Our Mission

The Mantinea Institute is dedicated to advancing art-based research as an essential means of understanding, cultivating, and reimagining Europe’s diverse cultural heritages. As a creative hub, the Institute fosters sensitivity, sensibility, evaluative acuity, and the practical valorisation of heritage through sustained artistic inquiry and interdisciplinary reflection.

Drawing on methodologies rooted in lived experience, attentive presence, and contemplative engagement, our research is shaped by the intellectual and artistic ethos of the Resonances of Stones (RoS) framework. We regard artistic inquiry not merely as an analytical endeavour but as an act of perceptive participation—a heightened responsiveness to landscape (urban and rural), environment (human and natural), form (tangible and intangible), and soundscape (musical, natural, and civilisational). This approach enables us to explore both visible and invisible strata of cultural memory, offering an alternative to the accelerating superficiality and disembodiment characteristic of contemporary experience, and pursuing a return to groundedness, nuance, and metaphysical depth.

The Institute also serves as a locus for creative experimentation and socially engaged initiatives developed in collaboration with local communities, research centres, religious congregations, art communities, private ventures, and institutions. Through collaborative projects, exhibitions, cultural events, conferences, retreats, and workshops, we examine how artistic practice can illuminate shared values, strengthen cultural ties, and open new interpretative pathways for heritage in transformation. Our activities further include comparative study visits across Europe and beyond, facilitating exchanges among communities confronting related questions of continuity, renewal, and selective preservation.

 
In dialogue with scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and cultural institutions, the Mantinea Institute seeks to formulate informed recommendations for the thoughtful stewardship of heritage—not as a static inheritance, but as a living field of meaning requiring discernment.

At the core of the Mantinea Institute lies a conviction that valuable research and creative engagement stem from the same impulse — a desire to see more comprehensively, to listen more consciously, and to create from a place of wonder. These dispositions are indispensable for envisioning futures that remain attentive to history, responsive to place, and open to growth.