Background

From its beginning, SAVE is a special coming together of different European individuals and villages. The origin of SAVE lies in the Croatian village of Praputnjak, the home of designer Ivona Miloš. Ivona, sixth generation villager of Praputnjak, studied and lived in Zagreb. She returned to her village in 2017, to work with the local community – wanting to renew the contact between the villagers, creating a broader common sense about and an improved relation with the cultural landscape they are living in.

Ivona Miloš joined a European collaboration project called ‘Tandem Fryslân’ (Tandem is an initiative of the European Cultural Foundation and MitOst e.V), where she met Guido Bosua, a Dutch photographer. In 2019 they decided to work together on a project about collecting personal stories from inhabitants of small villages.

During the preparations for this project, they got in touch with ‘Iepen Doar(p)’; an initiative of Sjoerd Litjens and part of the Leeuwarden – Fryslân 2018 ECoC programme. Through Iepen Doar(p), the personal stories of the inhabitants of a small community in Friesland were collected. All stories were shared on television and radio by Omrop Fryslân.

The project also resulted in a photobook with all stories and pictures and an exhibition, which was shown in Leeuwarden and in a local arts centre in Feanwâlden. All 129 personal stories can still be heard and seen on the website www.iependoarp.eu

Ivona Miloš, Guido Bosua, and Sjoerd Litjens decided to start a collaboration and see if they could use Iepen Doar(p) as an inspiration for a larger EU project about collecting personal stories in small rural communities. With the help of the Tandem-team they got in touch with other small-scale and grassroots organisations working in small villages: Daiva Vaisnoriene representing Stuba, house of creativity and activity from Jadagoniai Lithuania and Avakum Kvas, representing Eustachia from Hopovo, Serbia.

The next partner to join SAVE was Meghan Muldoon, Assistant Professor of Sustainable Tourism & Society from the University of Groningen – Campus Fryslân. With her on board, partners could deepen their project with a firm research layer, embedding collected personal stories in a social-geographic context.

‘Stories of the Archipelago of Villages in Europe’ was born, a multimedia storytelling project about European village life. An artistic project that portrays in sound and images personal stories of people living in small communities in Europe; that gives unheard stories from those communities a voice and a stage; that connects the tellers of those stories with villagers in other villages in Europe, so that they feel heard and seen.