People Behind the Scenes of Timișoara European Capital of Culture

As part of this scholarship, I intend to conduct a series of 7 interviews under the title People in the shadows of Timisoara, the European Capital of Culture, between August 10 and December 1, 2023.

There will be audio recorded dialogues, later transcribed, thought and constructed in such a way so as to help the public get to know or get to know better the builders of the cultural environment in Timisoara, people who, in general, are behind the spotlights.

I want, through this approach, to help the general public interested in local culture and, implicitly, in the Timisoara European Capital of Culture project, to find out details about the activity of these people - behind the scenes, as I called them -, about the course their professional, about the collaboration they have with the team with whom they are involved in the implementation of the Timişoara European Capital of Culture project, but also about their private life - without intrusive-aggressive accents, however -, as personal details can humanize a public person, can help the public to empathize, to get closer to what they do, to the institution and the cultural environment they represent, they can help them understand their work better and, last but not least, they can help them have a clearer vision on the complete picture in which the activity of these interviewed people is integrated.

I propose to interview, for example, the directors of some of the cultural institutions in Timisoara: the Mihai Eminescu National Theatre, the German State Theatre, the Csiky Gergely State Hungarian Theatre, the Banat Philharmonic, the National State Opera, art curators and gallery managers of art known not only locally, but of international scope and appreciation.

I then intend to publish these dialogues – to save them from the ephemerality to which publication in any mass media generally condemns them – in a future volume of cultural interviews.

It will be a volume that will include not only these interviews conducted within the framework of the scholarship, but also a selection of dialogues with people of culture from Timişoara or people of culture originally from Timişoara, who have built their international careers, interviews that I made and published in the last six years (2018 - 2023). It will be a volume that reflects this effervescent cultural environment, through the lens of the people who represent it, who think about it, who build it, who complete the cultural and artistic picture of Timisoara, the European Capital of Culture.

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Melania Cincea has a degree in Journalism and a master's degree in the Management of Mass Media Institutions and Comparative European Studies. Since 1995, she has been part of the editorial staff of the Timpolis publication, from Timisoara, the founder of the website www.putereaacincea.ro, she has written in Contributrs.ro and România Liberă. She collaborates with Revista 22. In 2018, she published the volume Frația penal-academică. Scientific Research in Romanian Penitentiaries. A journalistic investigation (Editura Humanitas) and the volume of interviews Compositions on Dictaphone (Editura Universității de West din Timisoara). In 2021, she published the volume of interviews 15 at the Fifth Power (Humanitas), and in 2022 she contributed an essay to the collective volume The Music of Thought. Gabriel Liiceanu in dialogue with his friends (Humanitas), edited by Cătălin Cioabă and Grigore Vida.

Aceast proiect a fost realizat printr-o finanțare Energie! Burse de creație, acordată de Municipiul Timișoara, prin Centrul de Proiecte, în cadrul Programului cultural național „Timișoara – Capitală Europeană a Culturii în anul 2023".