Now in its second edition, the "Spirit of the Island" Camp in Calarasi is an initiative that started from the desire to confront students with an atypical situation from a spatial, functional and micro-community point of view, challenging them to a creative and personalized response, in the sense of an authentic eco-civic approach, connected to the values and particularities of the chosen site. The activity started in 2022, within the DANUrB+ project (Danube Urban Brand + Building Regional and Local Resilience through the Valorization of Danube's Cultural Heritage), funded by the INTERREG Danube programme and continued in 2023 within the CULTADISER project: "Developing UAUIM's institutional capacity for research in architecture and urbanism by creating a culture of dissemination of results".
The camp is conceived as a non-formal reseaarch & design & build activity, aiming at understanding and then creatively and eco-responsibly exploiting an exceptional place: a quasi-natural island, located on the Borcea channel of the Danube, near the city of Calarasi, where a music festival already well known to young people takes place every year: "3Smoked Olives". The "Spirit of the Island" camp is a vector of inter-generational links for students from all three study cycles (bachelor/master/doctorate), leading to a non-formal re-grouping around an idea and an attitude capable of understanding the current issues associated with the green transition, the fragility of the relationship between nature, culture and technology and the concepts of "sustainability", "recycle-upcycle", "circularity".
Together with the organizers of the 3Smoked Olives festival, the students imagined and built small furniture installations for the festival, learning to value and creatively use the things at hand, recycling and innovatively re-interpreting atypical design and organizational situations, while practicing a responsible attitude towards nature and the micro-community created by the event. During the 6 days of the camp, the students made small furniture objects and installations such as: bench for the waiting area, pontoon access installation, structures for waste and recyclables, signal object - sailboat, hammock structure, outdoor seating/amphitheatre, lighting fixtures.
In this way, the camp speaks about the subtle and very topical relationship between nature, culture and society, about exploration, respect and valorisation of unused resources, becoming a platform to acquire "live" design and execution skills with recycled materials, leadership and organisation.
The camp is aimed at students from UAUIM and beyond, from architecture, urban planning, landscape architecture, interior architecture majors, starting from the second year of studies. The team is trans-generational, includes tutors - professors at UAUIM and PhD students.
The camp includes the following stages:
