Metasteps enabled us to turn complexity into structure.
"Instead of digitising heritage, we made it usable."
How a Catalan heritage federation brought a tradition scattered across hundreds of towns into one virtual place.
THE CHALLENGE
A tradition that exists simultaneusly in hundreds of places and nowhere
The Agrupació del Bestiari Festiu i Popular de Catalunya is the federation representing the festive bestiary across Catalan-speaking territories, the beasts carried, danced and set alight at local festivals. It was founded in 1996 to give member groups technical support and to act as a platform for research among the people who build, carry and maintain the figures.
The heritage it represents is real, enormous and almost impossible to see. It is distributed across hundreds of member associations, each holding its own figures, its own records and its own practices, in whatever format each has used. Material existed everywhere and connected nowhere. You could document a beast but not show the tradition.
Although individual associations preserve their own figures well, the difficulty faced was that nobody — researchers, the public, the associations themselves — could encounter the tradition as a whole.
THE SOLUTION
Bring your content into spaces you can walk through
The work sits inside Digibestial, the federation's creative laboratory for applying technology to popular and traditional culture. Its services include 3D digitisation of festive imagery and heritage elements, guidance for the constructors and restorers who make and repair the figures, and 3D printing.
Metasteps is where the digitised images are shown. Scanned figures that represent real or fantastic animals are uploaded into 3D spaces that present them together, beasts from different towns, practices from different territories, in one place a visitor moves through rather than a list they scroll.
What changes when the figures share a space
Material that was previously stored away from the public's eyes became material that could be encountered. The relationships between figures, practices and places stop being something you infer from a catalogue and become something you see by walking from one to the next.
THE RESULT
From scattered to visitable
The tradition can now be seen without travelling to each village during each festival. For a heritage that is by definition local and seasonal, that is a substantial change in who can access it: researchers outside Catalonia, the public outside festival dates, and member associations who had never seen each other's figures.
For the federation, the spaces also work upward. A body whose job is to represent a dispersed membership to institutions and cultural policymakers now has something to show them that conveys the scale of what it represents.
The federation's stated ambition is to keep extending this as reference infrastructure for intangible cultural heritage, with more to come on how the material is presented and on collaborative work with members.
Bestiari's Space
Visit the space for yourself and see what Metasteps' platform is capable of.
Visit the spaceBring a scattered collection into a 3D place.
Upload your content and build spaces people can walk through, however many locations it came from.