Storytelling & Interpretation 

Placed in tandem, Storytelling and Interpretation play an important part in changing the way we approach, experience, and communicate cultural heritage. Rather than factual details, Storytelling and Interpretation focuses on people, past, and sense of place, as such it is about unveiling the human story behind our heritage.

Storytelling and Interpretation can include: individual and national histories preserved and narrated as stories, narratives based solidly on well-researched facts, local knowledge and gossip, fairy tales, myths, legends, word of mouth, which all in all, through a variety of media reveal perspectives that intend to entertain, educate, preserve and enrich our shared culture.

Digitization and digital preservation

With a worldwide internet penetration rate of 59% and growing, and a domestic rate of over 95%, digitization has taken a crucial role in the accessibility of information. Furthermore, under the current global pandemic, the drastically decreased access in cultural resources (over 90% of museums around the globe have been temporarily closed) has opened a new level of necessity towards digitization and digital preservation.

Digitisation and online accessibility lend the collections of museums, libraries and archives much greater visibility. This does not only attract new visitors, tourists and researchers, but also business and regional economies. With the recent trend of increasing of online activities from museums, the opportunity to appeal to larger audiences through digitization and digital preservation has reached a historical high point.

Dark Heritage 

Most contemporary societies have their scars of history resulting from involvement of war, civil unrest or systematic social oppression steering ethnic hostilities and racial discrimination. These painful periods in history and the legacy they carry in today’s society are represented through a different range of places, such as: massacre sites, places related to prisoners of war and civil or political prisons, memorials and commemoration sites. These sites may bring pain and/or shame upon a society, for the cruelty and the ideologies they have represented. 

Therefore, by exploring the notion of dark heritage, we aim to broaden the interpretation of certain sites and experiences that relate to those painful pasts, and unpack therefore, different layers of meaning. 

Archiving Ephemera: Real-time Documentation Practices

Archives are systems of collective remembering. Also, they play a role in the formation of future cultural collectivities. How to archive that which is fleeting and transitory? How will we transmit knowledge across generations about the current pandemic? Archiving Ephemera: Real-time Documentation Practices accommodates for archival projects that have been created in the context of everyday life, that take note of the transitory qualities of the built environment, and recognize particular threats to collective remembering. 

This section can include archives represented in — and assembled through — creative works: self-documenting practices, memoirs, creative non-fictions, visual diaries, performance art, art installation, and hybrid archives that incorporate material objects, and also do the work of addressing practices that have disappeared because of, and beyond the pandemic. All in all, real-time documentation practices that add value to what might constitute heritage in the future.