Cultural Heritage

A person's cultural heritage is the basis for society's cultural development, because society thrives on the lasting protection of information and any resulting knowledge. Cultural heritage involves the temporal constant of generations and supports communication between people so that they become essential cultural reference points for communities.

Cultural heritage - be it personal, regional or international - is visible, tangible and something that can be experienced. After all, the success of cultural heritage is reflected in the way that something that has been around for a long time and has been tried and tested can make a transformative process from the past through to the present and on into the future. We negotiate the existing cultural space and examine how the treasured past can be made sustainable for the future. A crucial question in the process around the "preservation" of the tried and tested is how to make it succeed. The answer lies in encounters and the exchange of (very personal) cultural values with people, and how to develop, support, and encourage this. 

Mutual exchange entails awareness and understanding of a common heritage and thus the opportunity to pass the heritage on and to develop identity-building reference points for us and our society. A regional, cultural identity in the pan-European context unites people and generations.

There is both tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Very often, the two are interwoven; rituals and practices that are understood as the set of rules of communication between people often go hand in hand with object-related presentation: an objectified result of a society's negotiated understanding of cultural values.