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, artefacts and sonic traces are inscribed, contested and reimagined amid demographic decline, seasonal tourism and shifting social ecologies.
 

The project is centred around immersive fieldwork: walking with residents across the valleys and the streets of the village, home gardens and local pubs, conducting ethnographic interviews and collecting photos, thoughts, stories.
It gradually grew into community workshops, during which residents drew their beloved places, mapped underused spaces and knowledge hubs. They donated objects, letters, songs, each carrying stories of agrarian resilience, family caregiving and youth emigration.
The open-air exhibition became a phygital sensory path across the village centre: artefacts installed in situ were paired with QR-coded site-specific soundscapes. Using field recordings, we composed layered acoustic environments: the streams running through the mountain valley, the cadence of dialect storytelling, the spectral murmur of filò (farmers’ gatherings), the folk 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 the community’s desire for renewed sociality.  By co-curating memory, it foregrounds care as resistance and possibility.

Methodology: ethnographic fieldwork  (participant observation, group canvases, oral history); focus groups; community art workshops; artefacts co-curation; field recording; phygital soundscape composition (QR codes); participatory sensory path installation; thematic coding and ethnographic analysis via grounded theory.











Monumento positions participatory curation as an ethnographic method.
It maps a sonic and material ethnography of territorial becoming, where artefacts, voice and landscape coalesce into a living monument to mutability, situating collective exhibition at the intersection of anthropology and public art. 
Residents’ narrativers (Francesco’s ritual return of the sun, Fabio’s nostalgic filò, young Sofia’s urge to leave) surface tensions between rootedness and marginality, tradition and rupture. 



 







      PARTICIPATORY ARTWORKS
  ALESSANDRA INDINO                                                                                                                                                  SOUND ART ETHNOGRAPHY LISTENING