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Paper short abstract:

Wysel Gyr was called the "Pope of Folklore" in Switzerland. From 1961-1995 he produced numerous TV broadcasts presenting ‘traditional’ music and dance performances. The talk will focus on his practices of documenting asking what happened in the transformation from performance to documentation.

Paper long abstract:

Wysel Gyr acted as and was called the "Pope of Folklore" in Switzerland. He worked for Federal Television (DRS) from 1961 on, where he was responsible for folklore, folk music and cultural heritage. Until the 1990s, Gyr produced and presented numerous programme formats in which musical and dance performances were shown. Landscape shots and short historical clips on the development of various Swiss landscapes, villages and crafts complemented and framed the music and dance scenes. Gyr's broadcasts painted a specific picture of Switzerland that enjoyed great popularity.

In the context of the panel, selected broadcasts by Wysel Gyr will be analysed and understood as documentations of specific performances – 'traditional' music, dance, crafts – that were medially recorded for a specific purpose and broadcast throughout Switzerland. Using various documents from the rich archives of Swiss Television (SRF Archiv) and qualitative interviews with former employees of Wysel Gyr, it will be concretely traced, how, why and to which goal Gyr and his team produced specific ‘monuments’ of a traditional Switzerland by documenting ‘traditional’ performances. A practice-theoretical approach – focusing on documenting as practice – accordingly asks how (by whom, from which perspective, through which practices, with which media and technical means, by which motivation and intention, at what time, etc.) the recording of fluid and processual actions turns these documentations into manifestations of a fixed tradition without historical situatedness.