Factum Foundation for Digital Technology in Preservation is a not-for-profit founded by Adam Lowe in Madrid, in 2009. It works alongside its sister company Factum Arte, a multidisciplinary workshop dedicated to digital mediation, producing works for contemporary artists as well as facsimiles for preservation purposes.
Factum Foundation demonstrates the importance of documenting, monitoring, studying, re-creating and disseminating the world’s cultural heritage through the rigorous development of high-resolution recording and re-materialisation techniques. They have initiated and been part of numerous exhibitions, studies, conservation training programmes, and unprecedented joint projects involving major artworks and monuments from around the world.
Iconoclastic destruction, mass tourism, war, natural disasters, imperfect restoration and commercial exploitation all pose serious threats to the preservation of many great works of art and culture. Factum Foundation is at the forefront of rethinking the preservation of cultural heritage globally. They have initiated and been part of numerous exhibitions, studies, conservation training programmes, and unprecedented joint projects involving major artworks and monuments from around the world. A short list includes the recreation of Lamassu sculptures from the Palace of Ashurnasirpal at Nimrud, the Tomb of Tutankhamun, and Salviati’s ceiling at Palazzo Grimani. Ongoing projects include the Aalto Silo in Oulu, training in photogrammetry in Saudi Arabia, documentation of the Birdman cult on Easter Island, reconstructing the lost silver map of al-Idrisi, a facsimile of the Djehuty Garden in Luxor, and documenting, conserving and raising awareness about the Bakor monoliths of Nigeria.
The primary objective of the Factum Foundation is to ensure that future generations can inherit the past in a condition in which it can be studied and emotionally engaged with. We endeavor to create a living archive of a growing collection of all the wonders that we have inherited so that future generations – whose attitudes towards cultural heritage may, of course, be very different and who will certainly develop technologies far more advanced of ours – will have a resource that we bequeath of raw, clean and unmanipulated data.
For more information, visit our website.
Factum Foundation operates in the UK through Factum Foundation London, a Charitable Incorporated Organisation directed by Dr Ferdinand Saumarez Smith.
27 Crosby Row
SE1 3YD London
info@factumfoundation.org
