 Okay, super. Okay, now it's official, we're live, okay. Welcome to the first Innovate Heritage Conversations between Arts and Heritage. My name is Elliot Grini-Saukey, and this is Katarina Benenkassa, and we're the founders of the project, and we have an amazing organizational team who you'll be introduced to later. We started this project through the World Heritage Studies Program at the Brandenburg University for Technology, and we'll explain a bit more of the concept and kind of how it began throughout the conference a bit later, but first we want to thank our partners with who this wouldn't be possible. So Katarina will tell you who our partners here are today. Thanks to our partners who are here today. The German Commission for UNESCO World Heritage Studies course at BTU Cottbus, the British Council, Germany, Oriental Heritage Without Borders, and the Center for Arts and Urbanistics, ZKOL. Dr. Wolf from the German Commission, German UNESCO Commission, if you would like to come up, thanks. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good afternoon. Dear Mrs. Grini-Saukey, dear Mrs. Benny Kasser, dear Mrs. Rudolf, dear Mrs. Kadal, dear Mrs. Adam Bakan, dear Mr. Wievers. Dear artists, dear guests, it's a great pleasure to welcome you here in Berlin and to this conference. We at the German Commission for UNESCO were completely taken by the idea to cooperate in this conference. We think this is a very interesting and very innovative program. And as we know that in the Technical University in Cottbus-Zenftenberg and in the Oriental Heritage Without Borders, you do a lot of work along these lines for a long time. And we were very much taken by the idea that you get together and try to organize this international and transdisciplinary conference. In the past decade, BTU Cottbus and its students have often taken a pioneer role as bridge builder between the academic world, civil society and local communities, research and policymaking in Germany. International cooperation far beyond Europe characterizes its innovative research approach. With its investigation of the relationship between the arts and heritage, BTU Cottbus, once more, proves to be worth its reputation as an international think tank in this area. Heritage is what we live with today and what we pass on to future generations. However, our heritage does not only comprise thousands of properties forming part of the cultural and natural heritage, which the World Heritage Committee considers as having outstanding universal value. Our heritage rather manifests itself from our cherished historic monuments and museums to traditional practices and contemporary art forms. All together, they lie the foundation for vibrant, innovative and prosperous knowledge societies. Jumping from a basic knowledge of UNESCO World Heritage into an expanded tactile and exploratory perspective, looking at the subtexts of heritage in collaboration with the arts, innovative heritage illuminates this world heritage is a dependent of arts and heritage. Heritage often is a form of a creative process while much of the arts is based on historical framing and influenced by our heritage. Think of the World Heritage site Bauhaus and its sites in Weimar and Desau, for example, which revolutionized artistic and architectural thinking and practice in the 20th century. So far however, profound research as to the mutual benefits of arts and heritage has been neglected. I myself have a personal interest in your topic and the topic of your conference. You know, I have worked for about two decades on a topic which is central to what you do. That is called Mimesis. And the issue Mimesis is a Greek word and means the creative imitation of heritage. And the issue is that how do we produce new things by using existing forms of art and knowledge? How do we change them? And what are the processes in this change? And we have just done, or I as a professor at the Freyja University have organized a conference at the Lomonosov University in Moscow on these issues, Mimesis and cultural metamorphosis. So the idea that cultural learning is largely mimetic learning through a form of partly unconscious imitative learning but it's not like a copy machine, just producing a copy. It's an active process and it's an active process in which we change the heritage. Dynamics of changing heritage is what is interesting and you call it innovative heritage. So this is I think a central part because it puts the accent on the dynamics of change in the art. And today, you know, there are lots of challenges. We can no longer talk about modern art. We have today a global art with different centers of art. I remember with it to the Biennale in Sao Paulo and another one in Egypt and in China. We have so many different perspectives coming up these days based also on the regional heritage that I think this is of great interest that you try to work along these lines and find your path through this still very chaotic and complex field. This is so one thing which I think is essential in this conference. Another aspect is also important for us in Germany because last year we joined the convention on immaterial cultural heritage which passed to 2003 at UNESCO. And now we are looking for immaterial cultural heritage in Germany. We haven't done that because of our history and there were some problems, you know, with going back into history with fascism, national socialism and now we are trying to redefine our relationship to immaterial cultural heritage. And there is an expert group which tries to select all these different proposals which have been submitted and we are just in the process of doing these things and this is also the question, how is the relationship between heritage and innovation? How are the dynamics of arts? How do we change things by also keeping some traditional elements in it? And so in that sense I think you are really doing a conference right at the central point of art development and also of the issues of related to heritage. Dear guests, via lectures, panel discussions, workshops, exhibitions, performance evenings and film screenings, you will have the occasion to explore the intersections and divergence to promote creative approaches to theoretical and practical issues. Thus fostering dialogue and enhancing collaboration between heritage and the arts. The German Commission for UNESCO would like to thank you all for your rich and diverse presentations indicated in the program. We are confident that your ideas will be to the benefit of world heritage worldwide and that from this conference a dynamic and a very innovative perspective will come up. In that sense I wish you a very good conference and I'm very interested in the outcomes of your work. Thank you Dr. Wolff, that was a wonderful opening. I would like to ask our next partner to come to the stage, Simona Khadar, the fabulous program coordinator for World Heritage Studies at BTU Cottpus. Ladies and gentlemen, it is a pleasure for me to welcome you on behalf of the World Heritage Studies Program at Brandenburg University of Technology in Cottpus to innovate heritage. A wonderful initiative of our students and an invitation to think about heritage, arts, about innovation. And this time not about conservation but about conversation. But maybe think is not the right word here. This event came into existence out of a felt need to experience heritage. Not only to think and talk about it in theoretical terms but also to experience it directly, authentically and meaningfully. After all, we only protect and perpetuate what is meaningful to us. And meaning comes from use, from personal interaction. Otherwise, oblivion is inevitable. So there is probably no better way to protect heritage than to rediscover our personal relationship with it. This event also points to another need, namely the need to build connections between abstract thought and experience, between the past, the present and the future, between the individual and the collective, between visible materials and symbolic imagination, between heritage and arts. But where exactly does the language of heritage and that of arts differ? Oscar Wilde described art as the most intense mode of individualism. Heritage, on the other hand, represents our collective consciousness, the sense of belonging and the comfort of roots. As human beings, we speak the language of both since we are individuals and social beings at the same time and we always oscillate between these two dimensions that characterize us. But it is often the case that individual works acquire collective universal significance. This may be because if heritage joins people in the same memories, in the same values, in the same narratives, art joins them in the same emotions. For this reason, art appears to be somehow atemporal. I know that art historians will not necessarily agree with that, but the emotional intensity that inspired artistic creations 3,000 or 100 years ago may still resonate in the eye of the beholder nowadays. Heritage, on the other hand, contains an automatic reference to the past. It implies age and it implies distance. But time and distance, as science itself acknowledged, are relative and very much dependent on the observer. And this brings me to a very important decision maker in the heritage framework, time. Time, which in fact is nothing more than our system to represent changes, to express the passing and the becoming. Time, which is not always linear as in the European context, but sometimes cyclical and accessible in all its points through experience. Time, which makes us distinguish between the old and the new, although not always as opposites. This interaction between the old and the new is the origin of many disputes and threats affecting heritage. For a long time, the general approach was that everything labeled as heritage should have a certain historical distance and should keep its historical distance, avoiding change. The simple designation as heritage often generated a dislocation from a larger context and from the present, while protection meant barriers, barriers from cultural and social use. But the danger of being only transmitters and not also creators of heritage, the prospect of being prisoners of time and not having the possibility to create new cultural forms that respond to a new contemporaneity could have disruptive consequences. Now it has become clear that a new understanding of heritage is necessary, one that recognizes that heritage is not a finite product, but a continuous process. Not something that was, but something that is becoming. By not bringing heritage into the present context and to the language of contemporaneity, the risks of alienating it completely are very high. This need for constant innovation, for new ways to relate to tradition, to interpret it, to make it alive and to add to it lies also at the end, at the core of this conference. So the next three days are an invitation to all of you, not only to think about heritage, but also to experience and recreate it in your personal forms, be it old or new. So I wish you many good conversations and a very creative time together. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Simona. And now Mr. Bevers from the British Council, Germany Project Coordinator of the Arts. Yes, hello. Can you hear me? I'll just put that on. Good afternoon. Yeah, my name is Matthew Bevers. I am the arts coordinator at the British Council here in Germany. And first of all, on behalf of the British Council, my colleagues are very warm welcome to the conference, Innovate Heritage, looking at a conversation between the arts and heritage, and looking at the impressive list of speakers and artists who'll be contributing over the next three days. I think we can quite safely say that this is a truly global meeting of practitioners, professionals, researchers. And of course, not just here in the room today, but thanks to the live stream we're being followed by people around the world. And I know from my own experience how difficult live streams are, so well done. And I hope we stay online. And of course, over the next three days, people here will be sharing ideas and exchanging their expertise on the arts and heritage. And I think I can second what's been said so far that before the arts and heritage really do go hand in hand and you can't really separate them. And it's precisely this exchange and sharing of ideas which lies at the heart of the work of the British Council. And that's why we're so delighted to be part of the conference today. The British Council, for those that don't know, is the UK's cultural relations organization. And we work in 110, or just over 110 countries around the world. And it's our aim to build engagement and trust for the UK by doing what we're doing today, bringing people together from around the world to share knowledge and ideas. So that's why we're really, very happy to be here. And we work in three main areas, which are the English language, education and society, and the arts. And together with my colleague, Dr. Elke-Ritt, I work on our arts program here in Germany. And with our arts program, our aim is to encourage new ways of connecting and seeing each other through the arts. With our program, we build relationships with creative partners, both in the UK and here in Germany, in order to deliver exciting projects here in Germany. At the moment, for example, we're cooperating with the Poesie Festival Berlin, which started last night. And with Creative Scotland, who are the Scottish Arts Council. And we've brought together six poets from Scotland, with six poets from Germany. And they're going to work on translations of one another's poetry. And the results of that, the translations in English and in German will be presented at the Poetry Festival in Berlin on Tuesday and Wednesday next week. So if you're interested and still here, please feel free to go along. We also recently kicked off a global celebration of the 450th anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare, who is perhaps one of the greatest global figures in our cultural heritage. And we brought together eight authors, writers from the UK, at our annual literature seminar here in Berlin, where they discussed and reflected upon Shakespeare's influence on their work and on writing today. With our arts program, we also, we support the presentation of over 200 UK arts events across Germany each year. We're currently working with the Foreign Affairs Festival here in Berlin, the Performing Arts Festival, to arrange a performance by the National Theatre of Wales, who are performing at all places in Berghain, in Friedrichshain on the 10th, no, the 9th and 10th of July. So if you're, again, if that's your kind of thing, please feel free to go along. And finally, the final sort of main strand of our arts work is we give arts professionals in Germany, be they festival directors, the heads of theatres, curators, we give them the opportunity to go to the UK and visit the UK arts festivals, like such as the Edinburgh Festival, the Glasgow Festival of Visual Art, the London Short Film Festival, where they, first of all, they get the experience, they get to experience the latest arts and artistic trends from the UK, but also it's about making contact with artists and arts organisations that will hopefully lead to collaborations in future. So with that all in mind, that's why we're very happy to be at this meeting today. And I think we're going to hear from some fantastic speakers over the next few days. I'm pleased to hear that there are also a few speakers from the UK or based in the UK. It just remains for me to also say thank you to Innovate Heritage for inviting us to be part and putting together such a wonderful program. Thank you to the other partners as well, the Brandenburg University of Technology, the German UNESCO Commission and Oriental Heritage Without Borders. Thank you, of course, also to the speakers and the artists who've come from various parts of the world to be here. And I wish you all an exciting and enlightening three days. Thank you very much. Thank you. Our next partner who will be speaking is Soraya Adabakan who is from Oriental Heritage Without Borders who has been a really important partner for us and helped us make this event possible as well. So I'd like to welcome her to the stage now, thank you. My name is Soraya Adabakan, dear guests, colleagues and participants, ladies and gentlemen. I'm very much privileged to have this opening statement and it gives me a great pleasure to welcome you as the president of Oriental Heritage Without Borders to the First International Innovate Heritage Conference focusing on importance of dialogue between the arts and heritage. A special conference that is jointly organized what the World Heritage Studies Master's Program at Technological University of Brandenburg and supported in kind by the German National Commission for UNESCO, the British Council and the Azerbaijan Student Network. Today's gathering is truly a union of many cultures in harmonious coexistence with participants from various countries spanning all five continents. As a brief introduction, our non-for-profit organization OHWB Oriental Heritage Without Borders was established in 2012. It acts as cultural and scientific association based in Berlin informed by a group of enthusiastic scholars and researchers all with different educational background whom share a great interest as well as concern for the rich culture and heritage of the Orient. As we like to think, we are simply a group of ordinary people caring about extraordinary places. With that said, culture is a living material and thus protecting and promoting the arts and cultures is about living and sharing the diversity of our cultural expressions. Hence, OHWB is strongly dedicated to further contribute to the documentation, promotion, preservation and dissemination of such an imperative knowledge for the better understanding of its exceptional Oriental heritage including both the tangible and intangible cultural heritage and especially the heritage in danger and post-conflict which is mainly focused on. The title of our three day conference innovative heritage conversations between arts and heritage emphasizes the importance that professionals of the arts and heritage assigned to culture. Heritage and the arts are key components for a comprehensive culture that leads to a multifaceted development of the individual. Allow me to use the words of the late Melina Mercury. If a child is sensitized to culture then a different society, a different mentality and a different direction will be created. To this end, such an interdisciplinary and intercultural dialect can serve as the map and compass to enable those who are minded to navigate their way on this journey. The arts and the myriad forms and as the preeminent form of expression over time across cultures allow us not only to celebrate our cultural diversity but to learn and better understand our motives, anxieties, aspirations and history. Dear guests, believe in a world undergoing transformation subject to rapid changes and defined by globalization the mobility of cultures, modern technologies and by economic upheaval. As such, the aims and practical procedures and the practice of the arts and heritage must be in a state of continuous redefinition. The main purpose of today's conference is to provide an environment for fruitful and constructive dialogue between these essential fields amongst our fellow peers. To exchange ideas and experiences on new creative matters for development of more collaborations and practice and innovative approaches and research in which the arts and heritage together can shape our culture and further enhance our cultural diversity. The artistic and scientific program of the conference focuses on social and cultural issues, creative expressions, endangered heritage and identities as well as environmental challenges that we face in the 21st century. The whole program is designed to help develop a sound dialogue through different perspectives with the purpose of exploring ways through which heritage, through arts and vice versa can respond to the contemporary needs of our lives to enable us as the citizens of tomorrow to function harmoniously both at the levels of our local and global communities. I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks to the hardworking and really hardworking and dedicated team of organizers at Innovate Heritage working day and night to bring us to where we are now and in particular our honorable speakers, all of whom have been involved since the beginning of the planned stage and are still here today for all of us to benefit from their contributions even though they are very busy with their responsibilities and full schedules. We truly appreciate your dedication and care for this cause. Again, this program could not have been made possible without the kind support of the German Commissions for UNESCO, the British Council and our good friends at Azerbaijan Theatre Network whom all foresee the importance and necessity for more in-depth dialogue between the arts and heritage. I hope that everyone would take the results of this program to develop better networks and collaborations between these two imperative cultural fields and ensure the quality and livelihood of our rich cultural diversity. Finally, I wish you all three fruitful days of interesting and beneficial discussions and also that you have a pleasant stay in Berlin. I warmly welcome you all again. Thank you very much. Our next speakers from the Center for Art and Urbanistics. Unfortunately, we're not able to make it due to transportation problems, but as, sorry, as mentioned, we do have an additional partner that was very recently joined us was the Azerbaijan Student Network. We're very happy to be working with them and yes, and we would also like to thank the Center for Art and Urbanism where we are today. A very interesting organization. As you can see, we're in the main hall. Later this evening, you'll see the exhibition space downstairs. The patio is where the screen, the film screening this evening will be in a couple hours. The bar and the patio will be open and as you can see, there's a public park around us and a playground. There's even bee hives. It's a very nice space. And the other half of the building is actually artist residencies. So it's a very active, dynamic space and we're very happy to be partnering with them. So we are ahead of schedule now, so we're gonna just take a short break before we welcome Professor Brita Rudol for her lecture and I don't know. It starts at three o'clock, so I don't know what the time difference is, but in 10 minutes. So we have a 10 minute break. Thank you very much.