What are 150 culture ministers from around the world doing in Barcelona?

BarcelonaMore than 150 ministers of culture from around the world will be at the Barcelona International Convention Centre (CCiB) from September 29 to October 1. They are coming to participate in Mondiacult 2025, UNESCO's World Conference on Cultural Policies and Sustainable Development, organized in conjunction with the Spanish Ministry of Culture. Barcelona takes its cue from Mexico, which organized Mondiacult 2022.

Mondiacult includes a hectic schedule of presentations and plenary sessions in which, in addition to political representatives, personalities such as the Indian philosopher Gayatri Spivak and the Mozambican writer Mia Couto, the Mexican linguist Yásnaya Aguilar, researchers in digital culture and digital intelligence such as Helen Hester, Marta Peirano, and Lluís Nacenta, and various experts in culture of peace and heritage such as Jorge Melguizo and Manuel Borja-Villel. According to the Spanish Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, "Mondiacult 2025 is not just another event on the international agenda, but a major exercise in multilateralism and cultural diplomacy." Diplomacy will be essential to reaching constructive conclusions in six areas: cultural rights; digital technologies in the cultural sector; culture and education; the economy of culture; culture and climate action; and culture, heritage, and crisis.

The Barcelona precedents

The origin of Mondiaculto is the World Conference on Cultural Policies held in Mexico in 1982. Another meeting held in Stockholm in 1998, the Intergovernmental Conference on Cultural Policies for Development, contributed to defining UNESCO's Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity of 200. In 2022, forty years after that first conference, Mexico hosted Mondiaculto, which concluded with another declaration that already addressed issues such as cultural rights, the restitution of cultural property, and the role of culture in the face of the climate crisis.

Civic Agora in the city

In parallel with Mondiacult 2025, the following is being organised: the Civic Agora, a program open to the public that will run from September 26th to October 1st at the CCCB, the Institute of Catalan Studies, and the MACBA; that is, in the Raval district. The Civic Agora is sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, the Generalitat (Catalan Government), the Barcelona Provincial Council, and Barcelona City Council. The opening will be on Friday, September 26th at 9:00 a.m. in the CCCB theater and will include the lecture Culture as a right, universality and diversity, led by Alexandra Xanthaki, United Nations Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights.

The Civic Agora debates cover a variety of areas: cultural rights; cultural and linguistic diversity; technologies and artificial intelligence; culture and peace; cities and culture on global agendas; and cultural ecosystems. In other words, the program complements the Mondiacult sessions held at the Parc del Fòrum. Speakers at the Civic Agora include Fatima El-Tayeb, Director of Critical Gender Studies at the University of California; Orian Brook, researcher on equality in the cultural sector at the University of Edinburgh; Jasone Cenoz, specialist in multilingualism and education at the University of the Basque Country; Michele Gazzola, language policy expert at the University of Ulster; Marta Salicrú, Language Commissioner for Barcelona City Council; Jane C. Ginsburg, professor of literary and artistic property law at Columbia University; Octavio Kulesz, UNESCO expert on artificial intelligence and culture; Dominic WY Kanak, First Nations leader and councillor of Waverley, Australia; and Véronique Guèvremont, UNESCO expert on the diversity of cultural expressions.