Valentina Ciarapica and Alessia Rotondo show us their project ”Things That Matter“.

Please give us a short description of your project ”Things That Matter“:

What would we like to share with people of the future about our personal lives? This question lies at the heart of a mysterious video which shows up online out of nowhere. Yuri speaks from the future, seeking traces of our contemporary civilization and organizing the items he receives in his Wunderkammer, an astounding cabinet of curiosities. Since all knowledge about our present era has disappeared, we are all asked to share a relevant object of personal value with an accompanying story that a web platform will host.
No limitations to the nature of the objects. Only two rules:
– it should have a personal value;
– it should carry a story with it.

Storytelling is what makes humankind different from any other species. It’s the primary way in which we were able to pass over culture and know-how over the centuries.
Perhaps without this ability our mark on the planet would be less deep and dangerous and Post-modernism wouldn’t exist, but neither would the human capacity to acquire and produce beauty and value.

We constantly decide what’s valuable and what’s not. Man has always been interested in collecting single objects with certain qualities. Before museums were born, cabinets of curiosities were packed with items, classified under some controversial but still imaginative categories. The ultimate goal was to arouse the visitor with a sense of wonder.
Similarly, this project is not about universal valuable objects. This is about what makes a single object valuable, and why.
It’s about the microhistory challenging the bigger, official history.
It’s a collective act of imagination that will help us build a possible museum of the future.
If man is a geological force, big changes are made of single personal stories.
We want to show how common things are significant to understand our present and how they can build an overwhelming collective work about the era we live in.

When was the official start of the project?

01.05.2014

What category describes your project best?

Collective Storytelling

What kind of media do you make use of in and for your project?

Things That Matter is an on-going transmedia project selected by and created for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt of Berlin in the framework of the Anthropocene Program – Future Storytelling, a competition that aims to explore the Anthropocene hypothesis using any digital forms of narration.
Through a video call for action people are invited from Yuri to contribute to his futuristic cabinet, sharing a relevant object of personal value with an accompanying story that the web platform will host (www.thingsthatmatter.eu/join).
Since the end of September ’14 new content is uploaded every Monday: we are creating a temporary community of users who wait for this weekly appointment, browsing the website, enjoying the stories by others and sharing them using social medias. After this first step, a physical exhibit will be built based on all the contributions uploaded by the collective intelligence of the audience. All the objects and the stories the Collector was able to accumulate will be used to create a new storytelling journey that will be experienced in a virtual reality environment using Google Cardboard. Users will have the chance to enjoy Yuri’s cabinet on their smartphones simply downloading and installing our free app from the internet.

Tell us a little about the team behind Things That Matter:

Alessia Rotondo – author and screen writer
Valentina Ciarapica – author and media designer

Nuala Patriarca – interaction and web designer
Thomas Koch – actor

https://thingsthatmatter.eu/credits/

Did you get any funding?

The project got some national funding.

 

Thanks for showing off your project and best luck for this great collective storytelling journey!