Abstract

TRAST is a participation-oriented project aimed at creating opportunities through a set of broadly accessible but specifically targeted culture and heritage activities and different kinds of performative methodologies to rethink and reshape assumptions about insularity and insular identity as both real and conceptual notions. We approach the concept of insularity not as a geographical notion but as a notion denoting the state of being isolated or detached or lacking opportunities for being creative, productive, and enjoying self-respect, empowerment, and a sense of belonging to a community or wider society. By integrating digital shift in culture driven by new digital and communication technologies on the one hand and the potential of TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING on the other, the project counters inequality, discrimination, deprivation, and socio-cultural exclusion of insular groups and communities, including migrants and refugees. The project will explore new transmedia storytelling models, giving special attention to promoting technologies and concepts of collaboration such as open data, open sourcing, open archives, and resource sharing, as well as participation and archipelagic thinking as specific cultural formations. TRAST will gradually establish a digitally and physically integrated infrastructure that supports digital cultural collaboration all the way to open social and cultural innovation. The TRAST methodology is based on a combination of deep studying of secondary cases and existing theory as well as producing (studying by producing upon a custom-developed scaffolding) original participative transmedia works bundled in exhibition formats both off- and online, involving and merging elements of video/film, performance, visual, sounding and theatrical storytelling, collections consisting of the museum or gathered cultural or heritage artefacts, personal artefacts of cultural value and immaterial elements of heritage such as personal and collective memories.

Team