Dalida María Benfield 

 

“The greatness of a nation can be judged by how it treats its weakest member,” Gandhi

In 2001, UNESCO adopted the agreement of the Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, recognizing the need to enhance the potential of culture as a means of achieving prosperity, sustainable development, and peaceful global coexistence.
In 2002, The United Nation General Assembly declared the 21st of May as the World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development, following UNESCO’s declaration.
Every year on the 21st of May, the World Day for Cultural Diversity is celebrated at the UN and at UNESCO’s offices and lobbies. You might wonder why there should be anything wrong with celebrating differences? Yet some see this attempt as another kind of technical institutionalization of the far more complex issue of Cultural Diversity.  

This brings us to the question of how the unequal power relation and the dominant narrative of Cultural Diversity is channeled into our contemporary time, and into the junction of yesterday’s historical archive and today’s physical geography?
It is true that they say art was once the illustration of literary narratives. Today, it is more a about the translation of experiences. 
Concisely, the motive and motivation behind our seminar, is to reflect on the history and memory of metaphysically speaking of trendy slogans like post-colonial aesthetics, second cultural space, multiculturalism, migration and expatriatism. 
The art and aesthetic of the experience of cultural difference, expatriatism, diversity, or interculturalism are both the product and the expression of a long and unresolved struggle for the control over the image, and for the power to define the self and identity. Because the past is still present, the trans-identity is clearly still rooted in the cultural crossroads of the extended Europe to the so-called Black Africa, the Middle East, and South East Asia. 
All remain placed between a (forcibly) invisible colonial past and an ostensibly independent present. 

In this context the dominant discourse, particularly in Europe, remains obsessed with cultural difference and identity. The obsession with cultural difference through the years has been institutionally legitimized through the construction of the “post-colonial other” that remains, till this very moment, allowed to express itself as long as it speaks of its own otherness.
Indian scholar Tabish Khair highlight this equation in his article Othered + Mothered = Smothered (quote): "Just as the non-Western artist and writer is more likely to enter Danish society as an immigrant spokesperson of a different culture rather than as an artist or writer living in Denmark, non-Western art is more likely to enter Danish scholarly discourses in anthropological terms rather than, say, aesthetic ones." (end of quote).

As a consequence, the society remains confused and unable to maintain its focus on the cultural product itself, rather than on the producer who’s hybrid cultural identity remains visible / invisible on demand - as a case under study at the lab of national experimentation. 
According to Khair, it does not surprise him to come across, say, books on the Cobra artists that do not mention Ernest Mancoba, a South African-born artist who was an active member of the ‘Danish’ art group. 
Khair adds, it is still common even today to find non-Western art exhibited in Danish museums on largely anthropological terms - something that would be a minor scandal in, say, England or Scotland.  

Two groups of panelists will address a variety of translations of experiences and the real dissemination of contemporary intercultural practices. 

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