Digital meets Culture

five curated galleries from the WEAVE editorial team tell some stories of intangible heritage

Diada castellera de la festa major de la Mercè a Barcelona. Actuació de les colles convidades a la plaça de Sant Jaume. Els Castellers de Vilafranca carregant un 3 de 9 amb folre. S’observa l’enxaneta fent l’aleta.

img: Festa de la Mercè a Barcelona di Duran Fígols, Oriol – CRDI / Girona City Council – CC BY-NC-ND.

Disappearing trades and occupations

As our daily life and routines have changed a lot in past decades thanks to clever inventions and modernization, several jobs and trades that used to offer the same conveniences through less technologically advanced solutions are disappearing. With these gallery of workers with unique knowledge and skills, we celebrate the intangible heritage that is the art of the cobbler, the knocker up, the rag-and-bone-man, the peddler, lamplighter and more!

A whiff of memory: favorite smells

A faint hint of perfume, a sharp waft of mint, freshly mown grass or cake cooling from the oven: smells are powerful triggers of memory and emotion. Can you find your favorite in our gallery?

Never walk alone: processions

From Antiquitiy but particularly from the Middle Ages onwards, people worldwide have expressed belief, piety, societal cohesion and solidarity by organizing as collective bodies moving through public space. In so-called procession, participants often perform rituals, choreographies, songs and chants while wearing dedicated dress and carrying symbols, signs or banners.

Additionally, two more galleries were published by WEAVE Editorial Team in Europeana:

about the tradition of Castellers in Catalonia: Together we stand: human towers

and about various other intangible heritage practices: WEAVE intangible heritage.

This blog is part of WEAVE – Widen European Access to cultural communities Via Europeana: a project funded by the European Commission under the Connecting Europe Facilities (CEF) aimed at developing a framework to link the tangible and intangible heritage of cultural communities.

welcomed by colleagues of Maj Bel University, the team of partner Promoter explored the surprising cultural and tourism potential of an area that would deserve much more attention and promotion

Discovering INCULTUM pilot in Slovakia: mining treasures of Banska Bystrica

Promoter and UMB teams visiting Banska Stiavnica supported by the digital app – photo by Pietro Masi CC-BY-SA

In September 2022, INCULTUM partners Promoter and Matej Bel University met to discuss about the work ongoing in the Pilot 3 Mining Treasures of Central Slovakia.

Focus of INCULTUM action is to support territorial and tourist promotion in the region which has significant cultural and technical heritage related to its mining history. The Historic Town of Banská Štiavnica, and the Technical Monuments in its Vicinity (from 1993 enlisted at the UNESCO World Heritage List), are outstanding examples of an important mining settlement that has developed since the Middle Ages. The city of Banská Bystrica is the cultural and economic centre of Central Slovakia. The copper mining city acquired its present picturesque look in the Late Middle Ages when the affluent Fugger and Thurzo families founded the prosperous, largest and most modern early-capitalist company of that time. Depending mainly on the mines around Banská Bystrica, the company became the leading world producer of copper by the 16^thcentury.

[Show as slideshow]

Several other localities in the region were part of this important mining history while preserving cultural and technical heritage of international relevance. Despite the great potential of this heritage for tourism, its development is vastly underrated in the region, and due to significantly lacks in marketing and digital tools supporting promotion of this unique part of its history.

The Pilot coordinated by Prof. Alexandra Bitusikova, Head of University Centre for International Projects and full professor in social anthropology at Faculty of Arts, Department of Social Studies and Ethnology, is oriented towards the creation of an interactive digital map on mining treasures in Central Slovakia. The most important mining sites will be presented into one interactive platform and a digital map available as a software application. In the phase of its design, university students are acting as mystery shoppers to test the digital map and its applications.

the mining site in Spania Dolina – photo by Pietro Masi CC-BY-SA

Discover the INCULTUM Pilots: https://incultum.eu/pilots/

All photos courtesy of Promoter.

the important biannual gathering of experts about (digital) imagery and management of photographic heritage collections

WEAVE goes to Image and Research conference

img: Eiffel bridge in Girona, photo CRDI / Ajuntament de Girona, Public Domain.

Under coordination of WEAVE partners KU Leuven and Photoconsortium, a paper was submitted for the upcoming Image and Research conference in Girona (16-18 November 2022), where it was presented by Photoconsortium’s vicepresident Antonella Fresa.

The Image and Research Conference (Antoni Varés Conference) has been held in the city of Girona since 1990. This event brings together every two years experts and the public interested in debating, reflecting and teaching different aspects related to the management of photographic and audiovisual heritage.

The paper featuring WEAVE and its outcomes is entitled “Metadata generation for intangible heritage: the role of crowdsourcing and AI to address bias risk“, and it presents lessons learned from work on metadata enrichment in cultural heritage and archival collections, using both Artificial Intelligence as well as crowdsourcing in a complementary strategy.

Download Presentation (PDF, 2 Mb)

While AI approaches are unavoidable to be able to improve metadata at a sufficient scale, crowdsourcing through annotation tools proves crucial to validate the obtained results.

More importantly, involving stakeholders and representative organisations in this process is important as well as necessary to cope with contextual bias and misrepresentation, for which automated mappings cannot easily be implemented. To this regard, the WEAVE project demonstrates best practice approaches that were tested and validated during the project.

Metadata generation for intangible heritage: the role of crowdsourcing and AI to address bias risk

co-authored by Valentina Bachi (Photoconsortium), Rosa Cisneros (Coventry University), Antonella Fresa (Photoconsortium), Allison Kupietzky (The Israel Museum, Jerusalem), Alexandru Stan (IN2 Digital Innovations) and Frederik Truyen (KU Leuven).

In addition to this paper about metadata and communities representation in cultural heritage, a presentation of the major 3D digitization task performed by WEAVE partner CRDI was delivered by Marc Hernandez of La Tempesta, the specialized technology partner of CRDI, who explored challenges and solution for complex 3D digitization of daguerreotypes with photogrammetry techniques.

The importance of developing a new understanding on the value of cultural heritage

ILUCIDARE Policy recommendations to promote heritage as a source for innovation and international relations

ILUCIDARE, EU-funded H2020 project aimed at establishing an international network that promotes heritage as a resource for innovation and in international relations, has just published its policy recommendations resulting from the project’s activities.

Evidence gathered by ILUCIDARE during its activities shows how heritage resources are important drivers for innovation and international relations, stimulating a variety of impacts both locally and internationally.

Building on the ILUCIDARE learnings, the document includes proposals to better understand the value of heritage beyond its cultural value with respect to its contribution to (social) innovation, entrepreneurship and job creation, education or international cooperation and intends to provide recommendations on how policy should be framed to make the most of heritage to support innovation, international relations and contribute to a greener, more inclusive and sustainable future. More specifically, these policy recommendations aim:

To show the need to strengthen and improve heritage policy making to further unleash the potential of cultural heritage to contribute to innovation and international relations;
To help policy makers understand the value of heritage investment;
To guide future policy action with concrete measures addressing governance, legal and funding issues;
To empower heritage stakeholders to influence policy making and better develop heritage-led innovation and heritage-led international relations projects.

The recommendations can be downloaded at https://ilucidare.eu/resources/database/ilucidare-policy-recommendations

understanding context and challenges for innovatives approaches in tourism to achieve positive social, economic, cultural and environmental impacts.

INCULTUM Policy Brief on Sustainable Tourism

One of the research areas of INCULTUM project focuses on developing policy recommendations that supports innovative and participative approaches to a community-led and sustainable tourism development in rural or marginal territories.

The activity on policies overall is led by experts from Matej Bel University, with important tasks coordinated by cultural managers and researchers at Bibracte.

The first Policy Brief was released in September 2022.

This document formulates recommendations for the orientation of future research programmes in the field of cultural tourism, rural heritage management and sustainable development of peripheral territories. It develops a transdisciplinary approach, combining socio-economic analysis and drawing on the achievements of the literature on tourism development and territorial management. It endeavours to articulate the diversity of the
axes explored by the partners and the various aspects of the problem. This version 1 of the policy brief has been produced at the end of the first year of INCULTUM’s activity and the consortium members intend to publish a revised version at the end of the project in 2024.

Read the Policy Brief (PDF)

16 September 2022, Girona

UNCHARTED at WEAVE final conference

WEAVE – Widen European Access to cultural communities Via Europeana is a 2-years project funded by the CEF Programme of the EU.

Member of the UNCHARTED community since 2021, it supports Europeana about widen European access to intangible cultural heritage and the heritage of minority cultural communities.

Last 16 September its final conference “Weaving digital culture: tangible and intangible heritage, cultural communities and the digital transformation” took place in Girona to explore the connections between tangible and intangible heritage, cultural communities and the process of digital transformation of cultural heritage organisations.

Antonella Fresa, director at Promoter and technical coordinator of UNCHARTED, attended the event as speaker with the presentation “Cultural values, identities, participation and local communities” during which she presented the UNCHARTED project.

Conference details, full video of the event and presentations are available at https://weave-culture.eu/conference/

discover today the beautiful virtual exhibition published by WEAVE team in Europeana

The Renaissance of Romani Re-presentation

img. (cropped): Back To The Future! Safe European Home 1938, Damian Le Bas, Kai Dikhas Foundation / ERIAC, In Copyright – Educational Use Permitted.

This exhibition, jointly curated by WEAVE Editorial Team with invaluable contribution by guest author Dr Adrian R Marsh and an afterword by Imogen Bright Moon, follows a discovery path from misrepresentation to renaissance of Romani arts and heritage, also exploring the histories of Roma communities and opening a window to their contemporary artistic expressions.

View the exhibition on Europeana HERE >>>

Read the Europeana post about the Roma representation in the cultural heritage sector HERE >>>

'Strength, balance, courage and good judgement' is the motto of the human towers or 'castells' typical of Catalonia, Spain.

WEAVE blogpost: Castellers, Catalonia’s human towers

img: Festa de la Mercè a Barcelona di Duran Fígols, Oriol – CRDI / Girona City Council – CC BY-NC-ND.

Castells are human constructions, six to ten people high, that can occasionally be spotted in cities and town squares in Catalonia. Having originated at the end of the 18th century in the Camp de Tarragona area, they have spread all across the region – and beyond.

Read the blog published by the WEAVE project editorial team in Europeana to discover this extraordinary practice that serves as a prime example of intangible cultural heritage.
HERE

Also, you can learn more about this practice and its meaning in the Catalan community from the vivid voices of Castells’ teams in this documentary, realized by CRDI in the context of WEAVE project:

28-30 September 2022, hybrid conference

Europeana 2022: Making digital culture count

From 28 to 30 September the annual Europeana conference will take place in a hybrid format: online and on-site at the KB, National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague.

It will be a three-day event to learn, explore and deepen various aspects of digital cultural heritage:

Wednesday 28 September, Making digital culture count: perspectives and provocations on the data space for digital cultural heritage: to explore the data space in practice.
Thursday 29 September, Making digital culture count – stories, culture and society: how storytelling, cultural and digital heritage come together to connect institutions with the public and with trends and issues of today.
Friday 30 September, Making digital culture count – technology matters: how technology paves the way for digital inclusion and the preservation of cultural heritage.

In the afternoon there will be presentations, workshops and activities: the over 30 sessions of Europena 2022 have been co-created with cultural heritage professionals who responded to the call for proposals. There will be two hybrid sessions which participants can join both on-site and online, and online only talks on a diverse range of topics.

The full programme of Europeana 2022 is available at https://pro.europeana.eu/page/conference#

Pisa (Italy), 23 September - 10 October 2022

The 80s in 80 shots – photographic exhibition

On Friday 23 September at the Museo della Grafica of Palazzo Lanfranchi in Pisa, the exhibition “The 80s in 80 shots” will be inaugurated, and will be on display until 10 October 2022.

This is a collection of 20 photographic prints made by the artist and sinologist Andrea Cavazzuti, combined with 60 digitized photographs (from original diapositives) found in the albums of families emigrated from China to Italy in the 1980s.

From the concept developed by association EOE, the exhibition is organized under the patronage of the Municipality of Pisa and of the Confucius Institute, and supported by association Imago and ACSI.

Download the invitation (PDF)

Venerdì 23 Settembre nel Museo della Grafica di Palazzo Lanfranchi si inaugura la mostra “Gli anni ’80 in 80 scatti”, una raccolta di 20 stampe fotografiche realizzate dall’artista e sinologo Andrea Cavazzuti, oltre a 60 fotografie digitalizzate (diapositive) rintracciate negli album delle famiglie emigrate dalla Cina in Italia negli anni ’80.

Nata da un’idea dell’associazione EOE (EstOvestEst), la mostra è patrocinata dal Comune di Pisa e dall’Istituto Confucio di Pisa, partner principale di EOE, con il supporto anche di IMAGO e ACSI.

L’esposizione sarà aperta al pubblico da venerdì 23 settembre a lunedì 10 ottobre 2022, visitabile tutti i giorni dalle ore 10:00 alle ore 19:00 escluso il lunedì.

In occasione della mostra, venerdì 30 Settembre è previsto un dibattito per raccontare la Cina di quegli anni e il modo in cui iniziavano ad affacciarsi al contesto italiano le prime famiglie cinesi, il loro processo di integrazione e le prime relazioni. Oltre all’artista Andrea Cavazzuti, all’incontro parteciperanno Barbara Pasquale, documentarista e video editor; Carlo Laurenti, scrittore e traduttore; Zhi An, professore e scrittore collegato direttamente dalla Cina via streaming.

SULLA MOSTRA

La raffinata ricerca di Andrea Cavazzuti che si presenta con stampe in bianco e nero di fotografie realizzate in quegli anni, contrasta con le foto proposte in video, riprese dagli album di famiglia, foto a colori che mantengono il sapore delle stampe comuni che ognuno di noi conserva tra i propri ricordi, e costituiscono uno spunto di riflessione su un periodo della nostra storia recente che, se ben vista con sguardi molto diversi, sottolinea una lontananza che oggi appare quasi dimenticata. Così spiega il suo rapporto con la Cina il fotografo Andrea Cavazzuti in un’intervista di Olivo Barbieri “…allenato com’ero a cercare oltre gli stereotipi anche in patria, fotografavo una Cina non vista e, quel che è peggio, nemmeno immaginata, quindi invisibile. Le cose già viste soddisfano, consolano, hanno a che fare con la memoria, mentre il non visto è secco, scostante, refrattario, a volte antipatico. La Cina mi si presentava come uno straordinario bazar di oggetti, scene e comportamenti non omologati tra i nostri cliché culturali. Per me era irresistibile: gli oggetti in vista, la totale mancanza di privacy, le attività umane messe in scena su un palcoscenico sempre aperto, il paradiso del fotografo”. E conclude “Non è possibile immaginare cosa sarà la Cina domani senza considerare cosa sia stata fino a ieri. E’ l’ultima frontiera di espansione della civiltà globale per come l’abbiamo conosciuta fino ad oggi. È l’ultimo e definitivo confronto di civiltà. Dopo la Cina, saremo al bivio. Mi illudo e spero, con questa mia scelta di vita, di aver dato a me stesso e ai miei figli almeno la possibilità, una volta giunti al bivio, di saper leggere i segnali stradali”.

CENNI BIOGRAFICI SU ANDREA CAVAZZUTI

Andrea Cavazzuti (Milano, 1959) è artista, fotografo, video e film maker e sinologo. Laureato in lingua e letteratura cinese presso Ca’ Foscari di Venezia. Nei primi anni ottanta si reca in Cina a Nanchino nel 1981 e poi a Shanghai nel 1982 per studiare per due anni alla Fudan University, esperienza che stabilì il suo legame indissolubile con la Cina. Inizia a fotografare negli anni settanta. Negli anni novanta si dedica a video e film. Il suo lavoro tratta diversi aspetti dell’arte e della società. Ha realizzato e partecipato a numerose produzioni, sia televisive che cinematografiche, poi distribuite da RAI, ARTÈ, SRF, ABC e Sky TV, nonché proiettate in cinema e istituzioni culturali internazionali. Il suo lavoro è stato esposto in Musei quali, Triennale di Milano, Italia; Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, Cina; Museo Marco, Vigo, Spagna; Working People’s Cultural Palace, Pechino e Changjiang Museum, Taiyuan, Cina; MAXXI, Roma, Italia; Carnegie Hall, New York, Stati Uniti; Museo Ferroviario di Pietrarsa, Napoli, Italia.