Paper short abstract:

The paper presents grassroot collecting practices and the Slovenian minority museum in the Province of Udine in Italy. It highlights different approaches to heritage-making as represented by collections of objects on one side and more discursive multimedia story-telling on the other.

Paper long abstract:

The vernacular Slovene speaking inhabitants of the Provinces of Udine were only legally recognised as a linguistic minority by the Italian government in 2001. The pressure of assimilation since the Slavia Veneta was annexed to the Kingdom of Italy in 1866 accompanied by intensive emigration and a lack of education and media in the Slovene language led to assimilation, diglossia, incompetence in standard Slovene and fear or inconvenience in speaking the vernacular Slovene dialect in public.

Compared to the undesirability of the vernacular Slovene in public, there were some other, less contentious practices of expressing cultural differences. For example, collecting objects of past everyday life, agricultural and craft tools and ritual objects resulted in 19 grassroots collection and local museums. Some of them were later recognised and endorsed by municipalities, local associations and minority organisations, institutionalised, and promoted in the framework of the recent European cross-border project initiatives. In 2013, they were joined by the museum SMO in San Pietro al Natisone, managed by the Institute of the Slovene Culture. In contrast to collections of objects, the multimedia SMO museum is designed as a "cultural landscape" and "narrative" museum of the territory "from the Julian Alps to the Adriatic Sea", offering "interactive itineraries and multimedia paintings".

The paper will reflect on the differences between grassroot collecting practices and the narrative (re)presentation of the history of the territory, and highlight different approaches to heritage-making as represented by collections of objects on one side and multimedia story-telling experience on the other.