Memory and orality laboratories for the safeguarding and enhancement of intangible heritage

Pilot action organised in 5 analysis windows aimed at the experimental impulse of memory laboratories to recover, preserve, value and transmit the intangible heritage linked to mountain cultural landscapes. Knowledge, doings, activities, traditional trades are at critical risk of disappearance in mountain environments due to the strong impact of population ageing, the demographic crisis and the lack of generational renewal in mountain exploitation activities, as well as the loss of intergenerational transmission of all oral heritage that explains legends, collective memories, traditions, names of places, transit roads, folk songs; an intangible human heritage, but indispensable, to understand the cultural and heritage dimension of mountain landscapes and that is irrecoverable once the voices of the senior population are extinguished. The pilot action also focuses on a historical vacuum in relation to the intangible heritage of mountain environments, especially if we talk about pastoralism and transhumance: the invisibility of women in this heritage. The pilot addresses this problem in a clear way with the aim of recovering and claiming the orality, knowledge and feminine practices in the mountain environments of the consortium, which is also the way to dignify the activities of domestic cure and terea that have historically fallen to women and have been underestimated in the whole ethnographic and intangible heritage of agropastoralism and the exploitation of the mountain. Finally, the pilot action allows to define and test a joint methodology deployed through the laboratories that are conceived to be able to give them continuity beyond the project and be easily transferable. It highlights the work in favor of the transmissibility of orality and the testing of mechanisms to reproduce it within the community.

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