Preserving intangible heritage of Palestinian Territories’ cultural landscape: the Bethlehem Riwaya Museum

The cultural landscape of the Palestinian Territories is the result of multiple and millennial interactions between man and nature where, unfortunately, the endless persistence of the conflict is slowly but constantly proceeding to devastate and modify landscape’s unity and cultural identity. In this complex context, characterized by a deep cultural stratification, an essential matter is the safeguard of the huge tangible and intangible heritage of Palestine. Regarding this topic, I designed for UNESCO the Bethlehem Riwaya Museum, currently under construction, a project that attempts to narrate the immaterial values connected to the material finds of an underground archeological site through an innovative multimedia display. The Riwaya Museum is the result of the partial refurbishment of an existing building, from which an underground archeological site is accessible. Located in Bethlehem’s Manger Square, next to the Nativity Church, the site is composed of two separate parts, a cisterns complex dating from the middle ages and the rests of a more ancient byzantine monastery. The museum path develops through the archeological site along a sequence of sensorial and interactive video environments, arranged by Studio Azzurro, an Italian group of visual artists specialized in new media and technologies for museum communication. «Riwaya», in Arabic, means both «History » (of the place) and «story» (stories from their inhabitants), and the museum’s aim is to recover both intangible aspects, connected to the cultural landscape and threatened by war. By re-establishing local cultural roots, the interactive experience of the museum will be functional, for the local communities, to the consolidation of their own identity perception, reinforcing their awareness of belonging to the territory they live in.