Restoration used to mean scaffolding. In the Europe of the 2020s it can also mean a jet of atomic oxygen borrowed from spacecraft engineering, a robotic arm feeling its way across a seabed at 120 metres, or a virtual reconstruction of a transit camp that no longer stands. Under Horizon Europe and its national counterparts, the European Union is funding a generation of research projects that treat heritage not as a finished inventory but as a working laboratory. Eight of them, from Aarhus to Athens, show how wide that laboratory has become.
MOXY: the atom that erodes spacecraft, tamed to clean without touching
In low Earth orbit, single atoms of oxygen strip the surface off whatever a spacecraft exposes to them. NASA studied the phenomenon as a threat. Down at ground level the same atom is almost impossible to hold on to: at atmospheric pressure it is so reactive that it survives for an instant. MOXY (Horizon Europe, grant 101061336, 2022–2026), led from Ghent University, took the atom, left the violence behind, and found a way to produce it in quantity down here. Its cold-plasma system generates an extremely high flux of ground-state atomic oxygen, O(³P), carrying a translational energy of about 0.03 eV against 4–5 eV in orbit — chemically just as hungry, physically almost inert. That gap is the invention: it buys chemical selectivity while suppressing the indiscriminate, impact-driven erosion that makes the orbital version destructive, and it works on a surface with no contact, no liquid and no solvent. A patent application covering the platform has been filed.
What it reaches is wider than cleaning, and wider than paintings: the target is cultural heritage surfaces of almost any kind, particularly the ones where conventional conservation has little to offer. Soot and smoke deposits, fatty-acid exudates, vandalism residues, silver tarnish, the reversal of darkened lead white. Depending on the material chemistry and the dose, the same neutral atom can lift a contaminant, convert a degradation product, reconfigure a mineral phase or functionalise a surface, while change to the heritage material underneath stays below conservation-relevant thresholds. The clearest demonstration is carbon against carbon. Soot is defect-rich and chemically labile, ordered graphitic carbon is refractory and far less reactive, and the same treatment consumes one while barely touching the other — which is what opens a route to lifting fire-related soot off carbon-based media, graphite drawings included.
Beyond the laboratory, MOXY sits with GoGreen and GREENArt in the European Green Cluster for Science and Conservation Research. The cluster works on policy as well as chemistry: it met at KIK-IRPA in Brussels on 26 February 2026 for a strategic meeting whose programme included a panel discussion on policy measures for green conservation at EU level, and in July 2026 its members published a peer-reviewed definition of what the word means — Defining Green in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage, in Studies in Conservation — setting out green conservation as «a sustainable approach that involves holistic, balanced decision-making to reduce health, climate and environmental hazards while adhering to professional ethics».
THETIDA: listening to the sea before it takes the wreck
Coordinated by the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems in Athens, THETIDA (Horizon Europe, grant 101095253, 2023–2026) works on the heritage that climate change reaches first: the coastal and the submerged. Its method is preventive — continuous monitoring, risk preparedness and early warning rather than salvage after the storm. The pilot sites read like a war-and-trade history of European waters: an Ottoman shipwreck in Famagusta Bay, a US Army PB4Y-1 Liberator bomber off Praia de Faro in Portugal, a sunken submarine chaser near La Spezia.
MEMORISE: keeping the camps legible when the witnesses are gone
Led by the University of Southern Denmark, MEMORISE (Horizon Europe, grant 101061016) confronts a deadline no conservation technique can move: the last survivors of Nazi persecution are leaving us. The project digitises and reworks the heritage of that persecution for the generations that will never hear it first-hand — 3D reconstructions of sites such as Camp Westerbork, Bergen-Belsen, Ferramonti and the Bernburg euthanasia centre, prisoner artwork, diaries and testimonies, delivered through virtual reality and tablet-based exhibition tools built with educators and heritage professionals.
U-archaeoRoV: a tactile robot for the underwater dig
Excavating at depth is slow, dangerous and short: a diver’s working window at 120 metres is measured in minutes. U-archaeoRoV, a Greek project coordinated by Dr. Dimitrios Tzovaras at CERTH and funded through the national EPAnEK programme (2021–2023), built a semi-autonomous remotely operated vehicle designed for archaeologists rather than oil rigs: three-jointed manipulator arms whose pressure the operator can feel, the capacity to lift finds of up to ten kilograms, and stereoscopic cameras that turn a survey pass into the raw material for photogrammetric 3D models of the site.
GAMEHEARTS: what the videogame industry owes the museum, and vice versa
GAMEHEARTS (Horizon Europe, grant 101132543) starts from an observation most cultural policy still resists: videogames are Europe’s largest cultural industry, and they trade constantly in heritage — its buildings, its wars, its music. Led by the University of Vienna with the University of Salford, the consortium pairs academics with the Imperial War Museums, the London Symphony Orchestra and City Football Group to map the economic, social and cultural value of the European videogame ecosystem, and to ask how games and traditional institutions can collaborate rather than merely borrow from each other.
CRAFT-IT4SD: the workshop tradition as green infrastructure
CRAFT-IT4SD treats traditional craft knowledge — the techniques, skills and materials Europe has accumulated over centuries — as a resource for the green transition, not a museum piece. The EU-funded project runs four pilot clusters across Denmark, Spain, Finland and Romania, pairing craftspeople with digital technologies in entrepreneurial labs and learning communities, with sustainable fashion and craft design as the first testing grounds.
EXPECT_Art: cultural literacy taught through the making of art
What does it take to read a culture — your own, or someone else’s? EXPECT_Art (EU grant 101132662) investigates how arts education builds critical cultural literacy, with field research in twelve schools and communities across Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and Spain. The project’s instrument is the “art exploratorium”: children, teachers and citizens working as co-researchers through art-making itself, from the classroom to local Cultural Literacy Hubs.
STEAMbrace: putting the A back where the engineers can see it
Led by the Zaragoza publishing house Edelvives, STEAMbrace (Horizon Europe grant 101132652, €2.9 million) builds gender-responsive STEAM learning for students aged 11 to 18 — and insists that the A in STEAM carries real weight: expression, storytelling, design and culture as part of scientific learning, not decoration around it. The project mobilises universities, museums, schools, libraries and families across Europe, with its headquarters in Zaragoza.
Why this matters beyond the lab
Taken together, these projects redraw the job description of heritage. It is monitored by sensors before it is threatened, cleaned by physics instead of chemistry, excavated by machines that feel, translated into games and classrooms, and — where the physical trace has gone — rebuilt in software so that memory has somewhere to live. Cultural Heritage Online follows this work because the places in our archive are its raw material: every wreck, workshop and camp these teams study is somebody’s local heritage first. We will return to the individual projects as their results reach the public.
Sources
- MOXY project — official site (grant 101061336)
- THETIDA — ICCS and CORDIS 101095253
- MEMORISE — official site (grant 101061016)
- U-archaeoRoV — official site (EPAnEK 2014–2020)
- GAMEHEARTS — University of Vienna and CORDIS 101132543
- CRAFT-IT4SD — official site
- EXPECT_Art — official site (grant 101132662)
- STEAMbrace and CORDIS 101132652
Hero image: archaeological diver with a recovered ship’s bell, by Brendan Burke, Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. Editorial text © Cultural Heritage Online, 2026.
Correction, 17 September 2026. An earlier version of this article stated that the European Green Cluster’s «2026 white paper asks the Union to count cultural heritage among its critical entities», and that the cluster had fed green conservation into the Critical Entities Resilience framework. We have been unable to verify either claim: no such white paper by the GoGreen, MOXY and GREENArt cluster could be found. A white paper on safeguarding cultural heritage in a changing climate does exist, published on Zenodo in December 2025, but it is the work of a different group of projects and does not make that request. The passage has been replaced with the cluster activity we could verify: its strategic meeting in Brussels in February 2026 and its peer-reviewed definition of green conservation published in July 2026.