Friday, November 3, 2017

Culture: New Additions to Collective Memory

From October 25 to 27, the 18th Annual Meeting of the Regional Committee for Latin America and the Caribbean of UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme (MOWLAC) was held in Curaçao. During the Meeting, the specialists of the MOWLAC Regional Committee evaluated a total of 21 proposals from 14 states. […] As a result, the MOWLAC Secretariat announced the incorporation in 2017 of 16 new documents [from 12 states] in different formats.
Among the proposals that were incorporated, the candidacy presented by three states together, Curaçao, St. Maarten and Suriname, stands out. The “Documentary heritage of the enslaved in the Dutch Caribbean and their descendants (1830-1969)” was incorporated for its scope and validity in the active construction of regional peace. With regard to education, the importance of the [Cuban] collection called “The National Literacy Campaign, its international legacy: the Venceremos newsletter, the Alfabeticemoshandbook and the letters to Fidel” is also highlighted. [… Other items included into the Regional Registry are: “The Jamaica Letter” by Simon Bolivar, 1815 (Colombia), a collection of Cuban movie posters, and the “Archives of Haitian art, history of a place of creation.”]
MOWLAC has as its main objective the promotion and protection of documentary heritage as a central element of our collective memory. For UNESCO (as expressed by its General Conference of Member States in its recommendation approved on November 4, 2015) documentary heritage, in all its forms, through time and space, is an essential means of knowledge, creation and expression of societies and has repercussions in all areas of human civilization and its future evolution. The preservation and accessibility of documentary heritage consolidate the fundamental freedoms of opinion, expression and information as human rights.

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