International Council for Cultural Centers (I3C)

ALACP, Articulation in Latin America of Culture and Politics, www.culturaypolitica.com, is a project launched in 2010 by the Latin American Network of Arts for Social Change(RLATS), www.artestransformador.net, and the Ministry of Culture of Brazil and its Cultura Viva and Pontos de Cultura Program in order to help implement in other countries in Latin America the good practices from the Brazilian pontos de cultura (point of culture community arts centers) model. The idea developed parallely within RLATS, led by Crear Vale la Pena in Buenos Aires, and within I3C since November 2008, when, at the 2008 UNESCO World Conference on Developing the Implementation Guidelines for the Intangible Heritage Convention in Istanbul, Turkey, Nadezhda Savova met Josefina Delgado, Director for Culture at the Municipality of Buenos Aires, and the two initiated talks on the possibility to develop a national network of community cultural centers in Argentina, for which Nadezhda recommended the usefulness of the Brazilian experience as a model. As a follow-up to the initial idea, Nadezhda visited Buenos Aires and consulted Mrs. Delgado and her colleague Maximo Merchensky on a multi-layered strategy to begin with the consolidation of a network of centers in Buenos Aires and then extend it to a national network that would incorporate and revive the already existing casas de la cultura centers and create new centers through a series of capacity-building and new media activities. In addition to these first contacts between I3C and the Argentine network, the NGO Crear Vale la Pena in Argentina which is currently coordinating RLATS continentally started to develop a series of meetings and conferences with representatives of the Ministries of Culture of MERCOSUR which culminated with a continental cultural policy agreement to start regionalizing the Brazilian pontos de cultura model, with emphasis on national and local specificities that would modify and restructure the model in each country.