The research
will focus on three areas: stories from the city of Florence, stories from the Tuscany coutryside – Fiesole area – and stories form the ex-asylum of San Salvi, where the project partner Chille de la Balanza is based and which acts as a middle point between the urban and the rural dimension.
For the delivery of the action CBD will work in cooperation with the Associated partner Associazione Gruppo Le Falene – for Florence – and with anthropologists from the University of Florence – for the Tuscany countryside.
The experience of the European Project Seeing Stories (www.culturefund.eu/projects/seeing-stories-recovering-landscape-narrative-in-urban-and-rural-europe) is delivering significant outcomes both for research in humanities and for a wider perspective on the relationships between memory, local worlds, artistic expressions and sustainability.
In the framework of cultural policies of the European Union, these outcomes are appropriate to think about and plan our future.
Starting from two life stories collected on an ethnographical fieldwork and then adapted for storytelling and theatre stage, a number of dialogues and meetings have taken place between dwellers and storytellers, researchers and artists, local administration, civil society organisations and people. The experience done shows a number of significant linkages.
The Workshop aims at exploring linkages between:
Memory, oral history, narratives and creativity;
Scientific research, heritage process and artistic expressions;
Cultural diversity, communication and training;
Local worlds, tourism, and sustainable development.
The work of researchers is a contribution to the emergence of local knowledge and experience.
In this sense, the ethnographic research is a contribution of the meeting, listening and recognition of voices in the landscape.
The art of storytelling and entertaining is another key contribution to give value to local memories and narratives as extraordinary sources of knowledge and experience. The arts of storytelling are also opportunities to acknowledge and share Intangible Cultural Heritage of any territories. In this sense, they are tools to build a fair and sustainable future.
How to implement processes fostering the understanding and the development of strategic resources (knowledge, practices, traditions, etc.) in order to set up good governance for our territories?
How can narrative produce a living and dynamic vision of the cultural heritage still dominated by the cult of the object, the monument and the museum as a place of exhibition?
What kind of experiences allows the narrators to become actors in a territory and players of its future?
We invited researchers, students, members of cultural organisations and people involved in training programmes to discuss all the mentioned strategic linkages.
Valentina Lapiccirella Zingari, anthropologist, Simbdea (Italian Society for Museum and Heritage Anthropology)
