Purpose: The study aims to understand the meaning of event-based and place-based community practices, as well as the resulting social impacts. Design/methodology/approach: An ethnomethodological approach was followed (participant observation and interviews were supplemented by secondary data), with the analysis being exploratory and interpretative. Findings: The festival and the place reinforce the community’s social practices, which have impacts beyond the festival, benefiting individuals, the community and the place, becoming a means for valorisation and diffusion of the rural way of life, and placemaking. Research limitations/implications: In this study the authors focus on social practices in the context of an event and of a place (the village where the event occurs). The authors connect to theories of practice, which they apply in the analysis. The value of the study lies on the underlying mechanisms (how communities exercise social practices in the context of festivals, and what social impacts may lead to) rather than its context-dependent specific results. Practical implications: National and regional authorities can play a role in providing local communities with adequate tools to overcome the challenges they encounter. This can be done by issuing appropriate (events) plans and policies while giving room for the locals to voice their opinions. Social implications: Community-based festivals are key social practices that can strategically impact placemaking, strengthening community bonding, forging connections with outsiders and promoting well-being practices that discourage rural depopulation. Originality/value: There is a scarcity of research that deepens the understanding of the role of festivals in placemaking and their social impacts, particularly in the rural context. This study contributes to closing this gap by focussing on the social practices of a community-based festival in a village in the interior of Portugal.
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Amidst evolving landscapes and contemporary pressures affecting both the arts and rural living, policymakers and artists alike are directing more attention to rural and non-urban cultural practices. Participatory art forms, such as music, offer a unique potential to (re)connect people with each other and their surroundings by fostering reflection and reshaping societal perspectives. However, developing or attempting to integrate existing and new practices into rural communities can pose challenges for artists, especially when coming from outside these locales. Moreover, there is a notable absence of clear and sustainable pathways for artists to engage in participatory practices within rural settings, and research on this subject is limited.This report discusses the results of a case study which took place as part of the broader Sound Soils research project – a practice-oriented initiative aimed at exploring opportunities, roles and approaches for professional musicians to contribute to rural life in the northern Netherlands. In this case study, we aimed to understand the unique qualities and cultural lives of villages in the North-Netherlands region. To do so, we conducted immersive visits to three villages and spoke to locals about the existing cultural fabric of their village, as well as the current concerns and wishes of their inhabitants, both in general and in relation to music activities.Alongside providing other valuable insights into village life in our region more generally, our findings help identify potential ways for musicians to develop (new) collaborative music practices in rural communities, with a focus on forms that are in dialogue with existing local interests and community life. In this way, we seek approaches that have a higher potential for sustainability by being embedded into existing community structures and cultural practices. In this report, we explain the purpose, methodologies, and main findings of the three villages case study and discuss how these results may lead to follow-up research-in-practice projects in the villages studied and others like them.
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