On Friday 29 April, the sixth international course on Conservation of Built Heritage came to successful conclusion with a ceremony that took place at ICCROM. On this occasion, the participants were presented with their certificates.
Over eight weeks, 17 participants from 17 countries made ICCROM their home. They exchanged diverse experiences and worked together to broaden their perspectives and gain new knowledge in the world of built heritage conservation and management. Over 30 resource persons from ICCROM and from different parts of the world were involved in teaching and sharing their experiences through intensive weeks of lectures, group work, discussions and site visits.
The course began on Friday 4 March, and in the ensuing weeks, the participants worked their way through seven different course modules. They considered many different aspects of built heritage conservation, including definitions of heritage, management systems, documentation, condition assessments/treatments, visitor management and interpretation. The course closed with a special module on Heritage Impact Assessments, organized in collaboration with UNESCO World Heritage Centre and with the support from the directorate of Villa D'Este and the Municipality of Tivoli.
The farewell speech given by Yuval Peled, a course participant from Israel, expressed the sentiments of the group during the closing ceremony:
“Each one of us came with our own knowledge and experience, and yet was astonished by the beauty and powerful development of historic Rome.
“It is absolutely the best place to see, feel and understand the meanings of creativity, building, and destruction. ICCROM takes inspiration from Rome and collects the best minds to teach us about the connections between creativity, destruction, formation, conservation and preservation, in order to learn from the past and so create a better future.
“We met more than 30 international resource people, and became familiar with ideas, systems, technologies, and disciplines. We also had to practice presenting complicated subjects in only 20 minutes.
“Each day we climbed more steps up the mountain of knowledge. We realized that Aristotle was right when he said that ‘all that is artificial, man-made, is man trying to imitate nature.’ That is part of the important links between nature and culture.
“We thank you, people of ICCROM, for a wonderful opportunity to learn and discover through case studies, presentations, tours and your worldwide experience. It was a great opportunity to step outside our day by day work, think about what we are doing, investigate, explore, and try to understand what is missing, where we can do more and better. I am sure that my friends here will agree that from now on we will use the tools and knowledge that we got here in order to do better! We discovered the wonderful people of ICCROM, the loyal staff that followed us along the journey. We gave them a ‘hard time’ and in exchange, they gave us a ‘good time.’ We would like to assure all of you that the knowledge and experiences we gained here will be used wisely in order to create a better world.”
Asked about whether the course met their expectations, here are some comments:
“Yes. It has provided me with an international perspective in heritage through group work and presentations by resource persons.” Shikha, Australia
“Yes, it definitely met my expectations and much more in the sense of the integral approaches of heritage topics.” Andrea, Chile
“Yes. I met professionals from around the world and shared experiences, practices, insights. I learned about other aspects of heritage I previously had not worked on, and I learned so much about different cultures, religions, traditions etc.” Maria, Cyprus
“Yes, the course really met my expectations. I was able to find the relationship between different knowledge and conservation of built heritage, and also the way I use different tools.” Arezoo, Iran
“Yes, I have gained better understanding of the different approaches to conservation and related fields.” Maurina, Mauritius
“Yes, I like the idea of the course – different modules, one after each other and the summary in the last module.” Dabrowka, Poland
Member States represented: Australia, Brazil, Chile, China, Cyprus, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mauritius, Pakistan, Peru, Poland, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Turkey, United Kingdom, USA and Zimbabwe.
Institutions: UNESCO, African World Heritage Fund