Event: UNESCO and the 1960's Nubian Campaign: Initial Phase of a 3D Model of the Nubian Landscape

Speakers: Rosa Tamborrino and Paolo Piumatti, Politecnico di Torino

Our visiting scholars from the Politecnico di Torino, will outline the first steps in a new UCLA-Polito collaboration.

The first International large scale UNESCO campaign for preserving world cultural heritage was provoked by a looming catastrophe: the loss of the Nubian Temples under the Nile flood due to the High Aswan Dam. Although the monuments were rescued, the context of the cultural heritage was lost. Nubian temples were moved to higher grounds, other regions and abroad, meanwhile the Nile landscape was changing forever.

This lecture will introduce the ongoing joint research project developed by POLITO and UCLA with the aim to recreate the historical landscape before the change in the Sixties through the research of sources and the use of digital tools and digital humanities methods. The focus of the visualization project is the change to the landscape and the temples, by highlighting the transfer and the relocation, the dismantling and the re-assembly, and finally the new context of these monuments.

The speakers will introduce research themes and purposes, and will show some outcomes of a class on this subject taught to POLITO master students in the past semester.