Three NARDIV Summer Schools as Laboratories of Cultural Co-Design

Miercurea Ciuc 2024

Changing the Perspective

The first NARDIV Summer School, “From the Edge to the Centre,” took place in Miercurea Ciuc from 20 to 25 July 2024. Its title already formulated a challenge: what happens when places, communities and experiences commonly perceived as peripheral become the point from which Europe is observed?

The programme began with minorities in Romania and Europe, but deliberately moved beyond a purely academic approach. Documentary film, Life Writing, collage and social-media comedy offered different ways of approaching identity, memory and representation. An embodied workshop on dialogue and equality added yet another form of knowledge: one based on physical presence, interaction and shared experience.

Encounters with artists and cultural practitioners were central to this process. A conversation with actress and playwright Alina Șerban, for example, connected questions of minority representation with artistic practice and personal experience. Documentary film and theatre similarly opened spaces in which stories could be encountered not simply as objects of analysis, but through the people and artistic forms that give them expression.

The location itself became part of the Summer School. During an excursion to Mikó Castle, participants explored Transylvania as a European space shaped by minorities, multilingualism, shifting borders and overlapping memories. Looking at Europe from Miercurea Ciuc therefore meant more than moving an international programme away from a capital city. It meant asking what becomes visible when the supposed “margin” is treated as a place from which European history and contemporary society can be interpreted.

Throughout the week, participants also developed their own projects and presented them to the group. This was an important first step towards a principle that would become increasingly significant in the following NARDIV Summer Schools. Young people were not only invited to listen, discuss and encounter different perspectives. They were also given space to interpret, connect and produce knowledge themselves.

The first Summer School therefore established a starting point for the journey that would continue in Cetate and Bucharest: before cultural narratives can become more diverse, we need to reconsider where we look from, whose experiences we recognise as knowledge, and what we understand as the cultural centre.

KEY INSIGHT: Changing the position from which Europe is viewed can change the narrative of Europe itself.

Cetate 2025

Mediation as a Shared Practice

The second NARDIV Summer School, “Cultural Mediators between East and West,” took place in July 2025 in Cetate, on the Danube. If the first Summer School in Miercurea Ciuc had asked what changes when Europe is viewed from its supposed margins, Cetate shifted the focus towards a second question: how can different European experiences, memories and forms of knowledge be brought into dialogue without reducing their differences?

The distinction between “East” and “West” provided an important starting point. Rather than treating them as two homogeneous cultural spaces, the Summer School approached them as historically produced categories marked by unequal perceptions, expectations and opportunities. Cultural mediation, from this perspective, could not simply mean transmitting knowledge from one side to another. It required creating situations in which different positions could encounter, question and translate one another.

The programme itself reflected this understanding. Alongside discussions with cultural practitioners, participants worked through language animation, movement, theatre, creative writing and film. These were not merely additions to an academic programme. Each method created a different way of communicating and of making experience visible. A theatrical exercise can reveal relationships that remain abstract in discussion; creative writing can give form to memories or perceptions that are difficult to express in institutional language; movement can make participants aware of proximity, distance and interaction before these are translated into words.

The location reinforced this approach. The Danube is at once a border, a route and a shared European space. An excursion along the river and encounters with local cultural actors connected the questions discussed during the Summer School to a landscape shaped by mobility, exchange and historical divisions. “East” and “West” could therefore be approached not as fixed geographical blocs, but as perspectives that are continuously produced and renegotiated.

A further step concerned the role of the participants themselves. Through collaborative work on their own projects and reflection on their possible long-term effects, they increasingly became responsible for connecting different experiences and translating them into new forms. Mediation was beginning to move from the professional cultural mediator towards the group itself.

This does not make the cultural institution or the cultural mediator unnecessary. It changes their role. Rather than determining in advance what should be transmitted and how it should be understood, they can create the conditions in which multiple forms of mediation become possible.

Cetate thus marked the second stage of the NARDIV Summer Schools’ learning process. Miercurea Ciuc had changed the position from which Europe was viewed. Cetate began to change who mediates between those different perspectives.

KEY INSIGHT: Cultural mediation need not belong to a single mediator. It can become a shared practice through which different perspectives encounter, translate and challenge one another.

Bucharest 2026

From Participation to Shared Agency

The third NARDIV Summer School, “Untold Stories,” took place in Bucharest in June 2026. It brought the questions explored in Miercurea Ciuc and Cetate into a new context. If the first Summer School had focused on changing perspectives, and the second on mediation as a shared practice, Bucharest asked a further question: what happens when participants and members of minority communities gain greater influence over the stories, questions and outcomes of a cultural programme?

This shift was already visible in the structure of the Summer School. Repeated sessions entitled “Students Space – contributions on minorities” created room for participants to introduce their own perspectives and knowledge. Their contributions stood alongside academic and historical approaches, artistic research, archival work and a Sound Walk. Participants were therefore not positioned simply as an audience for expert knowledge. Their own experiences, questions and interpretations became part of the programme.

Questions surrounding Roma history and representation formed an important strand of the programme and of the wider NARDIV activities taking place in Bucharest. Encounters with Roma artists, activists and cultural practitioners challenged a familiar pattern in which minorities are primarily discussed or represented by others. The question was no longer simply how Roma histories could be made more visible, but who has the authority to select, interpret and communicate them.

This distinction is fundamental. Visibility alone does not necessarily redistribute cultural authority. Minority actors need opportunities to participate as artists, experts, authors and mediators of their own histories and contemporary experiences. Self-representation thus becomes part of the process through which cultural narratives are produced.

The Summer School also connected these questions to archives and cultural memory. Historical knowledge, artistic research and encounters with archival practices invited participants to consider not only which stories are told, but which stories are collected, preserved and transmitted. An archive is never simply a neutral store of the past: decisions about what enters it also influence what future generations will be able to remember.

At the same time, the role of the young participants continued to develop. The Summer School culminated in workshop groups in which they formulated recommendations to the European Union. The movement from listening to discussing, contributing and finally developing recommendations made the participants increasingly responsible for the outcomes of the programme.

This is where participation begins to become co-design. Participants do not merely gain access to an existing programme; they contribute to determining what is considered relevant and what should follow from the encounter. In parallel, minority actors move from being represented within cultural programmes towards becoming mediators and producers of cultural knowledge themselves.

Bucharest therefore made visible a double shift: from representation towards self-representation, and from participation towards shared agency.

For cultural institutions, this development also raises a further question. If participants produce knowledge, identify emerging concerns and formulate recommendations, what happens to this knowledge afterwards? A participatory project reaches further when its insights do not disappear at the end of the event, but are taken back into the institutions that organised it – discussed, preserved and, where appropriate, allowed to influence future programming and partnerships.

Bucharest thus brought the trajectory of the three Summer Schools to a provisional conclusion. The “untold stories” of its title were not simply stories waiting to be discovered by cultural institutions. They also belonged to people who could tell, interpret and transmit them themselves – and participate in deciding how they should enter Europe’s cultural memory.