Summer Nights at the Museum Festival, 1st edition

Data : July 21 2023 - July 23 2023

The first edition of the Summer Nights at the Museum Festival takes place between July 21st and July 23rd 2023, and presents a rich cultural offer, including new art media installations, music and poetry, films, a drawing exhibition, workshops and relaxing afternoons in the museum park, as well as guided tours. 

Water, essential element for life, is the thematic glue that holds together all activities and events of the festival. Joined together around water and through water, all participants are invited to explore the beautiful buildings of the historical treatment plant, to learn about water and its history, to practice their skills at the workshops designed for children and adults, to enjoy multimedia creations, music and films, spending time with family, friends and neighbors, or to relax or read in the shade of the tall trees in the museum park. 

On Friday and Saturday evening, at 8pm, we embark on cinema journeys, guided by water, following its course and the discoveries made by protagonists from Circumeuropa, Rowing for Europe by Gerald Harringer (Austria, 2017) and The Sailor by Lucia Kasová (Slovakia, 2021). 

For the duration of the festival, visitors can enjoy the interactive audio-visual installation produced by Electronic Resistance, and also a sound installation produced by artist Anamaria Pravicencu, who teamed up with the local poetess Daniela Rațiu and the Serbian musician Manja Ristić. The proposal of the three artists invites for introspection and is also a warning for the responsibility we all share towards the water resources close to us. 

In each of the three days of the festival, young children, teenagers and adults are all invited to join the various workshops offered, inlcuding clay modeling, making candles from waste cooking oil, drawing, pottering, environmental education and origami, to visit the drawing and photography exhibition The Water We Want, in partnership with the Water Museums Global Network  UNESCO. The Water We Want aims at exploring water, as seen by young people, within the framework of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. 

Together with writers Daniela Rațiu, Borco Ilin and Alina Dumitrescu, and composer Adrian Mardan, we will use water as an inspirational source for musical reading sessions, while on Saturday evening we will rediscover the musical hits from the 60s to 80s, reinterpreted by Colectivul Discotecă. Discotecă is a pop sonic archeology group, created in 2012, with the aim to bring to light Romanian pop music artifacts, focusing on the 60s to 80s timeframe. 

We also return to our challenge launched within the project for museum activation: to produce a Dictionary of Water. All participants are called to answer one simple question:  What words do you associate water with? 

Full agenda of the festival is available on the Facebook event page and on Aquatim’s website.

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The Water Museum – connection to the cultural network of Timisoara is part of the National Cultural Programme “Timisoara – 2023 European Capital of Culture”; it is financed by Grow Timisoara 2023 and implemented by the Center for Projects Timisoara, with allocation from the national budget via the Ministry of Culture.