In the context of an effort to develop international cooperation initiatives with similar organizations operating in other countries of Europe, in the July 2011 Binaural Nodar was invited by Italian cultural organisation Bambun to take part in a preliminary meeting to set up a European project related to sound & visual ethnography and digital archives. This meeting happened in the rural village of Arsita (Abruzzo, Italy) and it marked the beginning of a fruitful collaboration with many communities, artists and organisations that share the same passion with rural and mountain cultures.

The Tramontana Network was set with the driving idea of collecting and promoting the intangible cultural heritage of Europe’s mountains and rural societies, one that is part of the essence of European identity.

Intangible cultural heritage, which is constantly being regenerated and is a source of sustainability and social innovation, is currently very fragile and often unrecognised. Dealing with delicate and ephemeral materials such as people’s words, their memory and their way of life is not something that can be taken for granted, all the more so in an area as complex as mountain cultures are. This complexity requires working on the whole chain of operations, from finding people/resources to recording them; from archiving the data to sharing, analysing, restoring and transforming it creatively and dynamically by artists and audiences.

After more than 10 years of activity, The Tramontana Network is now a pan-European platform for action and cooperation based on an innovative and integrated model for research, cataloguing and digital archiving, artistic co-creation and transmission of the intangible cultural heritage of Europe’s rural and mountain societies. It aims to pool skills, ensuring that the collected documents in a variety of subjects can be used on a European scale, and process its data in a multidisciplinary and transnational way, with the aim of enriching the analysis and encouraging creative experimentation and international circulation of innovative forms of transmission.

Over the years, Binaural Nodar developed a wide set of projects related to its participation in the Tramontana Network such as:

  • The design and development of Binaural Nodar Digital Archive, and a series of regional and/or thematic sub-archives, that comprise over 2.000 catalogued and available sound and video documents.
  • The hosting of artists and researchers on the territory of Viseu Dão Lafões, who created and investigated in a wide variety of themes such as agropastoralism, cycles of cereals such as corn, linen and rye, the interaction of rural communities with landscapes with sacred meanings, social festivities connected with the several seasons, rural forms of polyphonic chanting etc.
  • Festivals, workshops, mixed-media exhibitions and publications related to the research subjects, presented in the municipalities of São Pedro do Sul, Vouzela, Castro Daire and Viseu.
  • The participation of Binaural Nodar’s team in international forums related to rural and mountain cultures, in countries like Spain, France, Italy and Poland.