Volunteering Teams in High Priority Areas
DIGITAL
ARCHIVE
EYES WIDE OPEN
.png)
About Digital Archive
This digital archive has been created to preserve and share the cultural landscapes explored throughout the Eyes Wide Open project. Over three years, volunteers worked in rural communities to reconnect with nature, discover traditional knowledge, and promote healthier and more sustainable ways of living. The archive brings together the traces of this process: stories, locations, practices and visual materials that reflect how young volunteers encountered, interpreted and contributed to the local environments around them.
Its purpose is closely linked to the project objectives. Eyes Wide Open seeks to support communities in valuing their natural and cultural heritage, to encourage sustainable behaviours, and to give young people the opportunity to learn through meaningful engagement with the environment. By documenting their experiences, volunteers help create new narratives about cultural heritage, rural life and ecological responsibility.
Digitalisation plays an important role in this process. Cultural landscapes often exist in fragile forms: paths, fields, local crafts, everyday habits, or memories shared by community members. By recording and organising them in a digital format, the archive safeguards elements that might otherwise be lost or remain invisible. It allows the stories of places such as Hopeland, Bergolo, Altamura and Djurovo to travel beyond geographic boundaries and to be used in future education, research and community initiatives.
In this sense, the digital archive does not only preserve the past; it expands the impact of the volunteers’ work and supports the project’s aim of creating living, evolving narratives that keep cultural landscapes active in the collective memory.
_JPG.jpg)
.png)
