Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

VCUarts Qatar’s (IN)>TANGIBLE_LAB’s aim is to capture and physically translate the vibrantly diverse Intangible Cultural Heritage within Qatar through interdisciplinary lenses. This Research and Design cluster brings together designers, artists, cultural scholars, scientists, museum curators and ecologists. The focus is to source and access existing Intangible Cultural Heritage archives, to gather and document unrecorded living history and to translate ICH through collaborative making efforts from different disciplines as a means for cultural preservation, knowledge transfer and artistic re-interpretation. The research collaborations are resulting in both the conservation of ICH and in the creation of tangible re-interpretations, visual translations, designed experiences and artistic re-enactments of living heritage.

Mapping Migration Memories is a multi-year research project under VCUarts Qatar’s (IN)>TANGIBLE_LAB, that is collecting memories and oral histories of the biannual Qatari migrations for re-enactments, exhibitions and cultural production. Mapping Migration Memories represents a movement to confront significant societal issues. As the world becomes increasingly homogenized, Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) elements are vulnerable to being lost or forgotten. According to UNESCO, the benefits of ICH include maintaining cultural diversity, supporting intercultural dialogue, encouraging mutual respect of difference, and promoting social and economic development. (IN)>TANGIBLE_LAB strives for the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage which nourishes cultural diversity and human creativity. Mapping Migration Memories seeks to not only document and preserve the intangible, but to translate and extend ICH through tangible and evocative manifestations.

The documentation, reproduction and presentation of living heritage (ICH) pose theoretical and technological challenges. The (IN)>TANGIBLE_LAB explores documentation processes including video, audio, photography, transcription and translation of living culture. These traditions (e.g. festivals, rituals, customs, cuisines, songs, traditional crafts and games) require cultural scholars, designers, artists and scientists to collaborate together with communities to develop new methods for sustaining and extending ICH and Traditional Knowledge.

(IN)>TANGIBLE_LAB seeks to preserve and extend Qatari Living Culture and Traditional Ecological Knowledge through art and design. By actively gathering the memories of migration, this research hopes to highlight and share Indigenous Wisdom and Traditional Knowledge. In this research, we hope to reveal Ecological Knowledges that may locate resources and observations of the interactions between living beings and natural processes within the Qatar ecosystem that ensured human survival. In 2023, Mapping Migration Memories is being exhibited and presented internationally, introducing our research findings and design outcomes to local and international culture and heritage audiences.