EUROPEAN CULTURAL CAPITALS 2007 - Luxembourg Region and Sibiu (Romania)
(2007 01 28 13:34)Luxembourg and its wider region as well as the Romanian town of Sibiu have kicked off their activities for 2007 as European Cultural Capitals. Luxembourg partied on 9th December, while Sibiu has held its festivities on 1st January, after celebrating EU accession on New Year’s Eve. Questions about the sustainability and European dimension of the programme pose themselves once more.
Luxembourg and the highly praised general co-ordinator Robert Garcia are trying to impress with more than 500 events which will take place in the wider linguistic and geographical region, including not only the town of Luxembourg, but the entire Grand Duchy, the Belgian French and German language communities, the regions of Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland in Germany and Lorraine in France. The main themes of the year are mobility, crossing borders and the exchange of ideas. A budget of more than 50 million Euros is at the organisers’ disposal, whereby the EU’s contribution amounts to around 500,000 Euros.
For Luxembourg the year will be a chance to show that regional co-operation can function in culture despite disparate structures: Post-industrial urban areas in Germany and France on the one hand and the scarcely populated Belgian province of Luxembourg on the other. Finding common denominators here certainly poses a challenge.
In reaching out to Sibiu for a partnership in organising this year, Luxembourg made a step towards another objective of the programme: intercultural dialogue. It is from the wider region of Luxembourg and the Rhineland, that German speaking settlers went and founded Hermannstadt in the 13th century in the kingdom of Hungary – today’s Sibiu in today’s Romania.
For Sibiu, the status of European Capital of Culture presented a real and major chance to continue and intensify the restoration of the town’s rich architectural heritage and infrastructure. But will it be enough to revive what once used to be a cultural and economic hub in its own region? Sibiu’s strength lay once in its ethnic German population and also its Europe-wide cultural, but foremost economic connections, combined with a series of privileges – cultural, religious, legal and territorial autonomy. All that is history – after massive emigration, diversity in Sibiu is more imagined than real.
This year should be an instrument to revive the town’s cultural life in a European context. More than 200 projects and 100 cultural events to be held in Sibiu in the course of the whole year - sounds ambitious and is almost impossible to carry out with the limited resources available. It is however safe to assume that the subsidised diversity won’t really be sustainable, for simple reasons of capacity. It already seems that the organisers are overwhelmed and that the co-operation with the partners from Luxembourg, but also from other countries is much based on the latter’s initiative and thus beats the purpose of Sibiu itself building up a network.
It seems that in the case of Sibiu the well-known point of criticism that the year as European Capital of Culture is used by the respective cities mainly for gain in profile and less to further the idea of European culture holds water. This seems to be less the case with their partner Luxembourg (and the region).
In any case, the partnership between the two cities was a good idea as such. The programmes, and the websites sound and look promising, if only the announced events will all take place.
Looking ahead, the European Council has just nominated Essen (Germany), Pécs (Hungary) and Istanbul as Capitals of Culture for 2010, still under the old procedures. New, more competition-based and transparent procedures will come into force in January 2007 but will only apply to nominations after 2013.
The information is taken from European Forum for the Arts and Heritage.