Voice Your Place 2.0

Authors’ Comment

Voice Your Place 2.0 continues and completes the project in Curtea de Argeș, started in 2023 with the Summer School. This year, during the Voice Your Place Workshops, the audio guide in English was made, and later the signage system and platform for listening to the episodes. The current edition brought together twenty teenagers from the local community, who gradually developed the audio guide through workshops in architecture, anthropological interviews, acting and studio recordings. Together with the 2023 edition, Voice Your Place becomes a complete bilingual audio guide, present in the public space and made by the community thanks to the forty participants in the two editions.
The opportunity to make a local audio guide becomes, within the Voice Your Place project, a pedagogical tool to raise awareness and deepen understanding of the built environment. The project aims to activate and involve the community through non-formal education, in a participatory process of exploration, knowledge and appreciation of local heritage. Voice Your Place creates the context in which teenagers become the promoters and the voice of their city, facilitating a direct and concrete community involvement, strengthening the belonging and affective bond with the city, where heritage occupies a central and generative place.
Through multidisciplinary workshops, the audio guide is gradually developed together with the participants. Recalling the activities carried out in these two years, in addition to the architecture, acting and studio recording workshops, the stories of the audio guide were written by the teenagers participating in the creative writing workshop and the field recordings that complement the narrative were created during the soundscape workshop.
This year, the project also involved the making of the audio guide's signage, thus opening the dialogue with various local stakeholders. Freestanding signs were installed at the six heritage buildings included in the audio guide, as well as in the central area of the city. The signs contain QR codes to access the episodes, which are available in Romanian and English on the project's online platform. The signs were initially conceived as an exercise for the participating teenagers to explore the aesthetics of the monuments. The design of the QR signs aimed for simplicity, intuitive use and their integration in the context of the monuments, keeping the playful tone of the project. Their installation was carried out during the workshop of public space interventions, where the urban furniture at Sân Nicoară was also refurbished.
Voice Your Place: Curtea de Argeș can be considered a pilot project in a network of audio guides that do not simply offer a narrative, but are the result of a process of exploration and interaction of the local young community with the built heritage, while offering the listener the experience of hearing the stories of the place through the voices of the community.