Opening Karelia Workshop

On March 20-22, 2013 an Opening Karelia Workshop was held as a kick-off project event in the Selena conference room of Onego Palace hotel, Petrozavodsk.

Over 50 participants took part in the workshop. Among them were project partners and associate partners, researchers, IT experts, designers. The workshop was conducted by Denis Kuznetsov, co-manager of the project. Art critic Georgy Nikich (Moscow), museum expert Nickolai Nikishin (Moscow) and Helena Lonkila from the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland were invited as experts.  

The round table “Euregio Karelia: positions, perspectives, introductions” gave start to the workshop. Experts from different fields made their presentations and speeches on related topics. Among them were:   

- Ilya Solomeshch, Ph.D. in History, associate professor of the Department of history of countries of Northern Europe, head of the Laboratory on the problems of the Scandinavian countries and Finland taking about Karelia as an example of creating and projecting meanings;
- Helena Lonkila, University of Jyväskylä, Department of art and culture studies with Experiencing Karelianism presentation and
- Natalia Aluferova, director, Around.ru travel agency sharing her observations on Traveling between Russia and Finland: expectations and preferences of tourists.

The three-day workshop program was very intense with several experts’ presentations, museums’ introductions, work groups sessions, discussions, game sessions and a visit to the National Museum of Karelia. In the course of the workshop partnerships were established between the participating museums and a whole range of issues was discussed, namely:  
-  general vision of the basic parameters of description and presentation of the Euregio Karelia region as a multicultural, natural and historic phenomenon;
- new approach to the creation of modern exhibition, the museum hypertext;
- design solutions for new exhibitions in participating museums;
- resources of modern information technologies for the open museum information network;
- possible types and scenarios of the game for the museum visitors.

 

Photos from the Opening Karelia Workshop