ones and contribute to the marginalization of alternative interpretations of heritage by ethnic and religious minorities, immigrants and Indigenous peoples. Conflicts often arise between these groups and state authorities over how to manage heritag...
What is involved in presenting the past as a physical object in public space? There is a significant literature by scholars in various disciplines that deals with the array of decisions that need to be made regarding which stories should be told, and how they should be represented. Nevertheless, once constructed, there is a tendency to see these objects as natural, as if they had to be built and could not have been constructed any other way. The Lost Stories project is designed to involve ...
What is the future of the UK and what is the role of heritage in this shifting political landscape? How have debates on heritage in the UK changed since the influential critiques of Hewison and Wright in the 1980s? How can those engaged in Critical Heritage Studies in the UK negotiate the difficult relationship between academic critique and sector relevance? How do current debates in the UK relate to and differ from those in Western and non-Western contexts? This workshop will bring ...