Heritage Malta Reaffirms its Commitment to Five EU-Funded Projects

Heritage Malta is proudly reconfirming its ongoing dedication to five pivotal EU-funded projects aimed at preserving cultural heritage and combating modern challenges: Clean Oceans and four Horizon Europe projects, namely ENIGMA, STECCI, IMPULSE and HERITALISE.

The Clean Oceans initiative is a partnership between Heritage Malta and Norway’s Stavanger Maritime Museum – MUST. Over the past two years, the two institutions have collaborated in harnessing cutting-edge technology to digitise and record both tangible and intangible maritime cultural heritage, addressing the threats of pollution and climate change. In June, they co-organised a hybrid conference titled ‘Clean Oceans and Mapping Our Seas’ at the Malta Maritime Museum in Birgu, inviting public participation to discuss recent developments in the field.

Horizon Europe is the European Union’s key funding programme for research and innovation. Heritage Malta is part of the Horizon Europe ENIGMA Project, a three-year initiative focused on creating sustainable strategies to combat the illicit trafficking of cultural goods. This project brings together an interdisciplinary team of academics and scientists to establish mechanisms for tracing, protecting, safeguarding, and repatriating cultural artefacts.

The agency is also at the forefront of addressing the impact of climate change on cultural heritage, through its role in the Horizon Europe STECCI Project. This initiative involves the assessment and conservation of medieval tombstones, known as stećci, in Bosnia and Herzegovina and surrounding regions. Heritage Malta is applying advanced 3D digitisation techniques to document these monuments and sites in high resolution, and creating virtual tours and an educational game from this data, showcasing its partners’ work on cultural heritage research, climate scenario analysis, and remedial conservation practices.

IMPULSE — an acronym inspired from ‘IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies’ — is another Horizon Europe-funded initiative which Heritage Malta participates in. This project is aimed at revolutionising the digitisation of cultural heritage, whilst streamlining digitisation processes for immersive environments used in education and the arts.

The fourth Horizon Europe-funded project that Heritage Malta has embarked on is HERITALISE. Its mission is to research and develop advanced digitisation techniques and solutions for documenting and representing diverse cultural heritage assets more comprehensively. In addition, AI-powered data-processing tools such as Machine Learning (ML) will be developed, allowing users to learn more about a particular object, what research has been done, and what results have been derived from it.

Heritage Malta’s commitment to these projects, spearheaded by its Digitisation Unit, underscores the agency’s dedication to
preserving cultural heritage through innovation, collaboration, and sustainable practices.