Our expert in issues of forming identity and mentality on local visual codes, professional designer and artist Michal Aniempadystau prepared a special report for our meeting in Brussels and further at a Belarusian discussion. We found it so deep and touching, that soon it became a distinct material. Here we suggest the whole text to your attention.
I was born and grew up when a city’s historical or cultural heritage used to live its own life separated from the city residents. The heritage facilities did exist physically, some of them even protected by virtue of their legacy status; yet, they were devoid of any substance and there was little we knew about them, if anything at all.
Individual buildings or their groups and ensembles, streets, squares, roundabouts or parks used to constitute part of a physical urban space which was deprived of history or stories, or any associative relations inside. It was just a space, flat and monotonous, like a newly built asphalt road pavement: distances between random points on an imaginary map.
