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MONUMENTO
MONUMENTO_2024
Monumento is a collective open-air exhibition and participatory soundscape developed through one-month ethnographic fieldwork with the residents of Ossana, Trentino. The project investigates the morphing nature of oral memory and territorial care, exploring how collective stories, artifacts and sonic traces are inscribed, contested and reimagined amid demographic decline, seasonal tourism and shifting social ecologies.
Summary_ Monumento: “that which remains, that which reminds”. A monument not of stone, but of voices and everyday objects.
In Ossana, nestled within the Val di Sole’s alpine taskscape (Ingold, 2000), memory is not preserved but continually renegotiated through dialect lullabies, the creak of winter wood-gathering, the echo of filò gatherings in abandoned stables. The project began with immersive fieldwork: walking with residents across generational divides, conducting oral history interviews. Then, it unfolded through community workshops: residents mapped beloved places, underused spaces and knowledge hubs. They donated symbolic objects, each triggering stories of agrarian resilience, family caregiving and youth emigration.
The open-air exhibition became a phygital sensory path across the village centre: artifacts installed in situ, paired with QR-coded site-specific soundscapes. Using field recordings, I composed layered acoustic environments: the streams running through the mountain valley, the cadence of dialect storytelling, the spectral murmur of filò, the songs written by the local community. A restored bench, colored in local hues and dedicated "agli incontri," (to meetings) anchored collective storytelling. Engaging acoustemology (Feld, 1996) and place-making anthropology (Basso, 1996), the community exhibition treats objects and sounds as agents in negotiating identity, fostering community desire for renewed sociality. By co-curating memory, it foregrounds care as resistance and possibility.
Monumento positions participatory curation as ethnographic method. By co-selecting and spatialising memory with the community, the project foregrounds care as a dynamic equilibrium between material conditions, social relations and cultural transmission. Residents’ narratives (Francesco’s ritual return of the sun, Fabio’s nostalgic filò, Sofia’s urge to leave) surface tensions between rootedness and marginality, tradition and rupture.
It maps a sonic and material ethnography of territorial becoming, where artifact, voice and landscape coalesce into a living monument to mutability, situating collective exhibition at the intersection of anthropology and public art.
Methodology_Ethnographic fieldwork (participant observation, group canvases, oral history); focus groups; community art workshops; artifact co-curation; field recording; phygital soundscape composition (QR codes); participatory sensory path installation; thematic coding and ethnographic analysis via grounded theory.
References
Basso, K. H. (1996). Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache. University of New Mexico Press.
Feld, S. (1996). Waterfalls of song: An acoustemology of place resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea. In S. Feld & K. H. Basso (Eds.), Senses of Place (pp. 91–135). School of American Research Press.
Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (2017). Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Routledge.
Ingold, T. (2000). The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge.
Pink, S. (2015). Doing Sensory Ethnography (2nd ed.). Sage.
Soundscape extract on filò (ancient custom of peasant gathering in the stables)