The First Meeting with the Ladin Community of Fassa for the European Project DIGICHer at the Majon di Fascegn

The challenge of digitising Ladin cultural heritage opens up to Europe.

Digitalisation, minority culture, participation. These are the keywords of the meeting held on February 6th at the Istituto Culturale Ladin in San Giovanni di Fassa, as part of the European Horizon project DIGICHer. Around twenty representatives of the Fassa community gathered to kick off a co-design process.

The meeting at Majon di Fascegn focused on the active participation of the community in the digitalisation of its cultural wealth. More than twenty people, representing the entire community, were invited to the Istituto Culturale Ladin to participate in the co-design workshop organised by researchers from the University of Trento and the Italian Institute of Germanic Studies, the Italian partners of the project.

In the Istitut’s main hall, representatives of what isreferred to in the DIGICHer project as the “quadruple helix” - the four sectors that make up society - met: the world of schools and research, the world of institutions and politics, theworld of economy and businesses, and finally civil society, associations and individual citizens interested in culture, its renewal, and its preservation.

The discussion initially focused on broader topics, addressing the participants’ ideas on the digitalization processes and the use of virtually archived materials, before becoming more specific, discussing six cultural digitalization projects already underway at the Istitut Cultural Ladin: the Mediateca Ladina, the large virtual portal of Ladin books, audio, and video; the new research on the historic apiary of Ronch, the Bait da la èves; the Tone project for the digital use of Ladin through artificial intelligence; Uteres, a performance/video by artist Claus Soraperra; the anthropological film Talis mater; and the vast photographic archive of Franz Dantone Pascalin.

This meeting was just the first step: the results of the workshop, developed by the researchers of the DIGICHer project, will be used in the continuation of a long process. In fact, in the coming months, the Istitut Cultural Ladin will organise other meetings, some of which will be open to the public, for anyone who wants to take part or learn more about DIGICHer and the digitalisation processes of minority cultures.

All the representatives of the European institutions involved in the DIGICHer project will meet in Val di Fassa at the end of March for the third plenary meeting of the project, in order to continue organising the numerous planned initiatives.