The Workshop - Coroico 2012

Hotel Gloria, Coroico - Photo credit: Henry Stobart

For the Coroico 2012 Workshop, the project brought together 20 Bolivians involved in various areas of culture and media, some of them of indigenous backgrounds.  The aim of the workshop was to open up civil society discussions on issues of cultural property, and to do so with a group of individuals who usually are not in dialogue with one another.   In titling the event through the terms “creativity” “recognition,” and “indigeneity,” the organizers purposely avoided direct references to “cultural property,” “authors rights,” or “piracy”—all hot button words that in previous dialogues and roundtables, had led to rigid positioning, claiming of individual rights, and accusations of theft.  With workshop activities planned to span several days and the crafting of small-group and plenary discussions, the organizers hoped not to avoid these topics, but to open up alternative spaces for more sustained dialogues about them. 

In an attempt to ensure focused and undisturbed discussion, the workshop was held in a hotel in Coroico, located in the tropical lowland Yungas region of the Department of La Paz.  After two full days of conversation there, workshop participants returned to La Paz for a public “conversation with experts” hosted by the La Paz Museum of Ethnography and Folklore (MUSEF).  In Coroico, the workshop discussions, planned through small group and plenary sessions, were structured around the following themes: Creativity and Motivation; Creativity and Recognition; Circulation; Heritage and Knowledge; and What is to be done? Bolivia and the World.     

Rethinking Creativity, Recognition and Indigenous Heritage by https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/boliviamusicip/home.aspx is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/boliviamusicip/home.aspx