Artistic creation: A street mural is seen during the 2018 Indonesian Culture Congress at the Education and Culture Ministry in Jakarta on Thursday
rtistic creation: A street mural is seen during the 2018 Indonesian Culture Congress at the Education and Culture Ministry in Jakarta on Thursday. Various art and cultural performances were staged during the event.(JP/Wendra Ajistyatama)
The 100th installment of the long-running Indonesian Culture Congress opened this week, with the stark aim of getting more government strategies and resolutions regarding cultural development and preservation.
This year’s edition, taking place at the Education and Culture Ministry from Dec. 5 to 9, could be crucial because the resolutions and the strategies drawn up there would affect the public development of culture for the next two decades.
Having been active in Indonesia since 1918, the congress has always been treated by government officials as a medium for making crucial decisions regarding cultural development in Indonesia and for sharing ideas.
The Education and Culture Ministry’s cultural director general, Hilmar Farid, said the resolutions would include several points to be given to President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo so that other ministries, as well as national institutions, could voluntarily follow up on them.
“The first result we are aiming for is a formal national cultural strategy, which would be run in accordance with the laws and the Constitution on a city-wide or regency-wide scale. The second aim is the congress-end resolution, which would involve participants of the congress,” Hilmar said.
Participants were asked to suggest ideas on what to do and they can submit funding-related ideas through a kind of trust fund set up by the ministry so the process would not be weighed down by the notorious government bureaucracy.
“These cultural strategies would be more abstract in nature because they would serve as a guideline for the next 20 years. The concrete results would come from the resolutions,” Hilmar said.
However, it is not yet known what these resolutions are to be, or what kind of strategies would be implemented, or how they would be implemented and for how long or for what fields of culture. As per our culture: Discuss first, do later.
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