Tramontana Network III is a celebration of the mountain heritage of Europe: an in-depth study of the common intangible heritage of European rural and mountain communities of 5 different countries with the aim to safeguard the richness of biodiversity heritage through its documentation and wider dissemination. The 8 Tramontana partners – Binaural Nodar (PT), Audiolab (ES), Akademia Profil (PL), Bambun (IT), Eth Ostau Comengés (FR), LEM-Italia (IT), Nosauts de Bigorra (FR), and Numériculture Gascogne (FR) - have created a project encouraging international cooperation in the research field and oral memory valorisation across generations.
Imagine a cold and cloudy morning in some of the European mountains where Tramontana Network’s team realized the research during the project. Day after day, the researchers dedicated their efforts to meet the people, especially the elderly, the privileged witnesses of the intangible heritage of these areas like linen weavers in the Portuguese Centre-Plateau, shepherds in Polish Tatra mountains, or a blind farmer in the Italian Gran Sasso mountains, among others.
In short, we, the Tramontana field researchers (anthropologists, sociolinguists, landscape audio researchers, and ethnomusicologists), strengthened relations with these invaluable custodians. We spent hours listening, asking questions, sometimes having lunch or dinner with their family, tracking the interviewees’ daily occupations, and experiencing a deep empathy with these unnoticed resilient Europeans. We also weaved personal connections and gathered knowledge, recorded their deep memories and reflections on the necessary socio-cultural and economic changes to foster these marginal places.
Today, rural and mountain communities’ intangible heritage faces many threats, such as the decline in these traditions’ knowledge and practice, the destruction of the environment and landscape, and marginalisation amid globalisation. The communities themselves also face numerous social issues, such as a rising rate of youth unemployment. However, such challenges have also provided the opportunity to establish new resources and research and experiment with new practices of social, cultural, and economic cohesion.
The intangible heritage of rural and mountain communities is immensely diverse and rich. Its documentation is of paramount necessity for its preservation and revitalisation. To that end, the Tramontana Network conducted research, created publications, organised artistic workshops and cultural events, and directly supported artists in these areas. The communities’ involvement in these processes was crucial as access to this heritage is often limited.
The intangible heritage of rural and mountain communities is immensely diverse and rich. Its documentation is of paramount necessity for its preservation and revitalisation. To that end, the Tramontana Network conducted research, created publications, organised artistic workshops and cultural events, and directly supported artists in these areas. The communities’ involvement in these processes was crucial as access to this heritage is often limited. Tramontana Network is essentially a three-dimensional network or grid comprised of: - rural and mountain territories, - institutions and people such as local communities, grassroots organizations, local and regional governments and universities and - ethnographic, ethnolinguistic, ethnomusicological research and sound and creative multimedia methodologies.
The project was conceived to work through mediation mechanisms at its core. Then, we exploited the crossing boundaries technique between institutions, giving a direct voice to ordinary people. This way, we showed that cultural heritage also belongs to each person in each location, even the most remote and peripheral. We think this aspect of giving voice to the unheard, as farming communities often are, is essential in today’s Europe. Each Tramontana Network member developed a shared methodology to achieve a concrete set of actions and outputs. This methodology has been applied to extensive research over a vast territory when performing the three Tramontana projects (one funded by the Culture Program in 2012 and the other two by the Creative Europe Program in 2014 and 2017):
After a staff recruitment and training phase, a competent European team in the fields of documentation, safeguarding, and dissemination of the intangible cultural heritage of mountain regions carried out over 2.000 field surveys, filmed and recorded together with inhabitants of the territories in areas such as Abruzzi (IT), Tuscany (IT), Campania (IT), Viseu Dão Lafões (PT), Central Pyrenees (FR), Tatra Mountains (PL) and Basque Country (ES), focusing some common research themes, to cross-reference and compare both in geographical proximity and on a larger scale: mountain farming techniques, animal shepherding and breeding, change perception in rural communities, languages, dialects, accents and non-verbal communication, onomastics and toponymy, domestic and collective chantings
We were archiving, cataloguing, saving. We then adopted a shared cataloguing methodology to make the processing and conservation in external hard drives viable. Since the data we processed became more critical in terms of amount, it was necessary to enhance our storage capacity. So we also shared these data in servers, particularly within the digital archives of our institutional partners, so we made it possible to share the libraries between the different partners. We collected various documents from the inhabitants (magnetic tapes, audio cassettes, audiovisual, photographic, and paper materials, such as diaries, letters, etc.). Subsequently, we digitized, catalogued, and archived.
In some way, we responded to the need for sharing cultural practices. Our platform promotes a vision of research that is fully open to the inclusion and participation of affected populations and beyond. One of the network partners’ significant strengths is precisely the in-depth knowledge of the territories and communities they operate with, facilitating the collection of materials and their development, restitution, and dissemination.
In all the areas we visited, the inhabitants received our initiative very well and supported and sometimes relayed our research, taking an active part in the production of documents and sharing the process of transmitting memory driven by the many meetings organized. During the course of the project, we developed a network of digital archives from mountain areas, one that includes Binaural Nodar Digital Archive from center Portugal, Soinumapa from Spanish Basque Country, Oralitat de Gasconha from the French Pyrenees, and Gran Sasso and Laga Mountains Intangible Cultural Heritage from the Abruzzo region in Italy.
We produced these original archives in collaboration with institutions, resident populations, and associations connected to the territory. These archives were conceived as living and active places in the transmission of memory and social and cultural practices, a center of accessible resources to plan together safeguarding and dissemination actions. Together, these archives comprise over 5.000 catalogued and geo-referenced sound, photo, and video documents and use common technical frameworks. All the libraries are self-managed, showing that grassroots organizations can adopt high standard techniques in articulation with local communities, local governments, and universities.
At the same time, we have set ourselves the objective of developing an educational path. The Tramontana Network partners developed a series of workshops in schools in the territories involved in bringing pupils closer to their mountain territories’ intangible cultural heritage.