Digital meets Culture

fieldwork continues to restore and valorize rural areas in the Altiplano de Granada

INCULTUM Pilot: Annual cleaning of the Acequia del Barranco de Poqueira

text and images courtesy of Elena Correa Jiménez (University of Granada).

On the 2nd and 3rd of April INCULTUM Pilot 1 Atiplano de Granada organized and carried out the annual cleaning of the Acequia del Barranco de Poqueira. There was the participation of about 70 people and members of the Comunidad de Regantes de la Acequia Nueva del Poqueira. The participants learned about the traditional techniques used to maintain and manage these historic irrigation systems in the Alpujarra region.
On Sunday everybody enjoyed a nice meal provided by the community.

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The activity was organised by the Biocultural Archaeology Laboratory (MEMOLab), coordinated by Professor Dr. José María Martín Civantos, from the Department of Medieval History and CCTTHH of the University of Granada.

Learn more about INCULTUM Pilot 1 – Altiplano de Granada

title of the presentation was 'INCULTUM Project: sustainable cultural tourism based on historical irrigation systems in the Altiplano of Granada'

Presenting INCULTUM in international congress Habitat Excavado

image courtesy of Elena Correa Jiménez.

The Geopark of Granada hosted the Congress «Excavated Habitat and Cultural Landscape: International Colloquium Culture of Deserts», which took place in March 2022, with the organization of the University of Granada and the associations of Guadix, Baza, Huéscar and Marquesado del Zenete.

In the context of such an international gathering, Elena Correa Jiménez for the project coordinator University of Granada presented the paper “INCULTUM Project: sustainable cultural tourism based on historical irrigation systems in the Altiplano of Granada“.

Programme (PDF)

Website: https://habitatexcavado.com/

A new museum exhibition opened in the city of Përmet, Pilot area of the Upper Vjosa valley, Albania.

Unveiling a new archaeological collection previously unavailable to the public

text and images by Egla Serjani, CeRPHAAL

During end of March and early April, CeRPHAAL team was involved in preparing a museum exhibit of archaeological artefacts found within the territory of the Upper Vjosa valley, Albania. This activity was supported by the Municipality of Përmet, and the display panels were arranged in the environments of the recently opened museum of the city. The collection was previously unavailable to the public, therefore prior to the display, many of the artefacts went through a conservation and restauration process.

Most of the displayed items derive mainly from a collection of material found during the archaeological excavations carried out during the 1970-1980 in the area, including also chance finds from various part of the Pilot territory. The display collection comprises stone tools, pottery vessels, jewelry objects, decorative reliefs, and construction materials, which date from Prehistory to the Late Medieval period.

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Each object was labeled both in Albanian and English, describing the typology of the object, dating, and its place of origin. In addition, two text panels about the Tumulus of Piskova and the history of the city of Përmet were also prepared and added to the display room.

This activity in the Pilot aims at the preservation, restauration and promotion of material cultural heritage of the area. Also, it provides an additional alternative for the tourist to absorb and engage into the local archaeology and history of the Upper Vjosa valley.

Discover more about INCULTUM Pilot 8: https://incultum.eu/pilots/8-vjosa-the-shared-river/

Open call for artists, deadline 15th June 2022; Festival to take place in November-December 2022

International Festival Of Art, Theatre And New Technologies “The Wonders Of Possible” 2022

Between November and December 2022, Kyber Theatre organises in Cagliari (Italy) the 9th Edition of the International Theatre, Art and New Technologies Festival called “The Wonders of Possible” – Le Meraviglie Del Possibile, LMDP.

LMDP Festival is the first of this kind in the whole Italy. Its aim is to promote the interrelation between artistic and technological languages.

Kyber Teatro – spin off of L’ Aquilone di Viviana (theatre and new technologies company, LMDP Festival organizer), addresses to Italian and International artists, also emerging companies and/or under 35 artists, an Open Call to submit their projects about “Interaction between arts and technology”.

Who can attend

The participation is open to:

rtists and Companies of every nationality
emerging companies and under 35 artists
not emerging companies and artists of every age
to who works individually or in a group of maximum 4

Eligible projects

Theatre and new technologies plays
Art and new technologies performances

Application Deadline the 15th June 2022.

Website: https://www.kyberteatro.it/en/festival/

The theme of LMDP Festival is the interrelation between theatre, arts and new technologies.

The application must contain:

Artist’s CV;
Detailed description of the project (in PDF);
Technical rider;
Selection of max 5 photos;
Link audio / video material (Vimeo or Youtube).

Application materials must be sent by the 15th June 2022, to the mail: info@kyberteatro.it

The result is going to be notified only to selected projects by the 15th of July 2022.

Economic conditions:

The winners of the Open Call will have guaranteed the full coverage of the costs for mobility (flight travels, board and accommodation in Cagliari) and an “attendance fee” for the presentation of their performance for 2 evenings. If possible, we will cover also any material required for the presentation of the performance / show / play (it will be subject to agreements with our technical director).

Publication:

Applying for the call, the artists must provide a short biography and an abstract of the project and they agree that the material related to the project could be published on the Festival website and/or presented to the press for promotional purposes.

Archiving process:

Artists authorise Kyber Teatro – L’aquilone di Viviana to present their work, to store the material and make it accessible through the Festival’s website. All rights to the artwork and images will remain to the artist. The Organization is also entitled to document the event in all its phases through audio recordings, video or images.

COVUNI is responsible of involving Cultural Communities with Europeana and of capacity building activities across disciplines

Meet WEAVE Team: Coventry University

Coventry University has roots reaching back as far as 1843. Today it is a forward looking modern University, a provider of high quality education with a focus on quality research. We are the number 1 Modern UK University (2014 and 2015), hold worthy positions in the influential Guardian (27th), Times and Sunday Times (45th) University Guides and are ranked in the well-respected QS World University rankings. The University has a reputation for excellent teaching and research, business engagement, innovation and entrepreneurship, and employs 3,000 staff, with 24,000 students. The University offers excellent teaching and state-of-the-art facilities and equipment through programmes that are flexible and taught by leading experts across four faculties in the city of Coventry. Faculties include Faculty of Business and Law, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Faculty of Environment, Engineering and Computing and The Faculty of Health and Life Sciences. Secondary campuses in London and Scarborough offer a range of specialised courses and the chance to study at a range of levels, designed in ways to suit learners’ lifestyles.

Coventry University is well known for being ambitious and innovative, making a significant contribution to work on important global and societal challenges. Coventry’s new £100M research strategy, ‘Excellence with Impact’, builds on this trend and will transform the way we conduct research by applying fresh and original approaches. The Centre for Dance Research is one of the University’s leading Research Centres. It is home to 19 international researchers and 30 PhD candidates and focuses on a range of research strands with dance and body-based practices at the core. Themes include dance and digital technologies, cultural heritage, inclusive practices, performance and choreography, dance philosophy, politics and dance and law.

Within the WEAVE project the team is leading on Activity 1 Involving Cultural Communities with Europeana and capacity building Activities, and coordinating the LabDay Series, contributing to scholarly articles and engaging stakeholders from across disciplines. C-DaRE is also a content provider and offering dance and cultural heritage items for publication in Europeana.

The WEAVE team is comprised of Prof. Sarah Whatley, Marie-Louise Crawley and Rosa Cisneros.

Prof. Sarah Whatley is Professor of Dance and Director of the Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University. Her research focuses on dance and new technologies, intangible cultural heritage, dance analysis and documentation, somatic dance practice and pedagogy, and inclusive dance. She has published widely on these themes and the AHRC, EU, and the Leverhulme and Wellcome Trusts fund her current projects. Those projects include coordinating EuropeanaSpace, exploring the creative reuse of digital cultural content. She is also a partner on a H2020 project, WhoLoDancE, exploring smart learning environments for dancers. One of her current AHRC-funded projects has involved creating an online toolkit for the professional dance sector, built on a MOOC model, supporting dance artists and arts organisations building knowledge about policies and practices for inclusion and diversity. She is founding editor of the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices and sits on the editorial boards of several other Journals.

Dr. Rosamaria Kostic Cisneros is an artist-researcher and is involved in various EU initiatives which aim to make education accessible to vulnerable groups and ethnic minorities and sits on various Boards: Roma Coventry Project (UK), Drom Kotar Mestipen Roma Women’s Association (Spain) and the Early Dance Circle (UK). She, herself is Roma and is also an independent artist, dancer, curator and teacher who has organized various festivals and exhibitions. Her dance films have screened in the UK, US, Colombia, Mexico and Germany and her latest documentary won best documentary from the UK in 2016. Rosamaria also collaborates closely with the University of Barcelona’s Centre for Research on Theories and Practices for Overcoming Inequalities (CREA) and completed her PhD in Sociology and has a close relationship with various artists, companies and networks and has been responsible for transferring the LabDay underpinned by the sociological Communicative Methodology principle. Her understanding of methods introduced the LabDay idea to the CEF EU-Funded CultureMoves Project.

Dr. Marie-Louise Crawley is an artist researcher and Assistant Professor in Dance and Cultural Engagement at the Centre for Dance Research. Her research interests include dance and museums/institutional cultural heritage and areas of intersection between Classics and Dance Studies, such as ancient dance and the performance of epic. Marie-Louise worked closely with Rosa on the development of the LabDay methodology during CultureMoves and is pleased to be developing this methodology further with the team as part of WEAVE.

The innovative tool to encourage a more active role of civil society in the cultural heritage management

The “Your Faro Way” game

The Council of Europe Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (Faro Convention) promotes a wider understanding of heritage and underlines its relevance relate to human rights and democracy.
It expands the vision on heritage by presenting it both as a resource for human development, the enhancement of cultural diversity and the promotion of intercultural dialogue, and as part of an economic development model based on the principles of sustainable use of resources.

One of the outcomes in the framework of the Council of Europe-European Union Joint project “The Faro Way: enhanced participation in cultural heritage” is the role-playing game “Your Faro Way”.

The main objectives of “Your Faro Way” are to facilitate the exchange of views and promote a more active role of civil society in the management of cultural heritage as well as to create a better understanding of the principles of the Faro Convention.

Players have the opportunity to experience concrete examples and gain practical knowledge on how to implement heritage projects. In the game they have the opportunity to take on the roles of different heritage stakeholders and develop heritage projects.

An innovative way to promote the value of cultural heritage for society and to actively involve different stakeholders.

“Your Faro Way” game is available at https://yourfaroway.com/.

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