Observing what happened during my participation for the European Heritage Days 2024 with Historical Knots, I have been amazed with what freedom the children who came with their parents to the exhibition, explored the images, the space and started to immediately transform the exhibition space into something they felt the need to interact with. As in Historical Knots the objective already has been to explore open ways of creating new narrative structures, I would love to go a step further for the 2025 European Heritage Days and involve the local communities into the storytelling process through setting up a different workshops adressing different communities (local, transnational, children and elderly, with and without migration story) to interweave stories of all these people with all their perspectives to let grow the sparkle of new connections to heritage and shared space and shared histories.

Oftentimes history and cultural heritage seems to awake sensations of linearity and chronological logics, but maybe as much as our brains are deeply connected to emotion and ancestral times that we may not even consciously remember or be aware of, it can be that our roots may be more deeply rooted in the poetic and in the abstraction of forms, colors, memories, tastes, sounds, faces, movement than what we might ever have considered. Maybe we are color, sound, bridge, hostel, stone, memory, word, letter, grass, wind, foot, walk, sand, dust and longing. Maybe we are what we are not aware of, and maybe our connection walks us through this unnerved reality connecting our bodies to our environments and make them feel with other bodies embodyind maybe other colors, other sounds, other forms, other wishes, other realities and yet we meet. And yet we are together, and yet we are community. 

Questions I offer are:

How does feel the grass below your feet when you see the first person you remember?

Did the grass tell you something of a country you never met?

In which language did it talk to you?

What was the color of its hair?

Did you understand its language? Or did it feel like sound?

If it was a sound, can you recall the speed the sound travelled from its beginning to its ending?

Where did it all happen?

How does the space look like?

Of what it is built?

If you are a parent and the questions sound too abstract for your child, how would you ask these same questions in other words to your child?

If you understand English and your friend doesn’t speak English, how would you translate these questions into a language that may be understood in your friend’s language and understanding?

If you don’t use words to communicate, how would you operate these questions in non-verbal language forms?

And if your answers start to grow, how would you keep track of them?

Whatever comes to your mind, now is the moment that you can start telling your story in the form you want and share it as a part of Write the Books once you are ready. Dear unknown person, I am sure it will be amazing to meet you through the story you tell. This is what makes our lives. The purpose of this common project is to co-create a webpage with all our stories and share this diversity which makes us being strong and beautiful and in the best position to built that common ground where future generations can continue to flourish.

The European dimension of this project resides in its intercultural aspect inviting whoever wants to to enter in the structuring of building common stories. Europe is multicultural and lives from debates and exchange, and the wish is to continue building communities where diversity is welcome and a chance for our societies to grow into a better future, one where humans are welcome, one where humans feel human again and learn to connect in good company with others.