International Day for the Remembrance of Slave Trade and of its Abolition 2015, August 23

International Day for the Remembrance of Slave Trade and of its Abolition, August 23.

International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition was first celebrated in a number of countries, in particular in Haiti (23 August 1998) and Goree in Senegal (23 August 1999). Cultural events and debates too were organized. The year 2001 saw the participation of the Mulhouse Textile Museum in France in the form of a workshop for fabrics called "Indiennes de Traite" (a type of calico) which served as currency for the exchange of slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Circular CL/3494 of 29 July 1998 from the Director-General to Ministers of Culture invites all the Member States to organize events to mark 23 August each year. 

The UNESCO Executive Board adopted Resolution 29 C/40 at its 29th session.

“Artists and the memory of slavery: resistance, creative freedom and legacies”

Programme and Participants of the seminar “Artists and the memory of slavery: resistance, creative freedom and legacies”; (4, september 2015)

Generations of artists have, ever since the abolitions of slavery, seized, revisited, rehabilitated, and transmitted, when their turn came, these esthetic legacies in diverse areas of creation. They have also taken over the historical, political, social, and identity questions inherited from colonial history as to draw new horizons to individual and intercultural relations.

To address these issues, UNESCO Slave Route Project along with the cultural association "Fait à Cuba" and Vallois gallery organize an event from 4 to 11 September in Paris consisting of a seminar, an exhibition and a performance. These activities will be offering a plural reflection on the relation that contemporary artists hold to the history and memory of slavery.
- How does this tragic history, still ill-known on the scientific field of research and marginalized by the media, feed artistic creation in its most contemporary forms?
- Does artistic creation enable to voice and crystallize new viewpoints on this complex phenomenon as well as to generate unprecedented overcomings?
- How do artists draw inspiration from, refer to, and carry this painful memory but also transcend it so as to achieve universality?

FORUM : 23 August - Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition