 Felly dweud am ymddangos am ychydig i ni, Alison Johnston, a phobl yn lleidio'r Parloedd Ysgolwys. Mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweld â'r gymryd, oedden nhw, yn ei wneud o'r Parloedd Ysgolwys, o'r ffyrdd yma'r ffyrdd yw'r 6th Llywodraeth Ysgolwysau Ysgolwys. For some of you, this will be a meeting of familiar faces, but I realise that for many of you, this will be your first time here in the Scottish Parliament, and perhaps even in Scotland itself, and some of you will also be joining us virtually. So, on behalf of my parliamentary colleagues, falcha, or welcome, welcome to you all. The summit is a partnership between the Scottish Parliament, the Scottish and UK Governments, the British Council and the Edinburgh International Festival, and I'm delighted that all are represented here today. We will be hearing very shortly from each of our partners, but before we do, I'd like to reflect on why we're here. I believe very strongly in the role that culture and the arts play in promoting international dialogue and understanding. This summit provides a unique forum for debate and discussion about international cultural policy. Someone who believed very strongly in the role of culture and the arts was Sir Angus Crossart, formerly chair of the Edinburgh International Culture Summit Foundation. Sadly, Sir Angus passed away earlier this year. However, he leaves a lasting legacy through his love for and his contribution to culture and the arts, and I know that he will be remembered fondly by everyone involved with the summit. I hope that you enjoy and take inspiration from your surroundings this weekend. This beautiful building was designed by Spanish architect Enric Marais, drawing on the Scottish landscape, the flower paintings of Charles Rennie Macintosh, and the upturned fishing boats that are still to be seen along our vast and spectacular coastline. The Parliament building itself has become a cultural icon here in Scotland. As he developed the design, Marais said that it was a building growing out of the land. His architecture and the Parliament itself in turn provoked our national poet, the then Scotsmacker Edwin Morgan, to write the poem Open Doors, which took the same theme and extended it by linking the Parliament to the people of the land and how our doors must be open to those people. I hope that you agree that this is a fitting venue for our guests from around the world to gather in to explore the unique role that arts and culture play as a form of exchange to build trust between people, cultures and nations. Thomas Carlisle, Scottish philosopher from the Enlightenment era, said that culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being. You don't need me to tell you that culture has the potential to be a force for positive change and to make a huge economic impact too. Culture is essential for our sense of wellbeing and self-worth. It's often what defines us as nations and individuals within those nations. It's at the very core of who we are and what we do. We are conscious of the positive role that the Scottish Parliament can play. Aside from parliamentary business where issues around culture are debated, throughout the year this Parliament hosts many cultural events and exhibitions. You may be aware that at the moment the Parliament is hosting the World Press photo exhibition in the main hall. The exhibition showcases significant works from photographers from 23 countries. They share their perspectives on issues including access to education, civil rights, the climate crisis and the preservation of indigenous ways of life. The exhibition features over 120 award-winning documentary photographs selected by six international regional juries and a global jury, chaired by award-winning photographer Rena Effendi. The overarching theme of this year's summit, as you will know, is culture and a sustainable future, which weaves together three programme strands that we will have the opportunity to explore in detail over the coming days. Culture and freedom, culture and education and culture and sustainability. As you can see, we have a lot to get on with. However, in between formal sessions here, I really hope that you will have the opportunity to make the most of the celebration of the arts that is Edinburgh in August and to take advantage of new opportunities for cultural exchanges, collaborations and friendships. Once again, welcome to the Scottish Parliament. I do hope that you have a very productive and a very enjoyable time here. Thank you. I'm now going to introduce a video message from the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the right Honourable Boris Johnston MP. Welcome to the UK, welcome to Scotland and welcome to the sixth Edinburgh International Culture Summit. It's great to know that you're all once again permitted to gather en masse for this fantastic fixture in the cultural calendar to enjoy the unparalleled delights of the festival and fringe, to seek global solutions to the challenges that we all face and simply to recognise the incredible power of culture, unique in its ability peacefully to unite different people from around the world as the packed streets of Edinburgh demonstrate every year with nearly five million visitors from countries around the world. But uniquely vulnerable in war to those who seek to wipe out culture, wipe out national identity and impose their own hegemony in its place. Throughout history we've seen what happens when aggressors try to oppress and to eliminate culture. We saw it with the Nazis in the Second World War, with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Taliban in Afghanistan. And today the world is once again witnessing unforgivable acts of cultural vandalism this time in Ukraine. Much of Putin's twisted rationale for his invasion rests on the vile assertion that Ukraine is somehow not a real country. This is a lie that he seeks to make true by systematically erasing all traces of the centuries old Ukrainian culture from the territory his troops occupy. We cannot allow that to happen. So I am immensely proud that alongside the vital military and humanitarian aid the people of the UK are funding cultural heritage protection measures across Ukraine. I'm also proud by the way that the UK will be providing a venue in which Ukraine can host next year's Eurovision Song Contest. If ever you wanted an inspirational case study on the power of culture to bring people together then Kalush orchestra surely provides it. And I'm proud to welcome representatives from Ukraine to the Edinburgh International Culture Summit as part of the UK Ukraine season of culture. So I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who has helped to make the event happen this year. In the UK Government, the Scottish Government, the British Council, the Scottish Parliament and of course the team at the Edinburgh International Festival. Whatever culture means to you, whatever your tastes, whatever your views you can't deny that it is art that gives us, life gives us meaning and separates us from other species. In these challenging times it's more important than ever that we celebrate that and that we support that. And I'm sure that's exactly what will happen at the summit this weekend. Enjoy the show. I would now like to invite the Deputy First Minister of Scotland and Cabinet Secretary for Covid Recovery, John Swinney MSP to address summit 2022. Deputy First Minister. Presiding Officer, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for the opportunity to be here this afternoon and on behalf of the Scottish Government I am delighted to welcome you to Scotland. Our country has a long tradition of extending the warm hand of friendship to people who have come from many places to join us and it gives me particular pride that you've all joined us for this important cultural summit. Our capital city, Edinburgh is twinned with the city of Kiev. And I'd like to thank Minister Kochenko, the Ukrainian Minister for Culture for joining us digitally from Ukraine and offer Deputy Minister for Culture, Gugarenko, a warm welcome to Scotland. Thank you both for joining us for this important exploration of culture and a sustainable future together. The Scottish Government condemns Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. We stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine at this incredibly difficult time. Our country stands for democracy, for human rights and the rule of law at home and abroad. We stand in solidarity with eastern European countries whose proximity to Russia and the experience of the Soviet Union means that we should listen to them when they advise us how to address President Putin's violent expansionism. Culture is truly an international language and your presence here speaks to our shared belief that culture is of central importance to every society. It also demonstrates our shared commitment to improve the way we support and promote our cultural sectors. In my view, enjoying culture deepens our understanding and empathy with countries with which we may have no direct personal experience. This recognition that culture can promote international understanding motivated the creation of the Edinburgh International Festival 75 years ago. In an age of austerity, it required real vision to decide to spend money on supporting an international arts festival all those years ago. However, from the very beginning, the people of Scotland rallied enthusiastically to welcome the world. This was partly for economic reasons. Scottish businesses then, as now, enjoyed welcoming the visitors who have been encouraged to come to Edinburgh. However, there was a more fundamental reason for the festival's success. The landlord-provest of Edinburgh, Sir John Faulkner, summed it up in his founding philosophy of the Edinburgh International Festival. Sir John said, the cultivation of the arts, the increase of prosperity and the development of universal friendships are matters which outreach our boundaries and the rebirth of joy and enthusiasm in life makes for a people's strength and happiness and health. Those ideals of friendship and working towards the common good are at the very heart of Scotland today and promoting the strength and happiness and health of our people, as Sir John Faulkner put it, should be the chief aim of every Government. In my work as Deputy First Minister and in representing a wonderful part of Scotland in the county of Perthshire, I see the benefits of cultural participation that are brought to communities right across the communities I represent and right across the country, the way in which cultural projects can inspire everyone from the very young to the very old and the impact of our artists when they perform overseas. In all of these ways and many more, I see how culture inspires, sparks emotions and creates new connections. We are a nation that cherishes culture for its empowering and transformative power. We recognise the value that culture in and of itself has and we want everyone to be able to experience its transformative potential. If you have a chance to read the quotations that are engraved on the wall of this building, the Canon Gate wall just out on the main road, going up into the old town, you will see that poetry is literally crafted into the walls of our Scottish Parliament. The value of our strong cultural sector cannot be overestimated. We know that the vibrancy of culture life is essential to national and individual wellbeing. Through our national cultural strategy and the national performance framework that we follow, we are placing culture as a central consideration across all policy areas, including education and sustainability. We recognise culture as central to the prosperity of Scotland and are investing in the future of the cultural, social and economic success of Scotland. That means that the importance of culture is reflected in the very purpose of our government and how we judge our success as a country. It is the responsibility of all of us to nurture and sustain the creativity that resides in each and every person. I am delighted that you are adding your experiences to this gathering. I hope that being here in the festival city and in this wonderful Parliament building provides that extra spark of creativity. I welcome you to Scotland today. Thank you very much. Thank you, Deputy First Minister, to welcome guests on behalf of the Government of the United Kingdom. I would like to invite the right honourable Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Minister for Arts, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to speak. Lord Parkinson. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. Let me start by warmly welcoming everyone here today to the sixth Edinburgh International Culture Summit. Edinburgh in August must be the most creative and vibrant place on earth, so where better for us to come together and discuss cultural policy. Thank you in particular to all of our international delegates who've travelled to be with us this weekend, especially those who've travelled from Ukraine. We're very glad to have you with us indeed. I also want to thank the many representatives of the UK's thriving cultural sector for attending today. It's your participation here, which makes the Edinburgh International Culture Summit so special, as does the participation of our youth delegates. So thank you for being with us this weekend. The diverse range of experiences and perspectives which are gathered here today is one of the great strengths of this summit. So I encourage everybody to bring their voices to the discussions that we'll be having over the weekend. I'm sure that I speak on behalf of all of the ministers who are here today when I say that it's your voices, your perspectives that we particularly want to hear. I hope that we can all inspire, challenge and learn from one another. And if every one of us leaves this weekend with just one idea, one point that we want to take to discuss with people when we get back home, then we'll be keeping the spirit of those discussions alive. It's wonderful to see Scotland and the UK playing host yet again to the international community. Glasgow did a fantastic job with COP26 last year, and I know that Edinburgh is well accustomed to having the world with it each August. The UK government is committed to supporting peace and prosperity by building connections, understanding and trust between people around the UK and countries worldwide. The Prime Minister has already re-emphasised the government's unbreakable solidarity and friendship with the people of Ukraine. I was moved and inspired by the conversations that we had this morning between the Ukrainian and British cultural sectors at the leadership dialogue. So I repeat our warmest welcome to our Ukrainian friends. It is an honour to have you with us. The horrific attack on Sir Salman Rushdie a fortnight ago is a bleak reminder that threats to freedom of expression and persist across the globe. Culture cannot flourish without freedom. Everybody must be free to explore and express ideas in all manner of ways. So I'm glad that we'll have the opportunity to do just that and to discuss this fundamentally important issue at this summit. The government of the United Kingdom is immensely proud of the UK's world-leading culture sector and we're proud to share and champion it through our extensive network of overseas missions. The brilliant British Council plays a major role in this, working in education, English language and arts and cultural projects across the globe. In the last year the British Council reached 650 million people globally. By working together, not least through the Council's world-leading bilateral seasons with countries across the world, we're delighted to share the benefits of British culture with millions of citizens across this planet. For culture ministers, the Edinburgh International Culture Summit is just one part of a varied international landscape. Culture knows no borders. International collaboration not only makes for a strong and prosperous sector worldwide but shows how culture can be part of the solution to some of the biggest challenges that we face today. I hope that the conversations that we have this weekend are just the start of many and that we'll continue talking and addressing ourselves to those challenges, particularly for those attending the G20 culture ministers meeting in Indonesia in a couple of weeks and for everybody at the UNESCO Mondiacult Summit later this month. But this summit's themes of education and sustainability are central to the government's work and I'm glad to have the chance to share some more detail about it with you over the course of this weekend. Cultural education, both formal and informal, should be accessible to everybody, not just in the classroom but in our public museums, galleries and festivals. This year the UK government is learning from our schools, our teachers and our world-leading creative sectors to develop a new cultural education plan which will set an ambitious direction for the provision of cultural education in England. We're also supporting Unboxed, a free UK-wide celebration of the country's creativity and innovation across science, technology, engineering, arts and maths. One of Unboxed's 10 spectacular projects is Dream Machine, which brings together the work of artists and composers with a team of leading scientists and philosophers. It's been experienced by over 30,000 people and has received rave reviews. It's art that you see with your eyes closed, but I won't try and explain any more for fear of spoiling the surprise. I hope you'll have the opportunity to experience it later in this summit. As for sustainability, we know that climate change threatens culture and heritage, but we also know that the arts can be a way to tackle the challenges such as this by changing mindsets and changing behaviours. I look forward to discussing the ways that our countries are approaching culture and the climate and sharing the great work of both Arts Council England and our international cultural heritage protection programme. After seeing the programme for this summit being developed over the last year, it's wonderful to be here in the Scottish Parliament at last. I've seen at first hand the huge amount of work that goes into making this event happen, so I'd like to conclude by echoing the Prime Minister's thanks to the Edinburgh International Culture Summit Foundation for all of the work which has led us to this point that has been given by all the partner organisations. Creativity and culture have been enriched by centuries of international co-operation and exchange. It's a pleasure to have the opportunity to continue that with you all this weekend. Welcome. Thank you, Lord Parkinson, to welcome guests on behalf of the Scottish Government. I would like to invite the right honourable Angus Robertson MSP, Cabinet Secretary for the Constitution, External Affairs and Culture to speak. Angus Robertson MSP. Presiding Officer, fellow culture ministers, ladies and gentlemen, may I offer you all a traditional Gallic language welcome, Cadmila Ffaltra, 100,000 welcomes? My thanks go to our partners for this fantastic event. The Presiding Officer and the Scottish Parliament, the British Council, the Edinburgh International Festival and the UK Government's department for culture, media and sport. My thanks also to the Culture Summit Foundation, who have arranged such an exciting programme for us all this weekend. We're all aware of the profound impact of the coronavirus pandemic on our cultural sectors. It impacted in all of our countries. It's been hit harder than almost any other sector anywhere. However, the intrinsic value of culture has to inspire, to enrich, to transform people's lives has endured. The past two years has demonstrated beyond any time I can remember the importance of culture in times of need. Culture played a huge part in getting us through and our cultural organisations helped to drive creativity across our communities. One example that I think shines with the themes of this summit was the online sessions organised by internationally renowned Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti, who will speak later this afternoon. Musicians of all ages, of all stages and from all over the world came together to perform a fantastic online concert. The sessions supported the sustainability of musical education and of participation as well as supporting mental and physical wellbeing during the lockdown. Our cultural sectors also contributed in other ways to the coronavirus response. Scottish Opera, for example, redeployed trucks to assist with much-needed supermarket deliveries, and Scottish Bally offered movement and breath workshops to front-line care workers. These are just a couple examples of the inspiring support our cultural organisations offered communities across Scotland. Let me extend a massive thank you to all cultural leaders, to all thinkers, to all artists in this room. Thank you for your support over the last two years. I would also like to take this opportunity to assure those within the sector and everyone whose life is enriched by it that the Scottish Government is determined to do everything that we can to see culture in Scotland thrive. Culture plays such an important role in how we think about the world. The ideas of creative people can help us tackle the world's issues in a new and in different ways, and at a time when international dialogue and hearing the voices of everyone is increasingly important, the theme of this year's summit, A Sustainable Future, is very apt. I believe that, through our experiences, all the participants in this summit can contribute to a better understanding of how we can use culture to help us to support a sustainable future. Let me quote Robert Burns, our national poet, all would come power the gifty geos to see ourselves as others see it. It be from many a blunder freus. This is an occasion where we can learn from each other. I'm particularly proud that the culture summit strives to include the voices of young people in our discussions. I look forward to the contribution of the youth delegates that they will make, and I hope that they will be vocal and passionate, I'm sure they will, and that they will challenge us all. I wish you all a productive and enjoyable summit. You're most welcome here in Edinburgh. You're most welcome at the summit. Thank you very much. Thank you, Cabinet Secretary. I invite our first keynote speaker to address the summit, Professor Irina Bokova, former director general of UNESCO. Prior to her role at UNESCO, Professor Bokova was Foreign Minister of Bulgaria. Professor Bokova has attended previous summits, but today we'll join us digitally. Professor Bokova. Thank you very much, Madam Presiding Officer. Ministers, members of Parliament, ladies and gentlemen, I'm delighted, indeed, again in this all-byte-from-a-distance in the sixth Edinburgh cultural summit under the topic of culture and sustainable future, where the link between culture and education and sustainability will be discussed. Such a topic resonates deeply with my experience as director general of UNESCO, particularly during the time when the organisation made a huge effort in the advocacy to integrate culture in the United Nations Sustainable Development Agenda 2030. I'm delighted equally that this impressive culture summit is held in the city of Edinburgh, a place where the old medieval town dominated by a medieval fortress and the neoclassical new town, whose development from the 18th century planning had a far-reaching influence on European urban development. Already, in 1995, both were inscribed on the World Heritage List. I believe that they both remind us the power of World Heritage, one of the most transformative, visionary and positive ideas of the 20th century. The idea that heritage belonging to different cultures may represent outstanding universal value and should be protected by international law involved in the World Heritage Convention, whose 50th anniversary we celebrate this year. The leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hulme, Adam Smith, Robert Burns and so many others lead to the flame of modern humanism, inspired by a profound belief in the power of reason and positive change, in the imperative of creating and sharing knowledge in the power of history also. In the words of David Hulme, a man acquainted with history may be set to have lived from the beginning of the world and to have been making continued additions to his stock of knowledge in every century. I believe that we need to renew this spirit of enlightenment and craft a new humanism of those turbulent times that we are living and culture and heritage can give us the key to many of the current challenges. The city of Edinburgh is a shining example also of the way culture can shape the history and the fabric of the society. Storytelling and the written word have been the life force of its art and culture for centuries. Its contribution to the world of literature is so rich and well recognised that in 2004 UNESCO has nominated Edinburgh as the first creative city of literature. I deeply believe that culture, for that reason, acts as a catalyst for economic and social development and for the first time inscribed on the agenda for sustainable development 2030. Because culture embraces diversity. Diversity respects and promotes inclusiveness. Inclusiveness strengthens democracy. Culture transcends and determines our way of life. It informs and educates, encourages self-expression, galvanising the citizens' engagement. The technological revolution and its disruptive impact puts in front of us another challenge. How to ensure widest possible dissemination of culture and arts, protecting the role of the artist while resisting to hate speech, racism and xenophobia among others. To note the fundamental prerequisite of inclusive societies, the right of everyone to participate in debate as free and equal individuals. Scientific research, ladies and gentlemen, shows time, times and times again that there is a close link between education and culture and that art education has an extremely positive impact on academic achievement, on social and emotional development, on civic engagement. Then I would say equal opportunities later on in life. But not only. Teaching philosophy or history of art and culture is fundamental for the opening of young minds towards the diversity and the other. It is the constant challenge of the present that can make one imagining and reinventing the future. A book can or a lesson of history or philosophy may change the perception of the world, may instill empathy in the sense of belonging. Knowing one's own history, culture and heritage creates a sense of belonging, knowing others' history, culture and heritage creates a sense of sharing and solidarity, so much in it today. To come back to the topic of this important culture summit, let me finish by saying that sustainable development is the first and foremost human development. It cannot be built slowly in the economic sphere. It must also be built on culture. Thank you for your attention and I wish success to this important event. Thank you, Professor Bukova, for your contribution. I am now very pleased to invite our second keynote speaker on the culture and freedom theme, Oksana Zabushko. Oksana is Ukraine's major novelist, essayist and public intellectual and will today address the summit about the challenges of cultural freedom in our world. I am particularly grateful to Oksana and the other delegates from Ukraine who have joined us at this very difficult time. Oksana. Thank you very much. Thank you, dear Presiding Officer, the ministers, dear Parliament members, dear friends. I have to confess that the privilege of speaking to you here today, a privilege which I appreciate more than I can say, nevertheless awakens in me mixed feelings. No one wants to be the bearer of bad news. Yet, alas, that's exactly the part I am destined to play here, not only by virtue of my representing Ukraine nation which has been, since six months now, under attack of a scale unknown to our civilization since the World War II, under the annihilation war, as they put it in the political silence, that is, the war aimed to destroy my country, to obliterate its very name from the records in the most archaic biblical manner, so to speak. Along with the mass matters, like the ones in Buccia or Mariupol, we've been confronted with the deliberate assault on our country's cultural heritage and infrastructure, something that Prime Minister Johnson had referred to already, and I really appreciate this mentioning. Occasionally, these losses make the international news, but it is not what I am going to focus on. In the Ukrainian delegation, there are representatives of the national cultural institutions who will be able to provide you with much more knowledgeable and detailed reports on Russian crimes perpetuated against Ukraine's cultural property in violation of the 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. However important is this subject, my professional interest of a writer whose job lies first and foremost in tracking the changes in human sensitivity pushes me to peer behind the figures, and that's where the worst news for all of us, for the entire humankind, I'm sorry to say, are buried. Some figures yet have to be dropped according to the information of the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine. Since Russia has launched its full-fled invasion into Ukraine on February 24, Russian troops have ruined or damaged 464 cultural sites, including some being on Ukraine's tentative list of the world heritage, such as the gems of the 11th century church medieval architecture in Chernihiv, or the celebrated constructivist skyline of the city of Harkiv. By no means could this be passed off as collateral damage. There is one good thing about Putin's invasion that it helps to see things in all their ruthless transparency, which has been kind of forgotten in the nowadays of political newspeak and media, both sidesism. Not only is it a clearly cut colonial war, as I guess Timothy Snyder was the first to have pointed out, it is also a genocide war with well-articulated extermination programme for Ukraine from the very start. Wucza, Irpin, Mariupol, all this, you know best, atrocities already performed by Russian troops in Ukraine, and those yet too await to be discovered on the now occupied territories. When Ukraine liberates the territories, where by no means incidental, actually they adjust the enactment of the Russian annihilation policy, which had been declared by the Russian authorities, many times before February 24, just not taken into full consideration by the rest of the world with due awareness. When Russians enter a village or a town now in Ukraine, they start with purges aimed at three categories of civilians of the civil population, the military, the priests of two independent Ukrainian churches, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine and the Great Catholic Church, and the intellectuals ranging from the school teachers of Ukrainian to the published authors. Among those first executed in Bucza was Alexander Kisluk, 60 years old translator of Tacitus and Xenophon into Ukrainian. In the similar cases are reported from the other places as they get liberated by the Ukrainian forces. In Heerson region, which is under the occupation, teachers are now compelled to teach students the Russian textbooks, and since the majority of teachers refuses, the proper teachers are being now brought from Russia to replace them, along with Russian journalists, Russian theatre directors, and other representatives, what is known as Russian culture and what is seen in Russia as soft power. Ukrainian books are being removed from libraries and destroyed. The procedure incidentally, which in the past eight years have been on a systematic regular basis is performed in Donbass, in this Russia-controlled, Russia-occupied territories in Donbass. Along with dismantling Ukrainian monuments, including the gravestones of the Donbass-born Soviet Ukrainian dissidents, and the memorials to the victims of the Grand Famine of 1933. These were clearly recognizable acts of cultural genocide, though on much lesser scale than now. And noteworthy, they were passing unnoticed for the rest of the world, as did, for instance, the attack on the Ukrainian library in Moscow back in October 2015, when the library was ransacked by the FSB Special Unit. Its director detained and varied not for my own books reported among once confiscated. I would have done probably seven years ago. Here, of this cultural purge, as little as you have in the United Kingdom. That's where I come to this very important question which has been occupying me for these six months. How come it's only now that the Kremlin's goal to destroy Ukrainian culture has become visible and subsequently has made visible the very fact that Ukraine does boast an ancient centuries-old gran culture which might make in the eyes of the imperialist neighbor a subject of the burning envy and of the herestratic desire to annihilate it. For let me reiterate, Putin does not do anything innovative. He's simply going on with the same annihilative politics which back in 1876 made Tsar Alexander II to sign the degree according to which supporting Ukrainian culture was qualified as criminal did and made the suspect subjected to legal persecution. The decree, the so-called M's decree was in place until the collapse of the Russian Empire. Then, of course, condemned by Lenin which helped him to gain the sympathies of the Ukrainian political elite of the time, then tacitly restored by Stalin under different names, of course, and up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ukrainian culture have been remaining in the endangered condition with some 400 cultural heritage sites demolished in Kiev alone. The figure comparable to the destructions made by the Russian troops in Ukraine in the past six months with bombs and missiles. So it's back to this practice that Putin's current imperial resentment and restoration ambition go. How come this cultural politics of Kremlin had flown under the radar, had been remaining unnoticed for nearly a century? We have recently marked the 70th anniversary of destroying the Ukrainian collection of National Museum in Lviv. On July 31, 1952 over 2,000 artworks from the so-called special fund, special holdings, the innovation of the Soviet censorship, mostly by the authors qualified as Orwellian non-persons due to their artistic or political choices. Among them, Alexander Archipenko, Kazimier Malevich and others, a perfect analogy to the Nazi degenerate art practice were destroyed within three days, paintings burned in the phoenixes, sculptures shattered with the hammers and swept away into the litter. Putin hasn't invented anything new. His army, be it soldiers, propagandists or teachers is going on with the same hammers if only symbolic ones. So how come the discussion on how to protect now Russian culture from symbolic consolation, so to speak, get much more media attention nowadays than how to stop the Russian cancellation of Ukrainian culture which is anything but symbolic. All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. We claim, we value all cultures, yet the claims that are not backed by tanks, missiles or tubes of money are much less likely to gain a hearing on the world stage. Here I can't but think about someone who was before Putin to have challenged our cultural awareness. I mean the Taliban's and the destruction of the Buddhas by Myanmar. For many Europeans then, it was the first time that they have learned about the existence of these statues. Needless to say, you cannot experience grievance about losing something you never knew it was there. The path to the tanks, that's my bad news, ladies and gentlemen, the path to the tanks has been paved by ignorance. And it's high time to review our libraries and our university programmes. And if I'm allowed to finish with some illustration to show you some pictures, to make my point clearer, here you can see the mosaic authored by Allahorskha, one of the leading Ukrainian artists of the 60s who was killed by the KGB in 1970. This individual terror against Ukrainian intellectuals had not been unusual at all at the time. These are the mosaics from her mosaics from Mariupol. And this is what has become of them now. 52 years after Horska was killed by the Kremlin. And I can't help from asking myself now seeing her being killed for the second time, seeing this double assassination. If the story of Horska and her generation of Ukrainian artists and intellectuals were present in the textbooks all over the world, could these masterpieces have been saved? Could they survive? I don't know the answer to this question, but I hope we'll be able to discuss it. Thank you. Thank you very much, Oxana. A very powerful contribution. I would now like to open the next session by going live to Kyff, where we will be joined by the Minister of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine, Olexander Tchenco. I would like to invite you to address the 2022 summit, Minister Tchenco. Thank you very much, colleagues, friends. Thank you for accepting me to be a digital delegate on this respectful forum. What I would like to say, two days ago we celebrated the city first anniversary of independence. Yes, it was a celebration during the war, because no one expected after February 24th we would celebrate this day. On this day, Russia greeted us with 59 rockets that were fired over the territory of the country. Air raid sirens sounded 189 times this day in the country, and the Ukrainians were forced to hide in shelters, journalists interrupted broadcasting and institutions stopped working. 22 innocent Ukrainian civilians, including children, were killed as a result of missiles attack on the railway stations on Independence Day. This is only one day. During the six months of war, air raid sirens in Ukraine lasted for 20 days. So many missiles were fired by Russians is difficult to count. Tens of hundreds, tens of thousands, but thousands of Ukrainians were killed on their own land. We are here today to talk about culture. For us, culture means freedom, and freedom is meaning of life for all Ukrainians. Russia is trying to destroy our culture and our freedom, our identity. It fights each day. More than 20 million people have fled their homes since Russian invasion to Ukraine. Russian invaders are almost completely destroyed by shellings and bombing and a number of Ukrainian cities. Volnovakh, Ochtyrka, Izum, Mariupol, while Kharkiv, Sumy and Ternigiv suffered catastrophic damages are under constant rocket shellings every day. Migration, unemployment and brain outflow are amongst the most serve issues we deal with in culture sphere. During six months of invasion, as Oksana mentioned, more than 460 culture crimes against Ukrainian heritage have already been recorded. And two of them I would like to mention specifically the museum in Skobradinavka we celebrate this year's 200th anniversary of famous Ukrainian philosopher. And museum of Maria Primochenka in Ivankiv region. Both of them are located in villages with no infrastructure around. And what we know 100% sure it was targeted specifically. Russian information has started a long time ago fighting with Ukraine. The Kremlin propagandistic machine never stopped bombing civilized world with fake news and manipulations spreading chaos and aggressive narratives. Today, Russia uses its great so-called in-breaks culture as a weapon and justification of war. They... In fact, they are trying to ruin the very concept of culture covering the bloody modus of Ukrainians with it. Mr Petrovsky, director of Russian Hermitage who is in close ties with Kremlin compared the expert of Russian culture as a special operation on his scandalous interview the same words they are using about war in Ukraine. Recently, during another speech Putin started... mentioned that Shostakovich Leningrad symphony continues to evoke the strongest feeling in new generations because it is about love for the motherland and the readiness to defend it implying that Shostakovich justified the war. The symbols that in support of war in Ukraine was placed in the facade of Oleg Tabakov Moscow Theatre. Russian culture is part of Russian military machine, unfortunately. And it cannot be divided into bad or good. There should be no questions as to why the world should cancel Russian culture until they wouldn't withdraw troops from Ukraine. Therefore, first of all, Europe should cancel Russian's visas and impose a ban on entering to EU. Every person who falls victim in this war is lost to other world culture. We are losing the knowledge this person had the traditions they carried. We need unified and concrete actions in supporting Ukrainian culture and informational sphere. Concrete to protect our people, artists, cultural managers, journalists that are eager to return to their work. They continue to live and work now in Ukraine. That's why Ukraine is fighting for culture and freedom not only for herself, but also for the whole civilized and free world. So we urgently need concrete help now in Ukraine. Thank you for your attention. Thank you Minister Tychenko. I would now like to invite Dr Maria Jackson, Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, United States of America to address the summit. Dr Jackson. Good afternoon. Right Honourable Alison Johnston, Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament and members of Parliament. Thank you for your invitation to join the Edinburgh International Cultural Summit and for this opportunity to address this distinguished group. I'm delighted to be in Edinburgh, a place so relevant to cultural vitality, the quest to balance preservation and innovation and the noble intent of advancing our humanity. It's a privilege to be here today and share some thoughts with you, especially in this moment, as we stand together to reaffirm our collective commitment to culture and freedom, not only in our own countries, but around the world. I want to take a moment to reflect on this past week Ukraine celebrated its National Independence Day at the same time that marked six months of Russia's full-scale invasion, the unprompted, horrific war. In this moment, we stand with Ukraine to support its people and especially its artists, cultural practitioners and communities. Today, in earlier sessions with an inspiring delegation from Ukraine, I was struck by the passion and commitment exhibited by the delegation and the reminder that arts and culture are core to our identities as nations and as a global community. I was struck by the role of artists, cultural workers, as a particular population and sector that warrants attention, investment, and its simultaneous critical role as contributors to building the world we want to inhabit. I was also struck by the necessity to think simultaneously about the need to tend to immediate needs, needs of survival, and the long-term need for planning and rebuilding, rebuilding communities that are healthy and opportunity-rich, communities where all people can reach their full potential, communities where our human interdependence is understood and communities where freedom rings. These global conversations remind me of why someone is me who's trained in urban planning and comprehensive community development chose to shape my career around arts and culture. My commitment to the arts started early and it started at home and it wasn't because my parents were artists or wealthy arts patrons. They turned to the arts within a U.S. context. They needed resources to help raise my brother and me, black and brown kids, to be proud of our cultures and recognize our common humanity with others, and they relied on the arts for this. So early on I understood that artists, culture bearers, designers were necessary in so many different ways. They helped us make sense of the world. They offered us different ways of thinking, feeling and being. They were a source of inspiration and innovation and they were critically important to our resilience and importantly, artists also helped us protect and advance our humanity. So early on in my career sometimes I was discouraged from a focus on the arts and I would have well-meaning colleagues say that you care about the causes and consequences of injustice. You want to address racist structures and improve neighborhoods. Why are you focusing on this arts and culture stuff as if I was off-mission? And I didn't have the words to explain myself early on but eventually I found the words and if you look around the world and throughout the ages in strategies to disempower, the first thing that is tampered with is one's ability to make meaning, to ask questions, to have aesthetics, to express yourself creatively, to do the things that we do through art. We see this today at a horrific scale in Ukraine and we see it in other ways around the world in other very insidious ways. So I always ask if it's so powerful that it has to be tampered with in order to control or oppress, why don't we understand it as core to building justice and building the communities that we want to see. I believe deeply that arts and culture are important and warrant attention period. I also believe deeply that at their most powerful the arts don't exist in a bubble. The arts have to be woven into what I think of as our social and civic infrastructure. And our social and civic infrastructure involves the mechanisms and relationships that we rely on to care for each other. The arts are often preconditions necessary for so much of what we say we want to achieve as a just society. And engagement in the arts we know cultivates curiosity, empathy, imagination, the ability to hold nuance, both individual and collective agency. Engagement in the arts is critical to our health and our well-being and to our economies, but it's also critical to helping us get unstuck. It's critical to helping us see things differently, to behave differently and land places where we haven't landed before. From my perch at the National Endowment for the Arts, I think about the idea of freedom through the lens of advancing artful lives. I think about building healthy arts ecosystems that support the connection between the arts and other sectors. Education, health, economic development, transportation, environment, so many of the issues that we must tend to. And I think that considering the integration of arts culture and design now feels particularly important and generative at a time when we have to tend to the immediate and also plan for the future. So this is a time where there's an opportunity to perhaps not do what we have always done and an edict to repair. So the question that I often ask is can we resist the impulse to just go back to business as usual? Or can we actually learn from the lessons available to us and proceed in a way that's informed by our examined experience? So the invitation or perhaps the obligation is to pause and consider what must we see differently? How do we devise newer different ways of working because we have to do this in order to do the real work of repair? So I'm inspired by our leaders in Ukraine and hopeful that the artists who are stepping up to respond and help us imagine a different way of moving forward, that they actually signal stepping into a new space, a new age. I'm inspired by the work that we might do together as global citizens and mindful of the challenges ahead. I'm also deeply hopeful about what's possible. Thank you. Thank you, Dr Jackson. I'd now like to invite Peter Glinsky, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Culture from Poland to speak. Ladies and gentlemen, Poland and Polish society is absolutely appalled by the unprovoked attack by the Russian Federation on our direct neighbour, Ukraine. All Poles are deeply touched and horrified by the human tragedies taking places right next to us. The scale of engagement of Polish citizens to provide aid to the fighting Ukraine is unprecedented in the world's history. 70% of Poles have been involved in refugees during the first three months of the war. They were engaged at the massive scale in relief actions, money collections, purchases and transportation of essential items and last but foremost, providing their own housing to the refugees. Despite the huge influx of people fleeing the war, about five million refugees, no refugee camps were established on the Polish territory. Polish citizens dedicated around 1.5 billion euro for those activities and the Polish government allocated over 5 billion euro in help for Ukraine. When it comes to culture, I'm firmly convinced that there is no place in Poland nor should it be in any other country for institutional cooperation with representatives of the Russian regime. In view of the crimes of war committed every day in Ukraine, there is no moral ground for presenting works of Russian artists and Russian culture in general. Moreover, I believe the sanctions, also the ones in the field of culture, are crucial. Russian broadcasters should be blocked across the world in order to limit the spread of propaganda. In the times of war, when there is no doubts who the aggressor is, we should all declare clearly what we stand for. We must help Ukrainians in promoting and celebrating their national culture. As an example of good practice, let me mention the exhibition by Ukrainian folk artist Maria Primashenko, whose works were rescued from the museum which was burned down by a Russian attack. This exhibition was followed by other projects presenting works of contemporary Ukrainian artists. Another 11th example is a joint initiative of the Grand Theatre, National Opera in Warsaw and the Metropolitan Opera in New York which decided to establish the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, comprised of leading Ukrainian instrumentalists, some of whom were recent refugees. The musicians have been preparing and inaugurated their tour in Warsaw and continue their tour in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, the Netherlands and the US. We also support continuously Ukrainian orchestras, theatre groups and numerous individual artists who are currently living in Poland thanks to special scholarships organised by the Polish Ministry of Culture. In order to assist Ukraine more effectively, we have established the Polish Support Centre for Culture in Ukraine. The Centre coordinates domestic and foreign initiatives. Our institutions are in permanent contact with the Ukrainian counterparts and immediately react to reported needs. So far, the Centre has already assisted over 100 Ukrainian institutions and dispatched several thousand convoys with materials useful for protection of monuments and exhibits. It is worth underlining how far the Polish government allocated millions of euros in various types of relief activities in the cultural sector, but also activities not limited to immediate help. For instance, one million euro was allocated at the disposal of the Fund to support digitalisation of cultural heritage sites and objects in Ukraine. I strongly believe that this will mark the beginning of a new chapter in Ukrainian history with Ukraine being a strong and secure European state with its development warranted not only by the heroism and sacrifice of its citizens, but also by international structures. Based on these secure fundaments, Ukrainian culture should flourish and become stronger than ever before. All international community should help Ukraine to achieve this goal. I would now like to invite the first of our youth delegates to address the 2022 summit. The summit is particularly proud of the work that is done with young leaders from the cultural and policy sectors. I am therefore delighted to invite Heba Alwadi to speak. Heba is one of the cast members of the Trojan women project and has brought an old tale from an ancient civilisation, Syria, to life in contemporary Scotland. Heba was born in Syria but now lives in Scotland where she is studying psychology at Glasgow Caledonian University. Heba. Hello everyone. It's nice to meet you all and I really appreciate the chance for being here today in the summit for the second time in a row. Who am I? My heart was in pieces each part with someone with some place. The most significant part of my heart was and still is our dream of a free country with dignity. I am utterly incapable of changing this reality. I live like I'm blind with broken feet. I can't look at my homeland just stepping away across the border. I don't feel like a human. That I have the right to live. I carry the status of refugee now, a strange feeling. I feel like a feather in this world. At any moment I can be thrown aside. Why? Because I'm Syrian. All we wanted and dreamed of was a free country. I never stopped believing in having the right of freedom through my journey. I had lots of questions. Will Scotland like new people? What about the Scottish people? Will they welcome us? Or will they be scared of Arabs? I tried to be optimistic. My heart was reassured when I felt welcomed. People here accepted me the way I am without any conditions. I grew up creating my second Scottish Syrian identity, embracing Scotland with her eastern and eastern food. Style, songs, love, culture and freedom. This is the sixth year for me here in Scotland. I am part of its people. I'm its daughter. I share with Scotland my deepest thoughts. I speak to her a lot and I know she is listening. She never refuses me and embraces me with open arms. My warm city. I walk in your streets for hours. Speak into your corners and you always embrace me and share my hopes and prayers. I was tired, so tired and today I am safe. Your landmarks are my home. You sing to me every day and fill my heart with hope. Do not regret to dream of staying strong to carry your heart and the pride to be a free human being. We dare to dream and never regret to get dignity. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Heba. I'd now like to introduce Marina Crut, a bandura virtuosa who will perform from the gallery. Marina is more famously known as Crut B is a renowned Ukrainian singer and songwriter. Thank you, my name is Marina Crut. I'm Ukrainian, currently live in Ukraine. I'm an Ukrainian artist. In my hand, Ukrainian traditional instrument called bandura. I play on this instrument more than 18 years. I visited all the country and more than three continents. Also I'm a volunteer. This is a beautiful instrument with ethnocod, Ukrainian ethnocod and also with many strings. 65. Yes. Also like all Ukrainian people, now I'm a volunteer. So two weeks ago I was in Donetsk region playing for our break guys and women who fighting for our freedom. I say, I say to Alexander and Oksana, Ukraine need help. When Russian troops came to our land they want to kill not just our body and catch our territory. They want to kill our culture. So price, so high. Thank you. I just want to say you, like a woman, like a Ukrainian artist, just like a people, thank you for everything what you give to Ukraine. Thank you for support. Sao Ogrinia. Thank you for the contribution and performance. Thank you. Now to lead us into the next session that I would like to invite Sir Jonathan Mills, programme director for the Edinburgh International Culture Summit to give an overview of what we should expect over the next three days before we hear from a number of keynote speakers on the other themes that combine to form this year's summit. Sir Jonathan Mills Your Excellencies, my lords, ladies and gentlemen, may I add my very warm welcome to those of the Presiding Officer, the Prime Minister, the Deputy First Minister, the Cabinet Secretary and the Minister of State for the Arts. The presence of delegations and representatives from 29 countries is an indication of the significant international interest in the work of the summit and in the work of Edinburgh in August. Even when travel continues to be challenging. As the Presiding Officer observed, Summit 2022 was always planned as a hybrid event, we are especially delighted that so many of you are with us in person and looking forward to a very stimulating dialogue. I am particularly grateful to the participation of the Deputy Minister of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine, Galina Grigorenko. Welcome. It seems totally inadequate to mention now after the extraordinary passionate addresses we've had. But when I was a music student in Sydney in the late 1980s, our tight-knit group was augmented in second year by the arrival of a larger than life musician called Victor. He was Ukrainian. He was accompanied by a strange instrument whose identity was obscured by its travel case. Its shape and size being entirely unfamiliar. Was it an overblown French horn? Some strange gigantic loot? Or a pair of colossal symbols? It was a bandura. The distinctive Ukrainian instrument that was prohibited and purged throughout Ukraine from the 1930s. 200,000 bandura players killed. Two and a half million of the instrument smashed. The same instrument that you just heard, Marina Crut play a moment ago. In revealing this instrument Victor forced a bunch of laid-back complacent Aussie teenagers to confront the inconvenient truths and uncomfortable situation of artistic censorship and suppression. He revealed the dangers associated with playing his instrument. The very notion of being censored or worse seriously injured or killed just for plucking a few strings on a plank of wood was simply beyond the comprehension of an Australian in the late 1980s. I would like to think it's still beyond our comprehension today. Earlier this morning the summit co-hosted a cultural leadership dialogue with the Ukrainian Institute. It was a deeply moving occasion especially for those of us who live in countries free from armed conflict. It was a rare opportunity to listen and to learn and to consider the importance of culture and identity in the lives of individuals in myriad places throughout the world. Over the next three days I learned that discussion from culture and freedom to its associated components culture and education and culture and sustainability. Culture and education is an expression and a way by which we achieve freedom and culture and freedom and culture and education are the best ways to ensure that we live in a sustainable community. You will hear and meet a choreographer, an environmental scientist, a diplomat and several entrepreneurial musicians who are passionate about the relationships between land and language, sky and sea, oceans and music, mountains and sculpture. You will also hear from a virtuoso violinist several economists a finance minister cutting edge technical technology entrepreneur and up comic to encourage us to think more creatively about the role that culture plays in the education of children how digital technology and video games can be especially useful to encouraging an awareness of our own particular cultural inheritances. This year the summit celebrates ten years of existence. Previous summits have invited a diverse range of artists to address a broad series of questions of relevance to the cultural sector. Culture is an international dialogue in 2012. Culture a currency of trust in 2014. Culture building resilient communities in 2016. Culture connecting peoples and places in 2018 and a special digital edition in 2020 the transformational power of culture. All of these topics I think suggest a coming together, a bringing together a cohesiveness culture brings different communities. What are the lessons I take from these diverse and inspiring conversations that we live in a world where no single culture, ideology theocracy or politics will be all pervasive or dominant a world in which knowledge comes from hugely diverse sources and locations. The abundant example of the artists administrators, policymakers and politicians at culture summits in the last decade is that we can indeed must learn from each other. The comparing best practice from wherever that might occur exploring how to adapt a great idea or innovative policy in very different contexts to always keeping an open mind most definitely yields benefits to every citizen in every community throughout the world. The German sociologist best known for his work on international defence and security Ulrich Beck expresses it this way as he implores us to have the courage to make use of one's cosmopolitan vision and to acknowledge one's multiple identities to combine forms of life founded on language, skin, colour, nationality or religion with the awareness that in a radically insecure world all are equal everyone is different. Summit 2022 coincides with the 75th anniversary of the Edinburgh International Festival a celebration that owes its origins to the profound desire to rebuild a sense of community in a continent that had been torn at Bahat by the tragedy of World War II. On behalf of its founding partners the British Council, the Scottish Parliament the Scottish and UK Governments the summit offers its heartfelt congratulations to the festival on its success and resilience over so many decades. In practical terms this summit is in two parts a series of short public presentations here in the debating chamber along the lines you've just heard these are the impetus for longer and more detailed discussions and debates in which you will participate in private session. The work of the summit is supported by the independent charity on behalf of the summit partners I would like to thank the trustees of the foundation alongside all our corporate philanthropic individual supporters for their contributions to Summit 2022. We wish you all in your deliberations at the Edinburgh International Culture Summit and hope that your time wish you well at the summit and hope that your time in Scotland is inspiring and rewarding. I have a quick video to show you some of the highlights over the last 10 years. I cannot think of a better place in which to discuss the international dimension of culture that is a city which welcomes so many artists from so many countries everywhere. I believe that the world is essentially a reflection of our hearts of our dreams, our fears, our threats and our experiences. The Hindu mind in the ancient reading times regarding culture is a balanced view of life where real and false values were not confused. Culture relations provide the opportunity for us to open up vistas of experiences and to negotiate differences and adjust and accommodate each other's priorities. We have strong evidence that music training in childhood facilitated language learning, reading readiness and general intellectual development. Participation in the dance program re-inscribes a sense of possibility, self-worth, even hope in the face of the generous bonus. Getting the framework right but not taking into account the nature and quality of the experience means we seriously undervalue the most important things which the arts can do for us as human beings. A nation that refuses to learn from other cultures is nothing but a nation of idiotic lunatics. How do we create optimism again? How do we believe that humans could be in love with other humans? And many things evolved from that moment and the South Bank centre was one of them, in fact the Edinburgh Festival was another. Music is also the unique spiritual language capable of bringing peace to our hearts. Music is a fundamental to human life. Why has man always gone to the fire side? Why do we have these things? Television and movies and plays and music and art and dancing. Being part of the future of these communities and the vitality of them. For me arts and culture is not a luxury that you can dispense with. It is as essential as the air we breathe as the water we thirst for. The key for me to creativity to learning is to listen. So the idea to keep in your mind as we move into this new period is so many of the things around us today that look strange or unusual or unnerving are not one-off things. They are expressions of this underlying shift of power that will be as dramatic and significant as the Enlightenment itself. The role of culture in such an era is really the thing that allows human society to progress through these massive step chains and what it fundamentally means to be alive and beyond the server. Thank you Mr Jonathan for that overview and for the compilation of images from previous summits. It's fair to say that we've already heard many inspirational and important contributions this afternoon. I'm delighted that that will continue of course as we lead into the next theme and I'm pleased to be able to invite our next speaker Nicola Benedetti, violinist and director-designate of the International Festival to address the summit on the theme of culture and education, Nicola. Thank you so much. I would like to say I am deeply, deeply humbled to be speaking to you all today. Everything heard so far has been moving and inspirational and life changing quite literally. Thank you so much for your words. I would also like to say as a Scott how proud I am that Edinburgh is the home to this summit and has achieved all that we've just seen and thank you so much to Jonathan for everything you've done. This cultural summit is born in Edinburgh but what is housed here is owned and shared universally. The collective stories of this city of all of those who have roamed its beautiful streets absorbed its spirit felt and sensed their way deep into its wisdom and humour and darkness and light. The individuals that possessed the audacity to dream of a fairer world and enlightened world in our most recent past of these last 75 years the thousands upon thousands of artistic presentations and interpretations of those stories. All of this reaches far back into our ancient primal history and propels us into our imagined future. We are not only our lives we are physical manifestations of a global and timeless collective experience. Every story in all its particulars and all its complexities every mythic creature in all its imagined iterations each differentiation of each human being our unique features and characteristics each nation with its values and borders and laws and belief systems and flags and road signs and customs celebrates the wild, unruly, stubborn, nuanced unpredictable diversity of humanity. But at the base of all of that diversity and colour we find a streamlined dense core our DNA no matter which corner of this earth you or your parents or your parents parents were born is 99.9% identical not similar but identical So when speaking to the invisible but thoroughly truthful part of our existence the parts we cannot see nor touch but that are the essence of who we are is the same not true our experiences of love hate birth, death greed, hunger, envy and loss this dense core of accumulated shared experiences is what binds us all it builds deepens, churns hardens and repeats its pain and its beauty across the world and across time so when we use the term arts and culture we speak of the highest most beautiful and revealing telling of these tales now I am a musician first and foremost not a speaker and have the honour of representing a universal language that is as old as we are a symbolic distillation and refinement of what we have to offer the world and an intensification of our human experience and walking through the chaos of Edwin's streets during this time we encounter countless people testing and honing their craft virtuosity and vulnerability in all its forms and thousands more visit this city here to view and appreciate the diversity of talent the old and the new all mixed up together because we all know that what has been will in some reimagined form be alive again we know that nothing and everything living within that dense core of commonality that 99.9% sameness is truly new but we need the reassurance and we need the repetition through education, through art through culture of all the things that keep us moving and keep us reaching just like in a yoga pose stretching in two opposite directions at once in search of balance in search of our life's challenge and the essence of its meaning I was asked to speak on culture and education to very very large subjects but let's just consider the facts around our gathering here this afternoon the effort expended by so many present here today to leave family and friends to get on flights to venture into the land of whisky and Haggis to hear and for some of us to tolerate the inescapable bagpipes that are on a loop to decode our strong accents negotiate the hills and steps and cobbles to be herded along in the shadows of so many grandiose statues and ancient castles if we consider our choice to leave probably much warmer and more friendly weather for this fickle Scottish climate our being here is in itself a shining symbol of international citizenship and true universality of a cosmopolitan will to contribute to offer what we feel what we know and certainly what we believe to other like spirited citizens not to participate in an exchange of hearts and of minds our very presence here today says that we are committed to a journey of development and improvement that we want to change for the better just being here clearly demonstrates our humility and our curiosity this gathering is a collective pledge towards our belief in something greater towards the belief that through embodying universality and enacting connectivity with all its messiness and colourfulness and disagreeableness we grow we grow through that process and if we can sit with strong and opposing views we can and we will be better now education can be a cold and dry word that can sometimes inspire a passive vibe within us and I don't know what comes to mind when you think of education of teaching learning passing on the sharing of information now one of the dearest people to me my duo partner plays piano and is Ukrainian and I have toured with for many many years and is one of the most phenomenal musicians he studied in Kiev with a great but strict and fairly controlling teacher this teacher was the authority on what she said it should go like he experienced many different educational formats throughout his life and was shocked to discover its diversity and the dialogue in learning that could also be determined in the answering and asking questions within oneself watching Alex say play and watching him teach now is an entire series of questions answers he is disinterested in forcing any idea on any student unless that idea is that they must themselves think and answer those questions there are so many other examples of the term education for Socrates the role of a teacher was akin to that of a midwife implying you have something within you that only requires bringing forth or for Levinas said that teaching is the presence of infinity being the closed circle of totality in other words through education are we in fact trying to open windows into worlds you would never dream of yourself or as one of my dearest friends would say all of life is your education learning how to cook a meal through calling your mum is an education something I do on a very regular basis we are all seeking education all the time just in my time here last week what I have observed and experienced in Edinburgh through the various festivals in this lock heads production of Midea at the Hub a contemporary reading of an ancient Greek play the uses of space the abundance of creativity and invention I left questioning my own perspective on sanity on the justifying of our behaviors we inflict upon ourselves and those around us the moving goalpost of right and wrong the interpreting and twisting of truths as we see it and the power of some of our worst traits and inflections but also the power of the ancient care taking bard the role of the nurse the persuasions of a chorus of voices although in Midea's case they are ultimately unsuccessful or the newly written work Samsara at the beautiful Lyceum Theatre Samsara meaning world the telling of the concept of rebirth and the cyclical nature of life matter and existence the virtuosity of two strong expressive figures how moving their lifelong commitment to their skill is for all of us in the audience and the story they told the tracing of the steps we take both forward and backwards or for me speaking more personally the performance that I gave alongside the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in the Usher Hall playing Brooks Filing Concerto that certainly taught me something about rising to an occasion something about nerves something about pressure and something about sharing collectively with audiences and experience our life is our education and with those fundamental components that are home to this summit curiosity and humility we will be educated and we can educate this summit was founded on those principles and an acceptance of a view that is not one's own ideas, expertise and best practices are shared here and its objectives encourage an openness within all of us it attacks and dismantles the innate conventional and hierarchical thinking we all possess in some form and gifts us the opportunity to reconsider the fundamentals that we may confuse with absolute truth or true reality the stated agenda to be deliberately non-partisan and pragmatic should not be confused with a dry, dispassionate exercise everything experienced here today speaks to that of course and knowing Jonathan Mills and other founding figures they are full of heart and in spirited with the heat of contrapuntal discourse and their fibre this gathering takes us and tasks us with balancing passion and pragmatism now this rolls off the tongue quite easily but it is always a precarious vulnerable, effortful undertaking like playing in an ensemble musicians that touch the spirit only appears when you are able to listen as hard as you play when you are able to play soft with the loudest possible intensity inside your own body whilst being so detached from your singular identity you have moved into that of your colleagues and into that of the composer if we circle back again and reconsider the efforts it took for us to gather here let's extend the momentum of that effort in improving the quality of the internal lives of those we encounter turning this dialogue and these debates the power and intensity of the collective vision within this room into actionable tangible change that people can feel and touch and spread further we have a lot against us in this time and contrary to a lot of thinking it is actually a breeding ground for apathy and for giving up for selfishness for exploitation of people's minds and of preservation over creation but it is precisely in these times that we have to imagine harder we have to dream harder we have to hope harder and work harder and find a deeper dedication to our integrity to really share and to truly bring more people in always always requires sacrifice but equally to carry out any mission with absolute integrity also requires sacrifice so my pledge is for us to double down in our various good willed fights to always aspire to raise the horizons of those we have the fortune to impact in practice in practice and in action to share with just as much passion as humility the best of what we know to share is to educate this is a lifelong and sometimes thankless pursuit but I believe that we are all here tied in this pursuit together which makes the road a lot less lonely so I look forward to walking down it alongside you all thank you so much thank you very much indeed Nicola I would now like to invite the second of our speakers today on culture and education Yoshiki Takuchi Deputy Secretary General of the OECD thank you thank you Madam chair ladies and gentlemen I would like to start by joining others expressing OECD's strong support to Ukraine and your people and I'm honored to be here for the 2022 Edinburgh international culture summit when the summit was formed 10 years ago it was to acknowledge the value of culture and encourage dialogues among nations to enrich lives of the people around the world and to contribute to our well-being those goals are important today as they have ever been too often however despite all the evidence to the country the culture is overlooked it represents a policy blind spot a nice to have last to invest first to cut in the budget line and we don't have to look very far to see the evidences OECD is an evidence-based institution so let me give you some numbers look at Edinburgh Edinburgh is today an international beacon for culture its festivals generate around one third of a billion pounds for the local economy and Edinburgh is not alone indeed culture and creative sectors accounts for around 5.5% of the EU's gross value added and up to 1 in 10 jobs in some cities such as Berlin for example but even that underestimates the real value of culture and creativity around 40% of culture and creativity employment for example is outside of the sector itself for example the industrial designers working in the automotive industry they are also culture and creative employment but we should be we are not quite aware of these huge number of employment moreover the sector generates significant knowledge spillovers for example here in the UK research and development projects by the BBC have driven software innovations across 53 countries contributing to striving tech startup ecosystems around the growth and then there is the fact that the sector itself is a magnet making our cities our regions more attractive and drawing visitors, tourist skilled workers and investment that support your economic ecosystem as Edinburgh itself demonstrates but these economic factors that is only the half of the things that culture brings together the social impact of culture is just as impressive as the economic benefit culture helps new perspectives and new solutions to the challenges we face this includes tackling exclusion and its isolation and improving health and social cohesion as many of us witnessed first hand during the Covid crisis let me give you an example indeed in Quebec museum visits are prescribed by the doctors to treat certain conditions and in France there is a long standing cooperation between and culture ministries to bring cultures benefits to retirement houses in a nutshell the culture and creative sectors are a powerhouse that can drive better economic and social outcomes globally and locally and before the pandemic driven by growing appetite for cultural products the sector was doing just that household spending some recreation culture grew by 18% between 2011 and 2019 twice as fast as overall spending accounting for nearly a tenth of all household spending across the OECD in 2019 this in turn drives higher rate of new firm creations and employment than the less of the economy but the sector was hit hard by the pandemic with household spending falling by 30% on average across OECD countries the current cost of living crisis across the globe is likely to add further pressure but as I hope I have made clear the impacts of construction go beyond economic impacts important though they are the unaffected cost will also be felt on other sectors as we lose the source of innovation as well as on health well being and social cohesion so let us use this platform of this summit to make the case for culture together and to shape the policies that will help it thrive in the years to come let me highlight four key recommendations for our recent report the culture fix first we need to embed a focus on culture across government departments and ministries let me give you two examples in health policy innovative use of creative content and virtual reality and cultural perspectives are increasingly being used and in the environment policy the power of culture to shape the attitudes and behaviors is being harnessed to help address the climate emergency second we need to address the sector's longstanding challenges for example we need to protect the human capital by improving contract stability and access to social protections for the sector's employees who are twice as likely to be self-employed as those in other professions we also need to improve the sector's infrastructure including the digital infrastructure third we need to do more to recognize and support the role of sub-national governments in nurturing the culture and creative sectors actually sub-national governments accounted for almost 60% of the economic expenditure when it comes to cultural services in 2019 across OECD finally although this is improving we need to continue to invest in improving the evidence on the economic and social impact of culture this will allow to shed light on those buying spots that are holding us back from leveraging on the sector's full potential so let me conclude ladies and gentlemen the full value of culture and creativity is often underappreciated by policy makers and we are all the more poorer for it today's summit provides another important opportunity to continue to raise the awareness of this multiple impacts multiple benefits and in turn strengthen our support for them and the ability to support our economies and societies the OECD will continue to provide evidence and guidance to cities, regions and governments on ways to maximise the economic and social value of cultural heritage and creative economy thank you very much thank you very much indeed we are now going to explore the theme of culture and sustainability and I'd like to introduce our next two speakers Lemmy Ponifasio choreographer, founder and director of MAU Dance Theatre originally from Samoa and now based in Auckland, New Zealand and Dr Yelina Poigau who is a scientist in green sustainable chemistry from Glasgow please make your way to the lectern thank you both it is indeed a pleasure for me to stand before you all representing my region, Oceania region the people of pacific islands as mentioned my name is Dr Yelina Poigau I am a sustainable scientist specialising in green chemistry today I have the pleasure to speak to all about sustainability in the pacific islands now just to give a background on our Oceania region I am sure some of you know where we are located we are in the pacific ocean and the Oceania region is divided into three sub regions we have the Melanesian people Polynesians and then we have the Micronesia now you can see we are a large we are a large amount of people we are in the pacific ocean and we are comprised of three sub regions now we have heard a lot about different arts and cultures and of course today I will speak to about sustainability now first of all I would like to just highlight why you should all care about the pacific region or the Oceania region well the pacific ocean of course it helps to regulate the global climate and is also the largest storage of carbon we have the pacific ocean which provides very rich fishing grounds 70% of the world's global catch we have the pacific ocean which is the largest in the world and provides sea transportation from east to west pacific islands are also rich in gold, silver copper and other very rare metals we also supply the world with oil and gas and we are food baskets and because we have vast virgin tropical rainforest of course it helps to absorb carbon dioxide and we of course offer the world so much more now we have this great issue of climate change and we have all been talking about it for a very long time however it has been affecting the pacific islands for a very long time now I'm sure you have come across this image before where we have the minister from Tuvalu who spoke at the COP26 meeting he gave his speech from the sea of course because you have the sea level rises and our islands are sinking in the pacific so because pacific islands are spread across throughout the pacific ocean and because of the rise in sea levels this has caused us to be extremely vulnerable to climate change now the entire Oceania region it only contributes 0.03% of the total greenhouse gases however we are the ones who suffer the most now it has drastically affected our way of life which of course it entails our cultural identity and also it affects our overall sustainable development of our region now today I will just highlight a couple of challenges that we face on land and also on sea the challenges that we face mainly on land are the clean water shortages of course we have our small island nations where we have a rise in sea level it contaminates the entire freshwater supplies and causes our water supplies to decrease we also have extreme weather events I'm sure you've seen across maybe across some different issues that we face with problems across the pacific for different countries where we have extreme droughts floods and heat waves it is also a cost problem with our food production where we have our farmlands to be become salinated by the salt water coming in from the ocean we also have a problem in a decrease in our biodiversity land erosion health problems and so much more now for the challenges faced on water of course we are the people of the pacific we mainly depend on our fishing so the people of pacific we depend on our fish for food and also to sustain our livelihoods a lot of us of course we come from developing countries in the pacific islands where we depend on the sale of fish in order to sustain our living we also have a decrease in biodiversity because of the drastic effects are mainly in our seas rivers and you can see that we also have of course our fresh water supplies are even decreasing as well and we have the major problem of our climate change and we also have a decrease in biodiversity because of the drastic effects mainly in our seas rivers and you can see that we also have and we have the major problem of our ocean acidification now how do we act we the people of pacific we have come up with also solutions but we need to act now because we have to protect our islands in order for us to have sustainable lives and of course in order to protect our culture and our identity now of course we have these climate agreements with things have started to go into play back in Paris and also we have the recent COP26 meetings we also have to protect our water sources by doing our own sustainable ways by planting vegetation to act as buffer sources and also build barriers because we have the salt water coming in and contaminating our water we the pacific are resilient people so we have come up with of course going back to how we did our traditional culture practices where we use traditional agroforestry practices for crops and trees to grow weather tolerant foods we also have to protect our vulnerable areas we have plenty of our islands which are of course syncing Kiribati, Marshall islands to Valu these are some of examples so we have to come up with ways to protect our vulnerable areas we also have climate change plans where pacific islands of course are producing plans pacific island nation governments in talks with each other to upgrade infrastructure great for climate change refugees and of course we have to create awarenesses to our people that in order to maintain our cultural identity to protect our traditional ways we are suffering climate change and of course in order to do that we have to educate everyone around us on how we can adapt to sustainability and how to do it effectively now pacific islanders we are resilient people despite all that has happened to us we still hold on to our culture traditions and beliefs very close to us we are very rich and diverse in culture we speak many languages I'll give an example my country Papua New Guinea alone speaks almost 900 languages spread in only 8 million people so the entire area of the pacific we are traditionally diverse we are lovely people and we are very resilient despite all that has happened to us so we continue to fight climate change try to come up with adaptable ways to survive and also continue our cultural heritage thank you I am Salah Bonitasio I come from Samoa I am a Matai or a chief of Samoa I carry the title Salah Salah is the name of the original ancestor my name Salah is the proof of the continued existence of my people and their connection and belonging to the Fanua Fanua is where we are born from the Fanua is the land the sky, the sea, the mountain who I am is the ecosystem it is where we orient ourselves the Fanua is home my name is from the Fanua the Fanua is where we know who we are the Fanua is our identity the Fanua gives us shelter the Fanua maintains the dignity of my people and harmony with the earth we don't have a word for nature we refer to our bodies as Fanua the word for my blood is pala pala pala pala means earth new words from England have replaced Fanua with real estate or property blood doesn't mean earth in the English language I am part of earth that stands up and walk and I will return to lie down when death arrives I am so back into the land grateful to have been part of this miracle called life my standpoint from a particular Cosmovision a particular spiritual tradition and a particular environmental position my beliefs how I animate my life and how I relate with the world were born from and coloured by the Samoan Islands and the ocean surrounded it called Moana this Cosmovision and Wisdom have enabled Samoans to live within the rules and rhythm of earth for thousands of years 17 years ago I was working on the island of Tarawa in Kiripas Kiripas of course is known more to the world now because it seems to be the first country that is going to disappear absorbed back into the ocean on my first day there I decided to go for a walk on the beach put my feet into the water I saw from distant birds were landing and taking off it was not possible to go to the water because in front of me was a mountain of plastic and broken tanks from the world war 2 so I sat on a rock and watched the birds as the sun was setting quickly I noticed the birds in a very golden light were picking up and carrying things that appeared to be like liquid in fact what they were carrying were VHS tapes in their mouths I thought about the final migrations I thought about the presence of ancestors I thought about the epic journey of the conference of the birds I thought about particularly and the very damaged buried venus I wanted to create a ceremony a prayer an apology a celebration, a preparation a sacrifice I wanted to communicate with something more divine I wanted to talk with the cosmos I felt the manure I felt the flesh of existence Sir Jonathan Mills visited me in Auckland where I work to invite me to the Edinburgh festival he asked me what I was doing and I said I am creating a work called birds with sky mirrors can we play that? please this work was presented up the road at the play house theatre to enable the spiritual transformation of the people and communities I work with and the audience who experience it spiritual here I'm not referring to religion but beliefs and practices that animate and integrate people's lives these spiritualities are constantly moving and changing in our relationship with their existence people coming to the theatre are not just wanting distractions or comfort but are seeking spiritual transformation theatre music dance, chant ceremonies these are prayers for spiritual transformation why do we do this? it is not possible to change human behaviour without reviewing our spirituality we cannot just hope to techno fix span and policy make our way out of climate emergency corporate greed picketry and racist violence blind hatred or crushing despair and loneliness we need to reform our spiritualities if our spirit is sick our behaviour will be unhealthy for spiritual transformation our tasks as artists and leaders is to find a way to improve the quality of how the people feel hear, see and touch the world how do you touch the world what is our human role on earth for we are not lords vandals or managers of earth we are part of the process of earth and these process have been here long before us and they will be here long after we are gone it feels like we are losing our attention empathy connection to earth and to each other the devastating way we treat the environment mirrors how we are treating each other art is a fight to restructure the order to regenerate what has been destroyed and create a reconnection a kinship with all existence the artist is never neutral you are always on the side of beauty of justice and of truth in art we are made to look at the wounds and heard of life and we begin to imagine how to transcend to healing and a more beautiful truthful condition just like an old rusted car in a rubbish dump an artist will take it work with it transform it and present a new vision of this old dead car as a work of art a thing of beauty and truth this discarded car makes a new life so art is a spiritual process where we reimagine ourselves and our world and where we can rewrite our story art gives us a second chance thank you Dr Gow for so profoundly and strongly setting the scene for our further deliberations on the subject culture and sustainability I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all the speakers and delegates very much for your contributions today and we'll be looking forward to further in-depth discussions over the next few days before we move on to the next part of today's proceedings we're going to take the official summit photograph here in the chamber and following the photograph a member of the Parliament's events team will guide you to where you need to be next but I would now like to close the opening plenary of the 2022 Edinburgh International Culture Summit thank you