Alpine Industrial Landscapes Transformation - Project Handbook

figure 1: In-depth Interviews.
rooted in two apparently paradoxical dimensions. The first
relates to the fact that the memory does not regard the past
as much as it does the present. In other words, those who
remember have nothing to do with the past, but only with
themselves, who today choose what to recall. Collective
memories therefore consist in selecting and reconstructing
the past based on the values and standards of the present.
The second paradox relates to forgetting: there would be no
memory if it were not possible to forget. If memory were not
a selection of the past to remember — implying the possibility
of letting go of certain memories — what we remember would
just be a mass of disordered, confused information about an
inert past. It would be the story of ‘Funes the Memorious’, so
masterfully told by Jorge Luis Borges.
This digression allows us to reach the heart of the issue:
memory is a function of identity, both individual and
collective 5 . It is therefore of fundamental importance to
rebuild the framework supporting the memory of the
industrial past held by a community interested in a process of
urban regeneration. Questioning social actors about the sense
of their identity, the signs and symbols through which they
recognize themselves, the meanings of their own industrial
past often represented as a golden age irredeemably lost and
which should be collectively mourned, telling stories about
life and the factory, collecting testimonies: all these actions
are aimed at understanding the collective representations of
a community that has experienced industrial transformation
and necessarily a revision of its identity in a more or less
recent past.