This year’s theme is “Heritage and Science”:
The issue of scientific heritage is today placed before the international community. It appears as a relatively new challenge, both for its definition and for its assessment criteria. It has become commonplace to recall that this heritage is today under-represented on the World Heritage List. Indeed, few cultural properties explicitly acknowledge this dimension as being dominant or simply even present in the analysis of their outstanding universal value. In fact, for ICOMOS, the concept of scientific heritage has so far only been one of the cultural dimensions associated with a cultural property, often a minor, even implicit, dimension.
Michel Cotte
ICOMOS World Heritage Advisor
The ICOMOS International Secretariat in Paris has created a website to collect and present information about this year’s International Day for Monuments and Sites at http://18april.icomos.org .
Among the events surrounding this year’s theme, the UNESCO-ICOMOS Documentation Centre is organizing the photo exhibition: “Observing the stars through the World Heritage sites”, featuring various cultural properties inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, from Stonehenge to the Struve Geodesic Arc, which have in common their relationship to astronomy. The exhibition will be open to the public from Monday 20 to Friday 24 April from 10.00 to 18.00 at the Secretariat in Paris.
ICOMOS-UK will also be hosting a one day workshop at the Museum of the Order of St John, St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell, London, from 7th May 2009, 10am to 4pm.
A distinguished panel of speakers will explore these issues and highlight the wealth of associations between milestones in scientific thought and World Heritage and Tentative list sites in the UK.
For more information or to publicize your event, please visit the website or contact Volker Zimmermann: volker.zimmermann@icomos.org