Founder of Venezuela’s world famous El Sistema music program, Jose Abreu, met with President Nicolas Maduro last night to discuss expanding the program. They agreed on a project called Musical Program Simon Bolivar, which will aim to have one million Venezuelan youth and children playing musical instruments.
One of Venezuela’s most celebrated traditions was granted Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity status by the United Nation’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) on Wednesday during a committee meeting of the international body in Paris.
Close to 2,000 representatives of communities from all over Venezuela arrived in Caracas last Monday to participate in the country’s 7th National Cultural Diversity Conference.
Mission Culture, a social program that aims to transform cultural education in Venezuela, celebrated its seventh anniversary on Tuesday. The program was created on July 10, 2005, by the government of President Hugo Chávez, and since then it has trained over 12,000 people in different areas of the arts to foster a renewal of popular creativity.
With the formation of its Culture Council yesterday, Venezuela’s Great Patriotic Pole (GPP) coalition of social movements continues to organise itself ahead of the 7 October presidential elections.
According to a Reading Behaviour Study conducted jointly by the National Book Centre, the Venezuelan Book Laboratory, and Goya Consultancy, 50.2% of Venezuela’s population are book readers, with a preference towards history, politics, and social issues.
Venezuela’s 8th Annual International Book Fair (Filven) closed on Sunday with record attendance, up over 20% from 2011. Between 9 and 18 March over 235,000 visitors attended the open cultural event, compared with 180,000 last year.
On Monday the Venezuelan government handed out 600 musical instruments to children from ten schools in Caracas, as part of a strategy to prevent crime, and bringing the number of instruments handed out so far to a total of 1,600.
The Los Angeles Philharmonic has seized the initiative in guiding a national teaching program based on El Sistema, the Venezuelan-based movement that weds music teaching and social work.
Surrounded on four sides by high walls or fences, looked over by a watch tower and countless closedcircuit cameras, the inner courtyard at this mixed prison is a barren and unwelcoming place. But the music is a clue that not all is so bleak at this jail.
