At the heart of the project is the Kojsko orchard, the region's largest genebank of old fruit varieties and the only place in the wider area dedicated to the systematic maintenance and research of old local fruit varieties and their associated cultural heritage. During the year of the European Capital of Culture, the orchard will be converted for visitors and several events related to the cultivation of fruit trees will be organised.
At the same time, the project looks far beyond the borders of Goriška and recognises the disappearance of old orchards as a global phenomenon.
Selected international artists from different parts of the world will revive abandoned orchard areas through specific creative processes and place them on a virtual map. The result will be an open atlas of forgotten orchards, a library of documentary and imaginative testimonies of former spaces of coexistence between people and trees.
The atlas, conceived as an open project that can be continued beyond the end of the year-long cultural holiday, challenges the forgetting and loss that the dynamics of the modern market economy and the growing need for monoculture to treat fertile land have brought to rural communities around the world in recent decades.
