Regio Earth

AUTORS: Alina Negru (TERRApia), Alessandro Serra (TERRApia), [Ádám Bihari] (Sárkollektíva), Dragana Kojicic (Earth&Crafts)

LOCATION: Romania, jud. Timiș, Timisoara

Regio Earth is a traveling festival about architecture, design and art with earth. This summer school rotates between three neighboring countries (Hungary, Romania, Serbia) and brings together earth building enthusiasts, professionals and specialists from Central and South-Eastern Europe. The aim of the cross-border coordinating team and its international partners is to protect the common regional heritage by identifying new ways of integrating it into today's socio-cultural dynamics.

Techniques with new land, people and places

We believe that passing on local technical knowledge about the natural resources available in the vicinity and experimenting with innovative techniques based on them is an important step for the protection of the built habitat. Connecting the international professional community with those in our countries also benefits both parties, who discover together the sustainability of earth building and the potential of territories less documented by specialists so far. The itinerant nature of the summer school offers the opportunity to explore at each edition not only a variety of earth techniques, but also new places and people, in the spirit of the circular economy and the valorization of local knowledge.

Three editions, over 30 participating countries

The first 2017 edition of the festival took place in the village of Oszkó, Vas County in Hungary. The second edition, in Romania, was held in Banat, in Buzad, and in 2019 Regio Earth took place in Serbia, in the village of Mošorin in the municipality of Titel. The Buzad edition brought together 40 people interested in earth techniques from 11 countries, who interacted with the community and left behind a pavilion serving as a village kitchen. During the festival, with the help of 16 international trainers, 18 participants acquired theoretical and practical knowledge of earth techniques: mud brick, straw, cob, cob cob, plastering, plastering, bread baking. Both the pavilion and the old village school, which has been given a decorative plaster finish, are filled with activities during the Electroruga festival, organized by our local partners, but can also be visited during the rest of the year as a permanent outdoor exhibition of local building techniques. The third edition gathered over 80 enthusiasts and earth specialists from more than 30 countries. They left visible traces in the village: a lecture hall in the courtyard of the Earth Architecture Center, several murals at the primary school and a kiln in the courtyard of a Mošorin villager.