Documenting cultural heritage sites and objects to the highest possible standards.

In 2024, artist and cultural manager David Machado Gutiérrez and the Parranda Marinera de Buches, a cultural association based in Arrecife (Lanzarote, Canary Islands), approached Factum Foundation to help preserve an ancestral, vernacular tradition now at serious risk of disappearing: the buches.

Since the 2019 ban on shark fishing in the Canary Islands – a crucial step in protecting marine ecosystems – the materials needed to make buches have become unavailable. Today, only 12 original buches remain, putting this centuries-old tradition in jeopardy. The buches are central to the performance – without them, the ‘pasacalles’ cannot take place, and a living traditional ritual risks vanishing.

After a high-resolution recording of the shape and sound of six remaining buches, Factum Foundation produced 35 fully functional facsimiles, ensuring that the tradition can continue without compromising environmental protections. This approach offers a way to reconcile heritage preservation with ecological responsibility, showing how craftsmanship, science, and technology can sustain living traditions in a changing world.

In February 2026, the facsimile buches were used for the first time in the Parranda Marinera, demonstrating how craftsmanship, science, and technology can sustain living traditions in a changing world. More fundamentally, this project affirms that cultural continuity and environmental protection need not be in conflict—that preservation can take new forms whilst honouring ancestral practices.

As Oulu steps into its year as European Capital of Culture 2026, AaltoSiilo continues to take shape as one of its most ambitious legacy projects. Earlier this month, the project was presented at the ‘New European Bauhaus in the North’ seminar at Design Centre Proto where Valentino Tignanelli, AaltoSiilo Project Manager, shared the story of the Silo’s transformation—from a derelict wood chip store in a cellulose factory into a vibrant cultural hub and multi-purpose space. The seminar was followed by an on-site visit, offering participants a direct experience of the building and its evolving potential.

As Oulu’s long-term legacy project for 2026, AaltoSiilo has been part of the New European Bauhaus (NEB) network since 2024. The NEB brings together sustainability, aesthetics and inclusion, linking the European Green Deal with lived experience and the transformation of places. AaltoSiilo embodies these values through reuse, recycling and careful architectural preservation—demonstrating how existing industrial structures can be adapted in ways that are genuinely sustainable. ‘Concrete’ and ‘sustainable’ are not words that are often used together but Charlotte Skene Catling’s work to develop the Oulu Protocol proves that re-use can be more viable than demolition if linked to planning gains. More about the Oulu Protocol soon on the AaltoSiilo website.

The building is still very raw, but it will host its full programme of events, exhibitions and activities – starting with the Ice Sauna created by Snowhow Oy for the Silo and the Frozen People Festival, operational from 23 to 27 February (for any inquiries regarding sauna use, please contact Katri Tenetz, Director of the Sauna Association, at katri.tenetz@rantasaunaseura.fi) and Bernd Nicolaisen’s exhibition ‘Residual Light’, a deep engagement with melting glaciers in Iceland, on display from 26 February to 1 March. His images are the result of fieldwork, scientific cooperation, and a meticulous digital-to-physical process that reveal intricate structures normally invisible to the human eye. Nicolaisen has worked closely with Factum to explore hidden landscapes — from the interior of glaciers to the shadowed strata of Australia’s Pilbara and the surfaces of comet 67P. His work opens the year with a clear statement of intent: precision, research, beauty, and material awareness.

A provisional programme is now available on the Aalto Siilo website, but there is room for it to get fuller and deeper—please sponsor an event or suggest an addition to the calendar! You can also follow updates on Instagram.

The Silo is more than a legacy project—it’s a Brutalist symbol transforming a socially deprived area on the edge of the Arctic Circle, the front line of cultural climate change!

The Museo Sefardí in Toledo asked Factum Foundation to produce a facsimile of a fragment of a Sefer Torah (a handwritten parchment scroll containing the first five books of the Hebrew Bible), found hidden behind a horseshoe arch in a house in Toledo. This small parchment, which recounts a passage from the book of Exodus, was concealed in the 15th and 16th centuries, possibly out of fear of the Inquisition or stored safely when the text was so fragmented it was no longer useful.

The document, housed within the deposit of the Museo de Santa Cruz in the Museo Sefardí (Ministry of Culture) was digitised using the Selene Photometric Stereo System to capture its surface and colour in high resolution. The processed data were subsequently re-materialised in Factum’s workshops, producing a facsimile that reproduces the Hebrew script and all the physical characteristics of the original on both sides. This small facsimile required several weeks of research to find the right way to rematerialise it keeping its original look and feel.

Given the fragile state of conservation of the original fragment, Factum’s facsimile will be exhibited in the Museo Sefardí every six months, as historical bibliographic documents are particularly vulnerable during display unless temperature and humidity are stable and the light levels minimal. This facsimile offers a solution that prevents the deterioration of the original with the added advantage that it can be handled and studied. The data captured with the Selene PSS further extends research possibilities by enabling high resolution remote visualisation and supporting conservation through comparison with other diagnostic techniques.

Factum Foundation collaborated on the PhD thesis carried out by Ana Carrasco Huertas at the University of Granada, co-supervised by Víctor Medina (University of Granada) and Carlos Bayod Lucini (Factum Foundation). The research was defended on 30 January 2026 and focuses on the study, digitisation, and virtual reconstruction of three groups of decorative architectural surfaces from different contexts and periods: fragments of Roman cornices made in lime mortar from the archaeological site of Castulo (1st–2nd centuries AD); decorative reliefs carved in bone discovered in the ancient city of Isturgi (1st–3rd centuries AD); and a 14th-century façade of plasterwork and wood in the Islamic tradition, located within the Alhambra Monumental Complex. In all three cases, these decorative surfaces have been heavily affected by the passage of time, which makes them difficult to read, understand, and interpret.

On 29 January at the Museo Arqueológico Nacional in Madrid, Pedro Miró (one of the original team that started Factum 25 years ago), presented the work to record and make facsimiles of the Romanesque capitals from Santa María la Real that are now on display at Centro Expositivo ROM in Aguilar de Campoo. This work forms part of “Bosque Románico”, a broader cultural heritage initiative promoted by the Fundación Santa María la Real to recover, contextualise, and re-present the monastery’s lost sculptural legacy.

For the fourth consecutive year, Factum Foundation has been invited to teach a practical and theoretical module on digital preservation in the Master’s in Heritage Management of Universidad de Zaragoza. With a focus on a learning-by-doing approach, the intensive hands-on course introduced a group of graduate students with different backgrounds to the main techniques developed and applied by Factum Foundation to preservation projects. On 14-15 January, Carlos Bayod, Pedro Miró and Tiffani Sole worked with the students at the Palacio de la Aljafería to apply close-range photogrammetry in recording a selection of 11th-century capitals that had never been documented in 3D. The data, which will be provided to the Aljafería for its archives, will add to Factum’s ongoing research on medieval Spanish carved decoration, a work developed in active collaboration with various cultural institutions.