Digital meets Culture

exploring creative practices and cultural values of the Roma community through the use of IN2's digital scrapbook tool

WEAVE Team member published chapter in Creative Activism Research, Pedagogy and Practice

text by Rosa Cisneros, C-DARE Coventry University.

This collection explores the growing global recognition of creativity and the arts as vital to social movements and change. Bringing together diverse perspectives from leading academics and practitioners who investigate how creative activism is deployed, taught, and critically analysed, it delineates the key parameters of this emerging field. Rosa Cisneros’ chapter Urban Villages: The Roma’s Digital Scrapbooks—Changing Narratives One Image at a Time, explores creative practices and cultural values of the Roma community through the use of IN2s digital scrapbook tool. Providing the Roma community with and access to advanced digital technologies which they would struggle to approach in other environments, was essential to the Urban Villages project. Allowing the Roma to write their stories and express their voices using the arts through producing films and a travelling exhibition and sharing the work widely and highlighting these positive stories, counternarratives were produced which begin to challenge the erroneous images that exist and are widely circulated.

Urban Village_ The Growing Project.mp4 from Rosamaria E. Kostic Cisneros on Vimeo.

More resources:

Digital Scrapbook: https://portal.culturemoves.eu/CMteam/urban-village-the-romas-allotment-project

Project Page: https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/research-directories/current-projects/2020/urban-village-the-romas-allotment-project/

Creative Activism Research, Pedagogy and Practice, Edited by Elspeth Tille.
Book Source: https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-8104-3

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

ISBN: 1-5275-8104-7
ISBN13: 978-1-5275-8104-3

in this hands-on activity, students worked on building galleries on Europeana and annotating digital cultural collections

WEAVE visits Coventry University MA History students

text by Marie-Louise Crawley, C-DARE Coventry University.

On Thursday 17th March 2022, students on Coventry University’s (UK) MA History ‘Cultural Heritage and Public History’ module, were delighted to meet team members from WEAVE and to learn more about the WEAVE project. Module leader and member of the COVUNI WEAVE team, Marie-Louise Crawley, introduced visiting guests and fellow WEAVE team members, Rosa Cisneros (COVUNI) and Sofie Taes (KU Leuven), to talk to the students about working in digital heritage with cultural communities.

Sofie began with an interactive talk, ‘Curating for Europeana: from quantitative approaches to qualitative and ethical considerations’, which was grounded in context of digital transformation and the current transition to a new era with diversity and inclusion, participation and co-creation at its core. Students worked on building galleries on Europeana and annotating collections using CrowdHeritage tool on a heritage collection highlighting dance as a cultural practice and aspect of intangible heritage. Rosa then followed with a talk, ‘From crowdsourcing and co-creation to citizen science: Civic Epistemologies’, using the Civic Epistemologies project (2014-2015) as a case study and thinking about its ‘roadmap’ for citizen researchers in digital heritage. We then moved on to a wider discussion about consulting ‘the crowd’ in WEAVE and how to design a LabDay.

The students very much enjoyed the seminar’s interactive elements, using QANDR (a discussion tool allowing for inclusive and participatory engagement) and becoming familiar with using Europeana, all within the context of lively debate on current issues of inclusion, participation and co-creation in the digital heritage sector. Thank you, Rosa and Sofie, for your fantastic intervention!

The art market accessible to all

Artistico, the Italian platform for modern and contemporary art

At the end of April 2022, Artistico, the Italian platform for modern and contemporary art, designed to buy, collect, exchange, resell fractions of artworks, will be online.

This project is the product of an idea by Margherita Giannotti, degree in Media and Communication at Goldsmiths University with a post-gradate master at King’s College in London, and intends to contribute to the dissemination of culture and art.

Artistico wants to foster art as a collective heritage, creating an art market accessible to all, transparent and democratic, and promoting works of real value, certified for authenticity and origin.

Each work becomes accessible to all through shared ownership and entrustment in custody to public or private institutions, museums, art galleries, foundations, entities that ensure its promotion and visibility by enhancing its economic and cultural aspects.

The selection of works, by established and emerging artists, is carried out by Artistico through a team of experts from the contemporary art sector and the market.

Here is the direct link to the platform which will be accessible at the end of April 2022.

More detailed information is available here.

The NEMO collection of activities and support initiatives organized by museums

European museums support Ukrainian colleagues and citizens

Since the onset of the war in Ukraine, Museums across Europe have implemented different support actions to help their Ukrainian museum colleagues and citizens.

The initiatives are relating to: storage and housing, job offers, donations, education and exhibitions as well as statements issued by European museum organisations.

The Network of European Museum Organizations (NEMO) is monitoring and collecting these support initiatives and created a dedicated web page on the NEMO platform, in order to give them greater visibility and to ensure that knowledge of these activities reaches people affected, especially Ukrainian museums and museum professionals.

The page is progressively updated with new solidarity initiatives.

NEMO’s invitation is both to contribute an offer to the web page and to share its webpage so that these initiatives can reach as many interested people and institutions as possible.

Here is the link to the NEMO web page which collects the support actions organized by museums for Ukraine.

To contribute an offer to the NEMO’s webpage, send your initiative (including location and description in English) to weber@ne-mo.org

Association for the Promotion of Music and Dance in Portugal

Meet WEAVE Team: PédeXumbo

PédeXumbo was born in 1998 to provide a legal framework for the Andanças Festival, created in 1996 by a group of Portuguese young people. The Association’s work can be divided into two stages: before and after 2007. Until 2007, it had an unstoppable growth, showing new artistic forms based on the practice of European dances and dances, hitherto unknown in Portugal. At the same time, it was promoting the professionalization of artists and increasing the offer in the area of traditional dance in Portugal. The Association itself became professional, expanding its activities to the whole country, multiplying festivals, training and leisure activities. In Évora, where it has its headquarters, it was possible to develop more in-depth work in the pedagogical aspect. To understand the scope of the association, it is necessary to talk about dances from the world, but keeping a distance with the Revivalism that happened in other European countries: in Portugal, the integration, especially with the Lusophone cultures, is very strong, and PédeXumbo safeguarded this wealth.

image courtesy of PédeXumbo

From 2007, PédeXumbo started a phase of loyalty of its public, but also of attracting new audiences, with the edition of DVDs and books on traditional dance and the programming of musical projects in national premiere. But it was mainly with the new creations that the association innovated. It used festival programming to propose new artistic productions, working with the traditional Portuguese choreographic repertoire, while trying to integrate the practice of the ball in new cultural spaces and cross traditional dances with other arts. Instead of creating a new dance company, it invested in the performing arts, including the public in the midst of creation and thus maintaining the most important aspect of the dance: the participation of all. Also the concern to register the Portuguese choreographic practices, which has been with PédeXumbo since its beginning, has been translated in a different way: initially based on the direct learning of traditional dances, PédeXumbo started to invest financially in records that could feed the new productions. This investment, in turn, led the association to think of ways to monetize and enhance this Intangible Cultural Heritage on the Internet, increasing its diffusion.

As a result, A Dança Portuguesa a gostar Dela Própria is a dissemination and research project that is led by PédeXumbo and included in WEAVE.

The team consists of Marta Guerreiro, who has a degree in Sociocultural Animation and in recent years has been linked to Traditional Dance. He attended several trainings and workshops, always in the area of Traditional Dance, having taken the Training of Dance Trainers, with the teacher / dancer Mercedes Prieto. She has a postgraduate degree in Dance in Educational Contexts from the Faculty of Human Motricity with the coordination of Professors Elisabete Monteiro and Margarida Moura. Did the training O Corpo que Pensa, guided by the therapist and dancer Pia Kraemer M.A. She is currently coordinator at Associação PédeXumbo where she has created and developed research, editing and programming projects in the field of traditional dance.

Their Role in the WEAVE project has included providing traditional Portuguese dance content and also organising several LabDays. Information on those LabDays can be found on the project’s website and YouTube channel.

More info:

www.pedexumbo.com

http://adancaportuguesaagostardelapropria.pedexumbo.com/

18 April 2022

ICOMOS International Day for Monuments and Sites 2022

18 April was established as the International Day for Monuments and Sites by ICOMOS, it was the 1982, and later UNESCO adopted it during its 22nd General Conference.

Since then, each year ICOMOS proposes a theme for activities to be organized by its members, ICOMOS National and International Scientific Committees, Working Groups and partners, and anyone who wants to join in marking the Day.

The theme to explore for the 2022, building on last year’s “Complex Pasts: Diverse Futures” , is : Heritage and Climate through open, constructive and intergenerational dialogues.

This International Day is meant to offer the opportunity to showcase strategies to promote the full potential of heritage conservation research and practice, to deliver climate-resilient pathways to strengthen sustainable development.

The initiative is part of the ICOMOS Triennial Scientific Plan 2021-2024 and also supports the 2020 ICOMOS’ resolution on People-Centred Approaches to Cultural Heritage.

The organized events will have to cover the following topics:

Disaster Risk (Climate-Induced, Human-Induced)
Vernacular Heritage
Heritage in Conflict
Heritage & Democracy
Indigenous Heritage
Sacred-space or Sacred Heritage.

To learn more about the ICOMOS International Day for Monuments and Sites 2022 and how to participate: https://www.icomos.org/en/focus/18-april-international-day-for-monuments-and-sites/104836-18-april-2022-heritage-and-climate

The UNCHARTED community is enriched by a new member

New collaboration with Kulturtanken – Arts for Young Audiences Norway

UNCHARTED project has just established a collaboration with Kulturtanken – Arts for Young Audiences Norway, the Ministry of Culture agency responsible for ‘The Cultural Schoolbag‘, the crux of the government’s policy for bringing culture and art to children and young people.

Kulturtanken works closely with the Ministry of Education and Research and provides services to the central government authorities involved in the culture and education sectors, in order to strengthen children and young people’s participation in art and culture and to promote collaboration, research, and innovation.

Kulturtanken has joined the UNCHARTED community with the aim to collaborate in the mutual support of communication and dissemination activities as well as to exchange knowledge for supporting understanding, capturing and fostering the societal value of culture and the impact of cultural policies in Europe.

More detailed information on Kulturtanken are available on:
Showcase of Kulturtanken on UNCHARTED website
Kulturtanken website

INCULTUM was invited to take part in a discussion about synergies and future collaboration with sister projects funded by EU.

Coordination meeting among projects on sustainable cultural tourism

Initiated by IMPACTOUR project coordinator prof. João Martins from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the NOVA School of Science and Technology in Lisbon, a very productive and friendly meeting took place on 11th March between the representatives of a number of projects all involved with sustainable tourism.

The projects invited in the meeting hosted by IMPACTOUR were INCULTUM, SPOT, TEXTOUR, BE.CULTOUR, SMARTCULTOUR and RURITAGE. These projects are in different stages of progress (some close to the end, others in the middle, others at the beginning) and it is therefore important to establish collaboration and synergies on the common strands of work and the common challenges.

img. Human Vectors by Vecteezy

The scope of the call was to discuss about two main themes:

– the organization of a joint workshop to address the topic of post-project life of web portals. All the EU-funded projects normally produce a lot of documents and resources that are stored and kept after the end of the project term in the project’s website. This is already a way to maintan project’s outcomes which are not dispersed after the project is concluded, but the project’s activity is nevertheless “frozen” together with its documents. This is a very important issue to debate and find cleaver solutions o solve it, in the light of a real sustainability of the project’s outcomes. The workshop is expected to take place in July 2022, possibly in hybrid form.

– the realization of a policy roundtable under the aegis of the European Commission, to share views and seek for sinergies across the projects’ strands of policy development in the same area of sustainable cultural tourism. This event is expected to take place in Brussels in September 2022.

About the sister project:

IMPACTOUR https://www.impactour.eu/
SPOT http://www.spotprojecth2020.eu/
TEXTOUR https://textour-project.eu/about/
BE.CULTOUR https://becultour.eu/
SMARTCULTOUR http://www.smartcultour.eu/
RURITAGE https://www.ruritage.eu/

the congress, whose main theme is water, takes place at the University of Algarve, in May 2022

INCULTUM Pilot in Portugal co-organizes the 10th Congress on Rural Studies

How does water, waters – groundwater, rainwater, river, marine – condition or conditioned agriculture and rural society? What strategies and what processes of cooperation or conflict have occurred in the access and use of water? What economic uses have been given over time? How have water resources been or can be used from a sustainability, tourism and biodiversity perspective? And, in the context of climate change, how to manage this resource? How can we learn from the past valuable lessons for the future?

These are some of the starting questions for the organization of the IX Congress of Rural Studies and X RePort Rural Meeting, organized by SPER – Portuguese Society of Rural Studies, and by Rural RePort – Rural History Network.

The event is hosted and co-organized by the Faculty of Sciences and Technology and by the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences of the University of Algarve, with participation of the Team of INCULTUM Pilot focused on research and recovery of the Campina de Faro area; in particular Pilot coordinator prof. Desidério Batista is member of the Organizing Committee and the Scientific Committee of the Congress.

The Congress will take place at the University of Algarve from the 26th to the 28th of May and prof. José Maria Civantos, coordinator of the INCULTUM Project, will be one of the Keynote speakers.

About the congress: https://sper.pt/cer2022/

Learn more about INCULTUM Pilot 2 Campina de Faro

SPOT: social and innovative platform on cultural tourism and its potential towards deepening Europeanisation

INCULTUM establishes collaboration with H2020 SPOT project

INCULTUM and SPOT projects are both focused on the research and study of problems related to cultural tourism, seeking for stakeholders’ and communities’ involvement and developing information to help policy and decision-making.

The EU-funded SPOT project aims to develop a new approach to understanding and addressing cultural tourism and to promote the development of disadvantaged areas. Specifically, it will identify different layers of data and capitalise on existing practice. It will explore emerging forms of cultural tourism, identifying opportunities and developing strategies to allow local people to gain benefit from their precious cultural assets. SPOT will engage academics and stakeholders in the development of policy proposals and generalise lessons learnt through an Innovation Tool to assist policymakers and practitioners.

Read more on SPOT website: http://www.spotprojecth2020.eu/