Events and meetings on intangible cultural heritage (co-)organized by UNESCO

This Community-based Inventorying of Intangible Cultural Heritage Workshop is the 3rd activity hosted by Samoa within the framework of the regional capacity building project in the Asia-Pacific Region and is funded by the Japan Funds-in-Trust for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.

The Workshop will bring together some 50 participants ranging from ICH custodians, traditional leaders, senior officials responsible for ICH safeguarding, NGOs, community-based organisations, to faith-based organisations. The Workshop will provide stakeholders with training in community-based ICH inventorying with hands-on exercise at Gataivai Village in Savaii Island.

This workshop on the preparation of nomination files to the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists will be held in Phnom Penh, Cambodia from 21 to 25 October 2013. Conducted by the UNESCO-trained facilitators, Suzanne Ogge from Australia and Rahul Goswani from India, the event is the final of a series of three capacity building events over the last 18 months aimed at the safeguarding of the manifestations of Cambodia’s living heritage. The training workshop, which the UNESCO Phnom Penh Office is organizing in partnership with the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, will provide training on how to prepare nomination files for the Urgent Safeguarding List and Representative List, as well as proposals for the Register of Best Practices and requests for international assistance. The training strategy will provide the participants with the knowledge of preparing complete nomination files by understanding how they will later be evaluated and examined. The expert trainers will lead around 30 participants from concerned government agencies, members of the academy, ICH practitioners and community members.

Documents

• Agenda: English

From 14 to 22 October 2013, capacity-building sessions on preparing nominations to the Lists of UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage take place in Argentina, first in Santiago del Estero, in the Gran Chaco Region, and then in Buenos Aires. At their end, about 70 participants, including government officials and members of non-governmental organizations involved in safeguarding cultural heritage from Argentina, but also from Paraguay and Uruguay, will have received theoretical and practical training on the nomination process understood as a planning process of community-based safeguarding measures.

Facilitated by two UNESCO-trained experts, Adriana Molano Arenas from Colombia and Mónica Lacarrieu from Argentina, these workshops bring to a close a capacity-building programme on the Convention supported by UNESCO/Japan Funds-in-Trust which for more than one year has provided to its beneficiaries substantial training on the implementation of the Convention at the national level and community-based inventorying of intangible cultural heritage.

Documents

• Agenda: Spanish
• List of participants: Spanish

From 7 to 11 October, the Regional Bureau for Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean is organizing a capacity-building workshop on preparing nominations to the Lists of UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. The workshop will bring together about twenty participants from Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic who already benefited in their respective countries from an intensive training on the implementation of the Convention at the national level, within the regional project for strengthening national capacities for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage, funded through the generous contribution of Norway to the Intangible Cultural Heritage Fund.

Facilitated by two UNESCO-trained experts, Adriana Molano Arenas from Colombia and Fabián Bedón Samaniego from Ecuador, this workshop is to provide participants with additional training on the preparation of nominations as processes of mobilization of the wide range of stakeholders involved in safeguarding intangible cultural heritage - and first and foremost communities - as well as of design of safeguarding plans tailored to the specific contexts and conditions for practising a given intangible cultural heritage element.

Documents

• Agenda: Spanish
• List of Participants: Spanish

Experts from South-East Europe will meet in Belgrade, Serbia, on 5 October, within the framework of the 22nd edition of the International Festival of Ethnological Film, to discuss how documentary films and other audio-visual productions may contribute to the safeguarding and viability of intangible cultural heritage.
The meeting, organized by the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade, in cooperation with the Sofia Regional Centre for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in South-Eastern Europe (Bulgaria) and the UNESCO Regional Bureau for Science and Culture in Europe, Venice (Italy), will include a round table on the realization of a possible regional audiovisual production on intangible cultural heritage in South-East Europe – challenges and opportunities. Participating experts will include representatives of heritage safeguarding agencies, anthropologists, film makers and other individual practitioners. The event is open to the public.

The Belgrade International Festival of Ethnological Film focuses on creative ethnographic documentaries with strong ethnological sensibility. Its concept is to encourage and inspire wide audience, anthropologists and filmmakers to contribute to impact and use of ethnographic film. This year’s edition of the festival will screen from 4-8 October 2013, in Belgrade, documentary films on the subject of ethnology and anthropology, also including a variety of events, meetings with filmmakers and social gatherings.

More information is available here

A national workshop on Community-based Inventorying of Intangible Cultural Heritage will be held in Orange Walk district in Belize from 1 to 9 October 2013. This is organized by The National Institute of Culture and History in collaboration with the Belize National Commission for UNESCO and the UNESCO Kingston Cluster Office for the Caribbean.

The 8-day workshop will focus on i) community involvement in identifying and inventorying in accordance with/as advocated by UNESCO’s Intangible Heritage Convention, ii) information gathering with communities, iii) organizing, accessing and updating information in inventories and iv) a hands-on experience in preparing field work. The workshop will be facilitated by UNESCO trained facilitators, Harriet Deacon and Kris Rampersad.

Various stakeholders such as government officials, non-governmental organizations and community practitioners will come together to partake in the workshop on the implementation of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. The official opening ceremony will take place on Tuesday, 1 October 2013 in the presence of invited guests including government officials, diplomatic corps, Heads of UN Agencies and the media.

Funded by the Government of Japan, the workshop is part of a sub-regional project being implemented in Belize, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago within the context of UNESCO’s Global Strategy on capacity building on safeguarding intangible cultural heritage.

After having had a first community-based inventory workshop (INV) in October 2012 in Goroka, Papua New Guinea will benefit from an additional workshop in another part of the country, the Milne Bay Province. Anthony Parak will facilitate this workshop.

The second review meeting on UNESCO’s global strategy for strengthening national capacities for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage will be convened by the Intangible Cultural Heritage Section in Cusco, Peru, from 17 to 19 September 2013, following the first such meeting in Beijing, China, in November 2012.

The Regional Centre for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Latin America (CRESPIAL), a category 2 centre under the auspices of UNESCO, will host the meeting that aims to assess the implementation of the strategy in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The meeting brings together eleven facilitators from the global network, established two years ago following a cycle of training of trainers workshops all over the world, who have now conducted capacity-building activities in the refion. Colleagues responsible for the Culture Programme in UNESCO’s field offices and CRESPIAL will also participate.

The meeting’s agenda covers the range of conceptual and practical problems encountered along the way. By inviting key actors involved in the implementation of this programme to share their experiences, the challenges they faced and the ways they found to overcome them, the meeting will improve the effectiveness of the capacity-building strategy so it can respond more adequately to the specific needs of States.

Documents

• Participants List: English/Spanish
• Programme: English|Spanish
• Summary records: English|Spanish

UNESCO continues its initiative to help safeguard Nepal’s intangible heritage with a workshop on preparing nominations to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage List in Kathmandu from 16 to 20 September 2013. The workshop is the last of three Japan funded events to build capacity to protect the manifestations of Nepal’s intangible – or living – heritage.

These living traditions in the form of traditions, performing arts, festive events and skills of people to produce traditional crafts are a central part of the country’s collective heritage.
The Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage adopted by UNESCO in 2003, and ratified by Nepal in 2010, is an excellent framework to give continuity to these living traditions. However, the national capacity to safeguard this heritage needs to be enhanced.

The forthcoming seminar, which UNESCO Kathmandu organizes jointly with the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation, will provide knowledge about inscribing elements in the intangible cultural heritage list and enhance skills to prepare a nomination file. It will also train experts, representatives from community and concerned institutions on how to prepare files for the Urgent Safeguarding List and Representative List and proposals for the Register of Best Practices, and how to formulate requests for international assistance.

Conducted by the UNESCO-trained facilitators, Suzanne Ogge from Australia and Shubha Chaudhuri from India, the event is the final of a series of three capacity building events over the last 18 months. The first workshop, held in April 2012 in Kathmandu, addressed the key principles and definitions of intangible cultural heritage; the second workshop, which took place in January 2013 in the Jiri-Sikri valley, focused on the process and guidelines for community-based inventorying of these living traditions.
The national capacity building events are part of the regional capacity building project “Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage through

UNESCO has partnered with the School for African Heritage (EPA) to help Member States by providing them with knowledge about the concepts, mechanisms and measures offered by the Convention. To make the initiative real, a workshop for the training of trainers on community-based inventorying of intangible cultural heritage will take place from 16 to 23 September 2013 in the EPA in Porto Novo, Benin thanks to funding from the Intangible Cultural Heritage Fund. During this training, participants will have the opportunity to become familiar with the materials elaborated by the Secretariat of the Convention.

The workshop will be facilitated by two expert facilitators, Claudine-Augée Angoué (Gabon) and Sidi Traoré (Burkina Faso) in partnership with EPA director, Baba Keita. It will focus on four principal topics: (1) community-based inventorying in the framework of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, (2) a framework of community-based inventorying, ethics and responsibilities, (3) methods and technics to produce information and (4) community-based inventorying projects.

A field exercise is also planned to allow the 30 participants that include officials from the EPA, the International Traditions and Languages Research Centre (CERDETOLA) and experts form Burkina Faso and Senegal to apply community-based techniques in the field. The workshop will benefit from EPA’s rich experience in the field of training for safeguarding of cultural heritage. The workshop will be coordinated by the EPA who will also organize the field work, building on the solid contacts it has with the communities of the Porto Novo region (the provisory program is being prepared).

Less than a year after hosting a foundational workshop on the implementation of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage at the national level and the development of a plan of action to this effect, Jamaica is mobilising community practitioners and representatives of its governmental and non-governmental organisations to push forward with the inventorying of its living heritage.

Organized by the African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica/Jamaica Memory Bank in collaboration with the Jamaica National Commission for UNESCO and the UNESCO Kingston Cluster Office for the Caribbean, a national workshop on community-based inventorying of intangible cultural heritage will take place in Kingston from 4 to 13 September 2013.

A significant step in the safeguarding of living heritage in Jamaica, the workshop will focus on community participation in the identification and inventorying of intangible cultural heritage, data collection, organization and management, and hands-on experience in preparing field work. The workshop along with the field exercise will set the stage for a pilot inventory activity to follow in proceeding months.

Funded by the Government of Japan, the workshop is part of a sub-regional project being implemented in Belize, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago within the context of UNESCO’s global strategy on capacity building to safeguard intangible cultural heritage. It will be facilitated by UNESCO trained experts Dr. Harriet Deacon and Dr. Kris Rampersad.