A month has passed… I have taken half a dozen planes since then, staying in half a dozen different cities in three countries. Ahead, while I finish my first placement in UCL, I have another half dozen planes, staying in half a dozen different cities in three countries. After watching ‘Up in the air’ I realised I am becoming a bit like Clooney’s character.
While I carry on with the design of fieldwork and the readings (and some other writings, bureaucracy and so on), I keep meeting people, sharing experiences and learning a lot from the stories I hear. During this month, while I was participating in the conference ‘II Jornadas Marca Cultura Territorio’ in Santander, I had the opportunity to meet many interesting people from the world of the arts and also the management of the arts… Among them, I realised that many of the problems we suffered are shared by other large collectives, but also that we are all looking for inovative solutions to understand and improve the way we work. One of the tools I liked most was the one developed by Karraskan: Kultursistema, that will be helpful in the design of some of our tools for this project.
During Easter, I went to my village to spend some days with my family. As usual, I like to walk around and usually visit the first archaeological site I worked in as a teenager. There, the team let me participate seeding my love for archaeology and maybe for public archaeology too—after all, I was just a kid invited to learn and take part and this probably made me believe what the archaeology I was studying years later needed to be. The current situation of the site is a bit sad, and it has been years since it started to take this way. When I started my degree, the course on Cultural Heritage Management with Prof. Querol, was maybe the other milestone in my carreer. Ever since then I have tried to find ways to improve management, although practicing them has not been easy at all.
Yesterday, in a Christening, a friend told me “we have lots of heritage, but lack management”, stating a feeling that remains in the core of this project. When the half dozen planes I have to take these days are over, my placement in UCL will be over and I will be starting the second stage in Athens. Then, more details will come and.