Open AccessBuilding memories: the experience of a creative workshop on digital stories from the University of Bologna
Author(s) -
Anna Paola Paiano
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
metis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2240-9580
DOI - 10.30557/mt00170
Subject(s) - narrative , collective memory , dialogical self , storytelling , sociology , meaning (existential) , cultural memory , memory work , aesthetics , creative work , epistemology , visual arts , history , literature , psychology , social psychology , art , anthropology , philosophy , law , political science
The memory has a narrative structure. Recovering the epistemological approaches of the collective memory of Halbwachs, Blondel, Bartlett and Vygotskij, and reflecting on Bruner's postulates on narrative thought, the present study supports the perspective of collective memory constituted by narratives in autobiographical and dialogical form that They allow the narrative rereading of experiences (understood as focal events by the subject), culturally endowed with meaning by the individual and by the community. Undoubtedly, on a daily basis we are surrounded by a sea of narratives (Bruner, 1992), which intersect and become contaminated with others, defining the limits of common experiences that the community represents the memories of a past endowed with a renewed sense exchange and co-constructed for each unique autobiography. Therefore, we could say that narratives become social structures of memory, such as time and space (Halbwachs, 1987), and they need recreations to be renewed and guarded in the collective memory, so as not to lose their meaning by being enveloped by the dust of old memories and old drawers. This work describes a creative writing workshop with the Digital Storytelling methodology with a group of twenty students from the Geography course at the University of Bologna who have been asked to tell a story in the first person to describe a representative place for them, the place of memories or a place where a focal event in your personal history occurred. The pedagogical purpose of the laboratory resides in the active and reconstructive function of the account of the experience, which is not limited only to the storage of places and events, but also to the work of reflection and discovery of the self, it has underlined how the autobiographical account can offer an interpretation of meaning jointly to the stories of the members of a community, in other words, the exchange of memories and with them, an interpretation of past events would facilitate recognition in a common history while maintaining a collective identity through values, beliefs and myths that the same collective memory transmits and builds.