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Paper short abstract:

The Fête des Vignerons (Winegrowers' Festival) is held in Switzerland every 20-25 years. Drawing on ethnographic work and digital methods, this paper looks at how, during the 2019 edition, YouTube became the place for extending the festivities and fostering new, participatory memorial practices.

Paper long abstract:

Enshrined in UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage list, the Fête des Vignerons (Winegrowers' Festival) is a Swiss traditional festival celebrated since 1797 in Vevey, on the shores of the Geneva Lake. Held only five times per century, each edition of the living spectacle on winegrowing takes place in a world that has profoundly changed. Mobilizing thousands of people and various public and private institutions, its 12th edition deployed for the first time not only in Vevey but also beyond its physical geographies through an ecosystem of digital social media which enabled new modes of engagement. YouTube, among other digital spaces, appeared as a key place, not only for the extension of the realm of the celebration, but also for its participatory memorialization. Drawing on a three-year onsite and online ethnography, this paper investigates the construction of YouTube as a place for opening up participation in memory making, and ultimately for complementing other mechanisms of public memory building. The results of the inquiry about the investment on YouTube before, during and after Fête allow contrasting expectations, affordances and practices of diverse actors, including managers, partners, and YouTubers. By situating the platform as a component in an organizational and cultural assemblage, its configuration as a site for collaborative memory building appears under a nuanced light, neither enthusiastic, nor hopeless. If this digital archive of the Fête's heritage escapes to some extent the control of professional curators, it remains unfailingly ruled by the opaque, commercial principles of the platform's algorithmic system.