HERITAGE

—The entire creative cluster is based on the notion of heritage as a development asset. We are busy communicating it at all levels, in all formats. We want to show that this model works, it pays off, promotes changes in the community while yielding social, economic, and cultural dividends. This is exactly why we have to follow the life and activities of the people working for us down to the smallest details so that we remain authentic and realistic. We need to recognise the value of historical knowledge without getting carried away, stick to the genuine local history and uphold personal contributions.

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Cultural economies deal directly with heritage, while creative economies are superstructures that interpret heritage, taking their inspiration from it to make design objects or music. Contemporary artists are cultural entrepreneurs inasmuch as they create original content that could become heritage.

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One of our exhibitions, Monuments Succumbed to Hatred, apparently based on conventional notions of heritage preservation, detonated a huge movement. It was a tremendous hit that mobilised civil activists far and wide. It travelled through several different countries: Finland, Latvia, Macedonia, ending up in Kharkiv (Ukraine). At every step of the way, we encouraged local residents, museum, library and university people that hosted the exhibition to make their own archives of monuments destroyed because of their iconic, symbolic status, because they represented an alien, offensive ideology, and not just because they happened to be in a heavily shelled area during the war. The very idea gave rise to a discussion of the cunningness of human nature that since times immemorial sought expression for ideologies in wood or stone and then fought them. When a monument is destroyed, all the memories it represents go down with the building. This discussion would have not been possible without touching upon inner and outer freedoms.

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Some months ago, a girl told me there were wooden window shutters kept in car sheds across the city. She proposed to get them and asked me to make an exhibition, because apparently people trusted me. I could not get over the shock for the rest of the evening. It turned out that people were keeping discarded window decorations in their car sheds. The ornaments had been dumped and scrapped, and yet people were hiding them away as representations of their own history. But they were eager to come out and show that history was alive and relevant. Next thing I knew, there was an old mansion with window decorations about to be thrown away. I raised the alarm. Neighbours came running and found two homeless bums. The bums found a сlaw bar and ripped the decorations out. They even said they needed no payment for the work: it was enough for them to know that the decorations had been saved. It means the histories around us are alive and need to be represented.

I would like to make a memory collection of my own. Not an array of lifeless antiquities, of course: we have a nice, modern, comfortable home with good heating and plumbing. And yet, we want to preserve memories. Maybe because my own family history got lost, I am trying to recreate the memories of my family after an Irkutsk fashion.

—Raising awareness of heritage issues is of utmost importance: the right attitude is shaped in the family, by the way people treat the archives of their grandparents.