The Ayas Museo Diffuso project aims to create an information circuit in Ayas to enhance the cultural heritage of Ayas: a cultural signposting system to be placed in the villages, linked to the website for further information.
CONCEPT
Ayas is a high land in the great Western Alps, where impervious terrain and seemingly inhospitable places have been permanently populated by man, not in a single centre, but in more than 30 scattered villages. The Alpine communities were not, however, isolated groups or societies with a primitive organisation, and many scholars have investigated the signs of their culture in historical, anthropological and architectural terms. Not only that. Over the past decades, the Valle d'Aosta Region has deliberated and promoted an intense and capillary work on the Ayas territory aimed at the production of cartography and a census of assets. This cataloguing was conducted with the awareness of having assets of such a diverse nature (often also intangible) that it was not desired to associate them with rigid categories.
In the current historical moment that sees knowledge, protection and valorisation - the three key words of the Italian cultural heritage - finally shared by the Ministry of Culture with all Italians, creators and users of culture, the capillary work of open cataloguing may have in the Ayas Museo Diffuso project - aimed at both the creation of on-site reports with web support and the organisation of events - a vehicle of transmission equally open in its choices and contents.
Every place and every object already has within itself the ways in which it must be treated. In Ayas, not only must a unique landscape emerge, but also the transformative work of the mountain by men 'builders' of cultural landscapes in a difficult nature, i.e. the culture of the place and of the men who have lived here: an anthropological approach for a narration from material signs to the rediscovery of the fascinating spirit of the mountain places and its history, mostly unknown to those who frequent the valley. All the more reason for it to be appreciated and experienced at all times of the year by a conscious tourism attracted by the particular. A fundamental reason so that the Ayassinians themselves do not lose the precious thread of their origins and know how to protect and transmit their heritage, a heritage of millennial life. In this sense, Ayas Museo Diffuso wants to be a collector of recent memories of the individual inhabitants of this Alpine world, fragmentary memories relating to a world that has seen a total transformation since the Second World War and which today are in danger of being dispersed. An archaeology of the present of an era that has now disappeared and will soon also be forgotten (using the title of a fine book by Sebastiano Vassalli), just as important for creating awareness of one's own historical memory and the basis of a future.
