Photo credit: Jorijn Neyrinck
Working Group on Cultural Heritage and Property
The WG asks SIEF members for assistance in identifying the former administrator of its FB group. It also reports on its recent activities such as a variety of conferences and workshops and announces the event “What Can Be Done with All Those Inventoried Materials? - Archiving For ICH Safeguarding” as well as the symposium of the ICH NGO Forum.
The SIEF Working Group on Cultural Heritage and Property was established at the 2008 Derry Congress, to address the growing interest in the field of cultural heritage, its symbolic and economic power, as well as contingent political implications. Its interests and activities encompass issues of heritage policy, theory, and practice. Any SIEF member is welcome to join our working group. To join, send an email to Carley Williams and Robert Baron, and please register for the Working Group mailing list online to ensure you receive our WG-related communications.
Requesting Assistance from SIEF Members: There is a SIEF Facebook group for our Working Group, which has been dormant for several years: www.facebook.com/SIEFheritage. We would like to use this group for WG communications, but we lack administrator rights, and there are no references to the former administrators. Does anybody know who began this Facebook group and/or has the administrator-rights? Please get in touch with Carley Williams or Helmut Groschwitz.
From 29 to 31 October, in Riga, the Archives of Latvian Folklore and The Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the University of Latvia (LU LFMI), in collaboration with SIEF Working Group on Cultural Heritage and Property (CHP), as our biennial WG-sponsored conference, and the SIEF Working Group on Archives, hosted the international conference Archives of Traditional Culture: 100 + 10. SIEF support to the CHP WG and Archive WGs helped facilitate streaming of the event. More details about the conference are available in the Archives WG section of this newsletter.
Recent and upcoming projects and activities from our working group members are widespread and varied, as always:
The end of September saw a two-day seminar on Living Heritage and Sustainability (27 September), and Inequalities (28 September), at the University of Tartu, which is situated in the 2024 European Capital of Culture. Organized by the UNESCO Chair on Applied Studies of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Estonia, the Seminar on Inequalities was held in honour of Kristin Kuma in celebration of a milestone birthday and reflected on the theme of ‘inequalities’ as one of the major topics throughout her extensive work as a critical scholar and expert in the UNESCO ICH Convention.
The Seminar opened with presentations by other UNESCO chairs: Anita Vaivade - UNESCO Chair on Intangible Cultural Heritage Policy and Law (Latvian Academy of Culture), Marc Jacobs - University of Antwerp and UNESCO Chair in Critical Heritage Studies and the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium), and Chiara Bortolotto - UNESCO Chair in Intangible Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Development (CY Cergy Paris University, France). In addition, researchers, ICH workers and practitioners from around Europe reflected on many vital issues relating to ICH, heritage policy, and implementation from various perspectives in critical heritage studies, civil society experiences, legal and policy matters, minority rights and approaches.
UNESCO ICH Chairholders Marc Jacobs, Kristin Kuutma, Anita Vaivade and Chiara Bortolotto. Photo credit: Jorijn Neyrinck, [Workshop Intangible Heritage (Belgium)]
The 18th Annual Meeting of the South-East European Network of Experts on Intangible Cultural Heritage: Living Heritage in Urban Contexts, took place from 9-11 October 2024 in Warsaw, Poland. It was hosted by the UNESCO Chair on Intangible Cultural Heritage in Public and Global Governance based at the University of Warsaw and the City of Warsaw (Culture Department) and organised by UNESCO with the support of the Regional Centre for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in South-East Europe based in Sofia, Bulgaria. The workshop reflected on the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage in urban contexts, considering the interplay between the implementation of the 2003 Convention and city management and cultural policies. Recordings of sessions on 10th October will be available on www.ichgovernance.com.
The South-East European Network of Experts on Intangible Cultural Heritage was established in 2007 under the auspices of UNESCO, to support the implementation of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in the region.
A conference on the protection of Chinese cultural heritage was held in Suzhou at the end of October: https://ichc.usts.edu.cn/ichc2024/xswyh.htm. Included in the program was a presentation by WG member Giacomo Caruso, focused on ecological revival, the reappropriation of tea value chain by locals, and living heritage revaluation in a cooperative in Hubei Province.
2024 was the culmination of the multi-year Nordic/Baltic collaborative project Re-storied Sites and Routes as Inclusive Spaces and Places: Shared Imaginations and Multi-layered Heritage. Research teams in Norway, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania explored how places and routes with a religious or mythical past can gain renewed significance through processes of narration, heritagization, and the creation of inclusive spaces. Drawing on expertise in the fields of vernacular religion, folklore and narrative theory, heritage studies and cultural history, the project scrutinized how places are made meaningful - sites and monuments, once defunct, acquire additional value as sites of cultural heritage; nature and landscape are re-evaluated as domains for spiritual growth. Formerly abandoned places, practices and narrative traditions are reframed in light of contemporary societal values and challenges; by exploring these changing meanings, and their potential in promoting social inclusion, the project aimed to identify models for enhancing the integrative power of places.
On September 5-6, 2024, a conference and workshop titled Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Military was held in Wrocław (Poland). This event was a collaboration between the International Centre for Training and Research on Cultural Heritage in Danger in Wrocław, the Department of Education, Culture, and Heritage of the Ministry of National Defence, and the UNESCO Chair on Intangible Cultural Heritage in Public and Global Governance (University of Warsaw). It focused on exchanging experiences, analysing, and discussing aspects of safeguarding intangible cultural heritage (ICH) both in general and in military-specific contexts. The discussions addressed methods and strategies to ensure respect for the ICH of diverse communities, groups, and individuals by the armed forces during military operations and in peacetime. A detailed report, which is being prepared, will help guide
military actions to ensure more effective ICH safeguarding in the country and build the military’s capacity to properly carry out safeguarding tasks during international missions and operations.
UNESCO & ICH NGO Forum
The biennial meeting of the General Assembly (10.GA) to the 2003 UNESCO Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage was held at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, 11–13 June 2024. Many SIEF members were in attendance in their roles as State delegates, expert advisors to State delegations, Observers, and as Representatives of Accredited NGOs.
SIEF CHP WG Co-Chair Robert Baron, in his role as President of the ICH NGO Forum, took the floor to present the ICH NGO Forum’s report. He discussed the projects and initiatives carried out by the Forum over the past two years. These include: The Declaration for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage for Climate Action, and a related seminar series, which were developed by the Climate Change and the Environment Working Group. Another seminar series was organized by the Research Working Group on ICH and Sustainable Tourism, following on from the Web Dossier on Intangible Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Tourism. And, the Forum has begun an initiative to generate applications for accreditation from regions under-represented among accredited NGOs (ANGOs).
Baron initiated a relationship between the Forum and Memory of the World, another unit within the UNESCO culture division. He presented at the Memory of the World Global Policy Forum in Paris on October 29th, discussing Creating Documentary Records of the Oral History and Living Heritage of Emergency Situations, which included an overview of folklore and ethnology archival projects documenting current emergency situations through innovative methods including interactive interfaces on archival web sites.
The Forum issued a statement of support for the #Culture2030Goal campaign to make culture a sustainable development goal for 2030, emphasizing relationships to a broad spectrum of SDG’s – health, poverty elimination, education, gender equality, sustainable cities & communities, economic growth, life on land and under water, climate action.
The Forum is about to launch the second phase of a project to map the expertise and competencies of accredited ICH NGOs. Like the first phase, carried out in 2021, the second phase will explore approaches for sharing expertise among ANGOs. During the first phase a wide range of good safeguarding practices and fields of expertise were identified, including informal and formal education, documentation, archiving, sustainable tourism, media production, modes of presentation, crafts training and traditional methods of conflict mediation. The first phase of the Mapping Project produced an infographic on SIEF that is now on the UNESCO ICH web page.
The 19th Intergovernmental Committee Meeting (19.COM) of the 2003 UNESCO Convention will be held in Asuncion, Paraguay, 2–7 December 2024. The general sessions of the IGC meeting will be streamed live, and recordings are available of all past meetings, on the UNESCO ICH website.
SIEF has proposed to organize a side event, What Can Be Done with All Those Inventoried Materials? - Archiving For ICH Safeguarding, at 19.COM on December 5th, chaired by SIEF Executive Vice President Sophie Elpers and with presentations that will include CHP Working Group member Ioana Baskerville and Maryna Chernyavska, co-chair of SIEF’s Working Group on Archives. It is being co-sponsored by the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance, by the permanent delegations of Romania and the Kingdom of the Netherlands to UNESCO and by the Estonia UNESCO Chair, Kristin Kuutma. This side event will introduce basic methods for such practices as obtaining informed consent, storage, and essential periodic migration of digital materials. The panel contributors will describe the resources provided by ethnology, folklore, ethnomusicology and anthropology archives as well as new directions for archives that enable direct uploading of user generated content, facilitating collaboration of communities with archives.
The 2024 Symposium of the ICH NGO Forum, Participatory Approaches for ICH Safeguarding occurring on December 1st, just before the opening event of the IGC meeting – will focus on community-based and participatory approaches to safeguarding living heritage. The involvement of communities, groups and individuals in safeguarding actions is widely regarded as one of the innovations of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage compared to previous UNESCO heritage conventions. A variety of methods have been developed by NGOs to engage communities. Yet, these haven’t been systematically researched or presented. This one-day hybrid symposium will provide a space for sharing experiences on the participation of heritage communities, non-governmental groups, and individuals in decisions and actions for safeguarding intangible heritage.
Both the symposium and the SIEF archiving for ICH side event will be available on Zoom, with links for these events to be sent to CHP members in late November.
The ICH NGO Forum is once again publishing its newsletter and has an active Facebook group, ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage and Civil Society’ and LinkedIn group, ‘ICH NGO Forum’.
As a member of a UNESCO accredited NGO, a SIEF member may register to attend 19.COM and other UNESCO ICH meetings in person, and can join any of the ICH NGO Forum’s working groups or events.
