MemorySharing is a project which aims to create a new way for increasing the value of a community’s memories and private documents, by combining web technologies, scientific accuracy and creative approach in the multimedia sharing/telling of contents. Main objective is to connect generations, comparing and transferring knowledge, dynamically and funnily strengthening the shared memory, actively engaging aged and young people. Basically, MemorySharing wants to match with History starting from documents and individual and family testimonies, believing that such micro-historical, fragmented and scattered material can constitute (once suitably reconstructed as a puzzle) an unconventional collective heritage, important for retracing the history of communities, cities and nations. The main phases of the project are four:

1)      Citizenry mobilisation – through web, institutions, local media, events, meetings: people are invited to share their photos, letters, diaries, super8s and heirlooms. Their material is an important piece of the collective history, to be digitised and used as source of events and tales;

2)      Material collection – through web portals, social networks and physical spaces (libraries, schools, associations and local newspapers. The material is collected, digitised and showed via itinerant video-boxes;

3)      Material sharing – the material is catalogued and inserted in open web networks (Historypin, Xdams, Europeana…), free and dynamic;

4)      Storytelling, exhibitions, events – the collected material is given a narrative and captivating form: documentary-films, multiscreen films, itinerant films, multimedia tours, multimedia exhibitions, photography contests, readings and theatre performances, web-docs (non-linear interactive telling), e-books, paper volumes.

MemorySharing is a project by the cultural association Acquario della Memoria (Aquarium of Memory), whose essential objective is to experiment effective and innovative ways of transmitting the value of past’s memories, in particular to the young generations. According to such view, Acquario della Memoria believes audio-visual and interactive technologies can contribute to keep up, in a modern and engaging way, the ancient oral methods of transferring knowledge and cultural identity. Documents and testimonies collection, creation of an open and dynamic multimedia archive, realisation of educational workshops, films, documentaries, video-installations, exhibitions and interactive museums are the basic activities of the association.

Download MemorySharing’s abstract

Download the article A year of MemorySharing by Lorenzo Garzella, president of Acquario della Memoria (published on a Italian newspaper, Italian language)

For more information visit MemorySharing’s web-page  and Acquario della Memoria’s website