Atlante della discografia antagonista: Italia, 1958-1980
Atlas of Antagonist Discography: Italy, 1958-1980
Partecipanti al progetto
- Tomatis Jacopo (Responsabile)
- Meandri Ilario (Collaboratore)
Descrizione del progetto
The project "Atlas of Antagonist Discography" is the first systematic and scientific study of political discography in Italy, covering the years from 1958 to 1980. By "antagonist discography” (AD) we mean the series of cultural enterprises, official or informal, dedicated to the production of phonographic supports conveying committed political and dissenting contents. In the 1960s and 1970s, parties and organizations (especially left-wing, but not exclusively), as well as the record labels directly or ideologically linked to them, published numerous records of old or newly composed political songs, speeches, sound documents and field recordings, also in the wake of the folk revival and the recording campaigns of "emergency ethnomusicology”, eager to document Italian oral tradition practices. Records and sound recordings have been at the center of cultural politics and propaganda, acculturation processes, and activists' leisure time. They have been a tool for constructing shared memory (e.g., related to the Resistance) and dissent, for counter-information, and for giving voice to minorities (including the feminist, labor and student movements).
This heritage is currently dispersed, difficult to access and almost completely unstudied. The project intends to 1) build the first catalog of Italian AD, 2) compile a sample of digitized sound sources and documents and 3) collect life history interviews, aimed at the 4) study and 5) dissemination of the materials, for the benefit of heritage communities as well as the scholarly community.
The history of AD intersects with that of ethnomusicology and demo-ethno-anthropological studies, by means of field research, the history of sound technologies, and folk revival. The market release of sound recordings entailed the emergence of an oral "neo-tradition" that is grafted onto new political repertoires, as well as re-mediated oral repertoires. The project overcomes a narrow and ruralist conception of sound archives, enhancing an innovative and anti-essentialist interpretation: the intangible heritage
cannot be understood nor valued without considering the cultural and political processes that have forged its style, contents and related practices.
The project is supported by high-profile cultural institutions. The dissemination will include publications, conferences, a traveling exhibition (available to those involved, in a process of "repatriation"), and an open access portal. The development of interoperable and Linked Open Data information systems will be implemented, in collaboration with other PRINs already funded at the Turin unit, and will be available for further projects, including public-private partnerships. This system addresses one of the main critical issues related to cataloguing resources: namely the fragmentation and dispersion of digital resources.