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‘My mother was born in Cerchio, a small village of 1569 inhabitants in the Marsica region located on the slopes of Corbarolo Mount, in 1956.’ This is the beginning of my personal history and of my thesis which has been driven by my need to elaborate on a theater project I started in Cerchio six years ago as a way to reknit the threads of my past. In this thesis I study the role of the memories of the village's elderly women and their embodied practices in the daily lives of people. I illustrate how they can be seen as complex and dynamic forms of memories capable of activating engagement in the present and shaping the future of the small community. The analysis shows how the value of the theater project lies precisely in its ability to have recognized the complex and dynamic character of the underlying memories and to have sought a way to channel their generative power.

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Heritage visualization methods, such as digital photography and 3D modeling, are ideal for documenting and preserving the material forms of heritage objects in digital space for scientific use. However, scholars have voiced concerns regarding institutional digital heritage practices’ ability to engage the public and thus preserve cultural heritage meaningfully. This paper argues that the challenge of public engagement in institutional digital heritage practices reflects a deeper-rooted issue: the dominance of the Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD) over the theoretically autonomous realm of digital heritage. Under the discourse of critical heritage studies and the condition of postmodern digital culture, failing to engage the mass audience with heritage may result in failing to preserve the past altogether. In contrast to the lack of public engagement in authorized digital heritage practices, a group of visual projects featuring abandoned built heritage and broader historical structures on Instagram have drawn active engagement from contemporary media consumers. This thesis considers Visual Adaptive Reuse, a term used to conclude the above-mentioned phenomenon, as a case of digital heritage that counters the digital heritage within the AHD. Through an examination of Visual Adaptive Reuse, this thesis aims to form a theoretical understanding of digital visual culture as a tool for facilitating heritage engagement, as well as digital heritage as an autonomous form of heritage outside the AHD. In response to the challenge of public engagement posed by authorized digital heritage practices, a methodological solution with proven value is envisaged. Smith’s theory of Authorized Heritage Discourse, Van Dijck’s theories of participatory culture and connected memory, and De Kosnik’s theories of rogue archives and memory-based making provided primary theoretical support. Based on the findings, the thesis concludes that digital visual culture’s attribute of connected visibility has reinforced the reproduction-oriented mode of engagement of digital culture, thus forming a different way of constructing mass engagement. Data production on digital visual platforms is visually and aesthetically filtered, strengthening the new memorial culture of ‘remembering through making’ in the context of heritage and memory. This mode of engagement creates space for the facilitation of an autonomous form of digital heritage that aligns with the theoretical principles of critical heritage studies and the democratization vision of digitalization, as well as responding to the postmodern challenge of the conflict between the past and the present. Furthermore, the thesis underscores the potential peril of capitalist digital visual culture ascending as the new hegemony in place of authorized forces hindering digital heritage’s autonomy. It emphasizes the imperative for careful supervision over the power dynamics between a capitalist tool and the public purpose.

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In its cultural policy texts, the EU officially recognises that culture encompasses simultaneously two fundamentally different aspects, namely an intrinsic value and an economic value. The first aspect highlights the upstanding values inherent in culture that are deprived of any utilitarian purposes and sees culture as an upright manifestation of the human genius and human rights. Conversely, the second aspect foregrounds culture’s economic potential that is used to enhance economic, social, political and governmental actions. Literature has shown that the discourses pervading EU cultural policy texts reiterate these two aspects; specifically, the “ideational discourse” highlights culture’s intrinsic value, while the “economic discourse” foregrounds the economic value of culture. Up until now, several scholars have dealt with the issue of whether the EU’s cultural policy texts manifest an overt or implicit preference for one of the two aspects of culture, but none has analysed which tendency prevails in the EU’s latest cultural funding programme Creative Europe 2021-2027. Thus, this thesis will investigate whether and which of the two facets of culture (i.e. intrinsic or economic) stands out more evidently in the Regulation (EU) No 818/2021 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 May 2021 establishing the Creative Europe Programme (2021 to 2017) and repealing Regulation (EU) No 1295/2013. The thesis additionally explores how these aspects are represented in the Regulation and examines the social factors that determine the preference for one over the other. The research method used is a Norman Fairclough-inspired approach to critical discourse analysis (CDA) combined with Tuuli Lähdesmäki’s discursive approach to EU cultural policy texts. Essentially, this means that alongside the tripartite analysis devised by Norman Fairclough (1992), a special attention has been devoted to the retrieval and explanation of the discourses present in the Regulation as well as the explanation of the discursive history of the EU cultural policy. Through analysis, the thesis demonstrates two findings. The first outlines that the text presents a clear preference for an economic discourse and hence the economic, marketable side of culture is highlighted at the expense of the intrinsic side of culture. This finding is in line with the economic nature of the “European Union project” and contributes to the imposition and reiteration of a neoliberal logic in the cultural and creative sector. The second finding shows that power dynamics are present at the moment of text production, which results in the imposition of the neoliberal logic both in the official text and in the actual cultural projects funded by Creative Europe.