As the pre-biennial Urban Vision of CRA showed, Prishtina is often perceived as a spatially fragmented city with little to no social contact between the neighbourhoods.

According to the participating interviewees, both cultural life (national cultural institutes) and city’s heritage (ottoman and modernist buildings) are concentrated in the heart of the city, while the neighbourhoods of the growing city lack any form of cultural identity. These impressions have been confirmed in our conversations with schools students.

‘Uncover your story: a manual to local culture’ started as a long-term project with public schools of Prishtina and Fushë Kosova, aiming to develop, in a collaborative manner, tools to explore and co-create (new) narratives and storylines of the city’s neighbourhoods. It promotes an integrated approach to local heritage that recognises its distinct value for community by taking into account cultural diversity, economic, social, historical, educational and environmental components.

Students were invited to (re)discover in their neighbourhoods local landmarks, public spaces and buildings with collective importance. This process was based on collective explorations through various methods, including psychogeography, oral history research and speculative writing.

After a piloting phase of testing workshops in four different public schools of Prishtina, the manual has been developed. The manual is designed as a guide to help teachers and educators to facilitate the exploration process.

The project is now part of the strategic national program Art in Schools organised by the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports and the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology of Kosovo. The ambition of the programme is to provide regular extra-curricular cultural activities to every student in Kosovo through extensive trainings of elementary and high school teachers.