Tag Archives: Networking

SILKNOW’S European Heritage Award/ Europa Nostra Award

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On the 21st of December, SILKNOW will hold a ceremony to unveil the bronze plaque commemorating the European Heritage Award. It will take place in Valencia (Spain) at the beautiful cultural center La Nau and will be retransmitted by SILKNOW’s YouTube channel. To attend in person, inscription required by filling out this form.

SILKNOW will count on the presence of stakeholders related to cultural heritage and some local authorities and media press. Other award-winning projects and the silknow consortium will also be present. This will be an opportunity to continue weaving our past into the future. 

The agenda will be:

10:00 – 11:30Project presentations
Eva Kaptijn. Heritage Quest., the Netherlands
Zachary Jones. Heritage Opportunities / threats within Mega-Events in Europe- HOMEE.,  Italy | Cyprus | Poland | United Kingdom
Elisa Monsellato, Alessandro Monsellato. Swapmuseum, Italy
Kasra Seirafi. Fluxguide.
Inger Leemans. Odeuropa.
Xavier Giner. SILKNOW and young designers.
11:30 – 12:00Networking break
12:00 – 13:00European Heritage Award Ceremony
Inaugural speech. Dr. Carlos Hermenegildo Caudevilla, Vicechancellor of Universitat de València.
Europa Nostra Speech. Bárbara Cordero
Greeting speech from SILKNOW project. Dr. Cristina Portalés and Dr. Jorge Sebastián
Doctoral Thesis Awards
Group photo
13:00 – 14:00Catering / Lunch
14:00 – 15:30Marina Martínez: Talk on HE Cluster 2 and related calls
15:30 – 16:30Guided visit to La Nau

The past 26th of September, SILKNOW was laureated with the European Heritage Award/ Europa Nostra Award in the Research cateogry and with the Grand Prix award for Innovation in presence of the Mariya Gabriel, European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, Hermann Parzinger, Executive President of Europa Nostra, and Ondřej Chrást, Deputy Minister of Culture of the Czech Republic, on behalf of Minister Martin Baxa. The ceremony assembled some 600 heritage professionals, volunteers, lovers and supporters from across Europe, including a large group of young people.

SILKNOW Partners:

Universitat de València, GARIN 1820 S.A. and the Instituto Cervantes, from Spain; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique – Lyon 2 and EURECOM, from France; Universita Degli Studi di Palermo, from Italy; Institut Jozef Stefan, from Slovenia; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universitaet Hannover, from Germany and Monkeyfab, from Poland, have participated in SILKNOW.

SILKNOW Activities:

Conferences, exhibitions, fashion catwalks, training and capacity building programs, publications. 

SILKNOW Results:

SILKNOW Net Actions

SILKNOW winner of the EuropaNostra Grand Prix Award

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SILKNOW was laurated with the Grand Prix award for Innovation in presence of the Mariya Gabriel, European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, Hermann Parzinger, Executive President of Europa Nostra, and Ondřej Chrást, Deputy Minister of Culture of the Czech Republic, on behalf of Minister Martin Baxa. The ceremony assembled some 600 heritage professionals, volunteers, lovers and supporters from across Europe, including a large group of young people.

The winners of the 2022 European Heritage Awards / Europa Nostra Awards, Europe’s top honour in the field, were celebrated with a prestigious ceremony held at the iconic State Opera of Prague.

“SILKNOW has created an innovative system to facilitate the transfer of the knowledge of silk weaving. This project represents an important example of how crafts, and therefore intangible heritage, can be linked to digital tools and how these tools can be used to democratise access to technical knowledge. The project’s machine-learning thesaurus is particularly interesting and has the potential to be applied in other areas of research,” stated the Awards’ Jury.

From 2018 to 2021 we produced digital tools beyond current technologies to improve our understanding and conservation of European silk heritage. SILKNOW helps preserve the intangible heritage of ancient weaving techniques by using pre-existing digitised information about silk to study, showcase and preserve silk digital collections. Users can access the collections through an exploratory search engine, spatio-temporal maps and 3D visual and tangible simulations. This broad approach is made possible through the close cooperation of a multidisciplinary team with a wide range of expertise.

We have woven a network with different users, from museums to young designers, from technology to traditional industries. Community, identity, history…Tangible and intangible experiences, technology, knowledge, arts and crafts inherited generation after generation. Let’s keep weaving our past into the future.

SILKNOW Partners:

Universitat de València, GARIN 1820 S.A. and the Instituto Cervantes, from Spain; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique – Lyon 2 and EURECOM, from France; Universita Degli Studi di Palermo, from Italy; Institut Jozef Stefan, from Slovenia; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universitaet Hannover, from Germany and Monkeyfab, from Poland, have participated in SILKNOW.

SILKNOW Activities:

Conferences, exhibitions, fashion catwalks, training and capacity building programs, publications. 

SILKNOW Results:

SILKNOW Net Actions

Rethinking Textile Conservation- Series Lectures

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Textiles are over 5 000 years old and common to all civilizations, past and present. A rich and diverse living heritage that comprises a multitude of materials, techniques, and shapes. Besides being a fascinating testimony of humankind’s ingenuity, textiles provide exceptional opportunities for the heritage sector to nurture innovation, promote respect for diversity, and public engagement. Textile production, trading, and conservation are inter-related topics that bring together multiple influences and areas of knowledge, providing a valuable medium for social cohesion and promotion of sustainable development. They encompass important overlapping aspects of tangible and intangible heritage, nature and culture, traditional knowledge and state-of-the-art research. Time is ripe for rethinking how we approach textile conservation. Simply safeguarding collections can no longer be our final goal. Conservation has to grow into an effective means to promote and sustain the realization of the full potential of our textile heritage.

The webinar organized by our colleagues from ICCROM, will bring together a diverse group of international panelists to share their views and experience on this topic. Their case studies include the journey of archaeological textiles from excavation to conservation, research, and community-based activities in China; the revitalization of India’s ‘Rafoo’ traditional culture of repair; the development of new digital tools in Europe to support creative industries taking inspiration from textile collections; and the role of conservation in the evolution and transformation of the Maya textile tradition in Guatemala.

Moderator

  • José Luiz Pedersoli Jr, ICCROM

Panelists

  • Zhao Feng, Director, China National Silk Museum
  • Rini Hazel Templeton, Research Assistant, National Museum Institute, India
  • Mar Gaitán, Research Assistant, University of Valencia, Spain
  • Barbara Knoke de Arathoon, Associate Investigator, Ixchel Museum of Indigenous Dress, Guatemala

Link to the webinar

Join us on 25 November 2021. Registration is mandatory and FREE.

https://iccrom-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_1sZ19Fh_Tfi-7O6CexDNBQ

Weaving our Past into the Future

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On the 14th October, SILKNOW had its final review meeting. All work packages were presented, after a discussion, the work done so far in SILKNOW was approved according to the EU standards. It has been more than three years of weaving our past into the future. We have woven a network with different users, from museums to young designers, from technology to traditional industries. All to protect, conserve and disseminate the important heritage of silk.  Here is a summary of what we have been weaving these years and why.

Silk has surrounded us for centuries, from royal beds to traditional costumes, from liturgical vestments to ceremonial flag. It has been everywhere, within the Silk Road,  but also beyond it. Silk weaving has shaped manufacturing cities and trade routes, engaging visual artists, engineers and multitudes of workers.

Community, identity, history…Tangible and intangible experiences, technology, knowledge, arts and crafts inherited generation after generation. It is a link from the past to the future.  This heritage is still alive, but it may die soon. The artisans who used to weave using traditional techniques and looms are disappearing. Valuable historical fabrics are endangered by their sheer fragility. But technology continues to be very close to silk heritage, even today.

“The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

We have taken Ada Lovelace’s words as an inspiration to merge humanities and technology, in a team coming from six European countries. We have been working during three years to protect and disseminate silk heritage, weaving a net among academia, computing, arts and crafts, design, and creative industries.

Conferences, exhibitions, fashion catwalks, training and capacity building programs, publications, all around silk heritage, have contributed to illuminate its important past, and its promising future.

In addition to that, we have created some digital tools

We have worked to create a unique resource, a thesaurus about silk in four languages, including one thousand words. It is based on many sources from across Europe,so that experts, museums, and just about anyone can delve deep into this knowledge.

Looking carefully at historical techniques, we have produced a digital memory tool, the Virtual Loom, that is able to weave on screen like a Jacquard loom does, giving the creative industries a chance for experimentation and business.

We have integrated the information from many museums bringing together data about thousands of objects around the globe locating them in time and space, giving everyone access to this hidden but precious heritage.

In short, we continue to weave the past into our future. Do you want to join us?

  • First Review

Related news:

From Museum documentation to digital data curation. Challenges and opportunities for open access.

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Cultural heritage organizations produce a vast quantity of heterogeneous datasets which are often held inside their walls and are not open to the public. Even when they are, sometimes they are not easily accessible, for technological and organizational reasons. This has led to the loss of information essential both for the general audience and researchers. The problem gets worse when dealing with textile collections that require a high specialization to document and conserve them.

SILKNOW aimed to provide answers for some of these challenges, thanks to digital tools and approaches, combined with scholarly expertise (from silk specialists, art historians and historians, textile engineers…). One of its goals was to provide methods and best practices for heritage institutions that want to take their textile collections into the information and knowledge society. It pays particular attention to institutions that lack the technical resources and staff to venture into ICT and research.

Three workshops were held where the ultimate goal is to develop together a document of good practices in textile conservation.

The first workshop was held on 15th February 2021. It was attended by 13 professionals specialized in textile collections, some of them coming from 8 Spanish museums, such as:

The second workshop was held on 25th February and was carried out in Italian. It gathered representatives from 9 small museums, all of them belonging to Catholic dioceses: 

The third workshop was held on the 6th April, and gathered participants from Europe, America and Asia. The 15 attendees included representatives from 9 museums and one EU-funded research project, plus 2 independent scholars, including:

SILKNOW partners with ICCROM

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SILKNOW is partnering with ICCROM, the IInternational Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, to participate in the Our Collections Matter programme.

This programme puts the spotlight on sustainable development in the cultural sector, recognising this as an important aspiration and responsibility among museums and other collections-based organizations globally. The programme aligns with the goals set out in the UN 2030 Agenda and embodies the same determination to make this decade one of concerted action and transformation, during which no one is left behind.

SILKNOW tools will be part of this international toolkit. Together, we will continue to weave the past into the future.

Silk & Design

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We have visited the Hochshule Luzern – Design & Kunst, also known as Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences. There, and over the last years, a great team of designers, historians, textile specialists and web designers has developed silkmemory.ch, a web portal that offers abundant information about the legacy of Zurich silk industry. Their work and ours in SILKNOW has many aspects in common, so we took the opportunity to visit their new school and learn more about their project. We also studied some avenues for future collaboration, and ongoing mutual learning. Corporate archives of companies involved in silk textile manufacture, teaching materials for design schools, user experience of online catalogs, digital modeling of traditional weaving techniques… these issues and some others provided food for thought during a very useful workshop.

In the photograph: Andrea Weber Marin, Alexis Schwarzenbach, Tina Tomovic, Claudia Schmid from Hochshule Luzern – Design & Kunst and from Universitat de València: Cristina Portales and Jorge Sebastián.

Thanks to all of them for a warm welcome and many smart insights.

2019 General Assembly of the Silk Road Universities Network

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From the 18th to the 21st September, Dr. Ester Alba, our Dissemination and Exploitation manager travelled to Kazakhstan in order to attend the 2019 General Assembly of the Silk Road Universities Network. This year’s theme was the “Role of Universities for Transforming Silk Roads into Peace Roads with Prominent Human Heritages” As Sungdon Hwang, SUN’s Secretary-General, said: “The most valuable lesson from the history of the Silk Road is that the key to peaceful coexistence and collective prosperity is to treat individual differences as a cause for celebration rather than segregation, best captured in Silkroadia-the spirit of ancient Silk Road.”

SILKNOW was also disseminated at the QS Worldwide International Education Forum: “Journey to Global Prominence: Harmony of Human Heritage and Advanced Technology” held at the Al-Farabi Kazakh National University. There, Ester Alba presented SILKNOW and how it will impact on civil society by preserving historical weaving techniques and bringing them to the future. She also introduced some of our Open Access publications and some research done by our coordinators, Universitat de València, regarding the Silk Road project.

In SILKNWOW we believe in learning from each other and protecting silk heritage as it is a unique example of heritage. It is a link of union between different places, peoples and ideas.

Let’s keep this spirit alive by realizing how precious cultural diversity can be and how we can learn from each other, and from ancient and traditional ways of living.