Travelling Voices, how storytelling can be used to tell about rural regeneration
How does cycling on an abandoned railroad in Norway sound to you? How about going on a geological wine-tour, in Germany? Maybe drinking from a miraculous healing spring in Austria and sword fighting in a shiny armour is more to your liking. If none of these entice you perhaps an Italian monster with a black body, yellow eyes and the head of a toad does! However, if shaking your feathers is more to your taste, then Turkish clarinet musicians that play for hours will certainly make you twinkle! These are just some of the curious stories you will find in the newly released RURITAGE Project “Travelling Voices” book. Apart from those, 24 other stories written by Tóth Gyula Gábor and illustrated by Livia Hasenstaub, will take you on a virtual tour of RURITAGE’s six Replicators territories.
Initially planned as a modern-days troubadour that would travel along RURITAGE regions by train while registering his/her interactions with the local population via social media, the activity had to be rethought due the travel restrictions imposed by COVID19. After considering many options and evaluating proposals from several artists, Gyula’s proposal, based on a visual story-telling approach, was the winner. It took months of interviews, gathering information about the regions and the project, curating images, writing and drawing to create the wonderful Travelling Voices book. The book is now ready to be shared with the world and tell the stories of six regions in Europe which are using their natural and cultural heritage as drivers of rural regeneration. We have spoken to Gyula about the art of storytelling and the process of creating something that will become part of RURITAGE’s heritage for the future.
Gyula grew up in “a magical rural region in eastern Hungary” where until this day locals believe that under the main street a secret tunnel is hidden connecting a long gone hillfort to another distant fortress. The way he describes his home region as a place with old wooden bell-towers and mills, small churches, tales and folk art, shows that despite living across the ocean in Canada, his cultural and natural heritage are ingrained in his identity. That helps explaining why, for him, presenting a proposal to tell RURITAGE rural regeneration stories made sense.
Although he holds a degree in law, Gyula started his career in the advertising industry where, as he puts it, he’d make a living “convincing people to buy stuff they didn’t really need”. Then one day, after one more successful campaign for a large bank, he had an epiphany: “I suddenly realised what I did was actually a form of mental pollution and decided that my creativity had to be used for something more meaningful”. He then started to teach himself about plastic pollution, air quality, food systems, sustainability and went on to study environmental law. But practicing law wasn’t exactly the right path just yet. Building on his experience from the advertising world the lawyer/marketer turned to sustainability communication and started using a powerful tool to reach and influence people: storytelling.
Formally, “storytelling” is the process of using a narrative to communicate facts, fantasies and everything in between to an audience. Early stories were transmitted orally and humans have been telling them since the dawn of time. They are part of our collective identity in the form of tales and sometimes even become part of History. Despite that, doing it an appealing way is an art form that not all master, with every culture having its own professional storytellers. In India, they are called vyasa, in Medieval Europe they were troubadours or minstrels, whereas bards is the name given to storytellers in Celtic culture and griots can be found in West Africa.
“From psychologists to religious or political leaders, from teachers to businessmen, from photographers to advertisers, everyone uses stories to sell, convince, entertain or teach. According to brain science humans are actually hard-wired for stories as we interpret the world through them”, says Gyula referring to the fact that scientific research has found that the brain neural networks that process emotions arising from sounds along with areas involved in movement, are activated when listening to a story.
On the power of stories, he adds: “I don’t think stories are super weapons by themselves but they can definitely be a perfect tool to engage with our target audience by bringing them as close to our cause as possible. The communication sphere is so unimaginably overloaded with competing messages that we have to be smart, creative, or simply different if we want to make any impact. I know that we often have to produce policy papers but we can extract their main messages and deliver them with stories instead of just using dry facts and boring numbers. Sustainability, cultural heritage, rural regeneration are quite abstract terms – stories can give them richness and real meaning.”
Although all stories share a common foundation build upon four pillars – People, Place, Purpose and Plot – each storyteller has its own strategy to create a story. Gyula likes to dive in deep into the available information and obtain the most detail as possible, “then, like a treasure hunter with a metal detector, I look for story elements: actions, characters, opposing forces, surprising twists, unique settings and so on”, he explains.
That’s how it happened with RURITAGE Replicators. A series of meetings mediated by UNESCO were organised where he, just like a teacher would do, demonstrated that there is interesting things to be told everywhere. Even when on the other side there were sceptical “students” struggling to see how their local particularities, stories and actions interesting to anyone. After that, he learned as much as he could on each of the six regions using RURITAGE official documents, web articles and social media. In the end, Gyula’s knowledge on these rural territories surprised even their local representatives who, motivated by this effort, joined the “dig” and worked to gather the many stories that are now part of the book.
Gathering information, interviewing and writing thirty stories about distant regions without ever leaving his hometown in Canada was not an easy task. Not being able to walk the region’s streets or forest paths takes out an important part of a storyteller’s work which involves “feeling the character, the smell of a place, hearing its voices and seeing its colours”, Gyula explains with a shudder. Still, the tales, real or imaginary, coming from RURITAGE six Replicators managed to capture his enthusiasm and left a strong impression. He highlights the 107 small iron heads placed in and around Flekkefjord paying homage to the same number of children born in that Norwegian town during the first year of the pandemic; the yearly Appignano del Tronto dinner organised for those left the Italian town; the old hand-painted beehives shared as an inheritance in the Karawanken/Karavanke UNESCO Global Geopark; the Messel Pit fossil site in the Bergstraße-Odenwald UNESCO Global Geopark that avoided becoming a landfill due to the mobilisation of local citizens; the making of parchment using ancient techniques in Izmir, Turkey or the Slovenian pranger, a “pillar of shame” dating back to 1686.
With this book, Gyula hopes to have demonstrated that storytelling has the potential to strengthen the community and make its inhabitants proud of their place: “I can’t say that stories will stop the young generation from leaving their hometowns, but stories can definitely give them a more rooted identity, a stronger sense of belonging. And maybe one day, when they have to choose, perhaps they will decide to stay and keep those stories alive.”
For now, we join Gyula’s appeal that encourages the featured communities to “share these stories and showing them especially to the people who are featured in it!” We are certain they will love them and feel that they do justice to their sense of resilience and the power of rural cultural and natural heritage.
You can download the book here.
