Casa de las Americas, Havana

Havana, May 10 (RHC)-- The Cuban institution Casa de las Americas will host from May 15 to 19 the IX International Colloquium on Cultural Diversity in the Caribbean, under the theme "Landscapes, Rights of Nature and Ecopoetics in the Caribbean".

The event will propose reflections on the paths of a regional ecological thinking as a process consubstantial to its culture, and will address issues such as links between gender and nature and the rescue of the ecology that subsists in the knowledge of native cultures, according to the institutional portal La Ventana.

During the Colloquium four academics, three Cubans and one Haitian, will give keynote lectures that will complement the program of panels and debates organized.

Cuban architect and professor at the Jose Antonio Echeverria Polytechnic Institute, Isabel Rigol-Savio, author of the volume Heritage Conservation: Theory and Practice, will give the inaugural lecture on Monday, May 15, in which she will talk about the cultural landscapes of the Caribbean as the combined work of nature and man.

The Haitian master architect Didier Dominique will also present the proposal

"AMOUNI, Nature and Culture", to show aspects of the culture of that country that are built from a complete organicity with nature.

Meanwhile, Cuban researcher and art critic Yolanda Wood will revisit her book Caribbean Islands: nature-art-society, published in 2012 by UH and CLACSO publishers, to establish a dialogue with the contemporary art of that region.

In addition, Reinaldo Funes, professor at the Department of History of the University of Havana, will give a lecture on "The Greater Caribbean: Shared Ecologies and Common Environmental Histories", which is part of the author's project to reconstruct an environmental history of the region, taking into account its particularities and limits.

The Colloquium will especially remember Barbadian writer George Lamming through a tribute to this intellectual without whom the Caribbean experience in terms of philosophical and cultural thought cannot be told, according to Casa de las Americas' website.

Also under the umbrella of the event, on the centennial of Haitian artist Préfète Duffaut, the institution takes advantage of the space to highlight the painter's presence in the Haydee Santamaría Art of Our America collection and the imprint of his colors in the Caribbean imaginary.

The event includes other tributes, panels, lectures and a varied program with the participation of professors and students to debate and reflect, among many other topics, on culture and environmental preservation in the face of the effects of climate change in the Caribbean island territories. (Source:PL)