The AquaGranda digital community memory activating awareness about climate risk

Abstract

This study aims to explore how vulnerable communities, scientists, and artists can collaborate to construct digital community memories to excavate opinion spaces related to socio-natural events, creating a shared and inclusive ground for mutual understanding and collective action. The proposed approach combines web archeology and digital artivism to construct community memories that can be used for social activation in relation to climate change. The research draws on participatory and community-based research techniques, citizen-science approaches, and digital methods to collect dispersed community-memory fragments and create an expressive space for the diverse perspectives and needs of the affected populations. It emphasises the importance of inclusivity and non-polarizing approaches for reconstructing and interpreting narrative streams that propagate in the physical and virtual world, and for representing, through digital art, extreme events and their societal impact. To illustrate the proposed approach, the AquaGranda project is here presented as a case study of community memory related to an extreme event: the high tides that occurred in Venice in November 2019.