The event - of an international nature - has managed to highlight this heritage and significantly increase the new additions of material to the archive itself or the visits on the web to the registry of old photos
The Minister of Industry assures that the commitment of the Cabildo, through Fedac, is to “teach our history through photography and become a reference archive in the region”
The Minister of Industry, Crafts and Commerce, Minerva Alonso, today presented the VI Conference on Photographic Heritage of the Canary Islands, an international event that brings together in Gran Canaria the main managers of the photographic heritage of the Atlantic at the Casa de Colón between the days March 29 and 31, under the title “Macaronesia, photography on the islands of happiness.”
Since 2018, the Cabildo of Gran Canaria, through the Fedac Photographic Archive, has been celebrating these Conferences to value this heritage, because as the counselor explained, “in the Cabildo we continue with the same task through Fedac, teach our history through photography and become a reference archive in the region.” Objective that is being achieved as demonstrated by all the new additions of material to the archive itself - from around 200 thousand in 2018 to more than one million in 2022 - and the increase, for example, in the number of web visits to the registry of old photos, which has gone from 50.000 to 450.000 in just four years.
In this sixth, the days are dedicated to the islands of happiness, which is the name by which Europeans have called the Atlantic African archipelagos since classical antiquity. A collective European imagination - locating paradise on our islands - that was republished for centuries until it became, in the second half of the 20th century, part of the marketing that attracts millions of European tourists. The appearance of photography in the mid-19th century led to the creation of colonial iconography regarding these archipelagos during the first capitalist globalization.
In this edition, therefore, a reflection is proposed about how the populations of these territories have internalized the iconography of the colonial period, incorporating it into their own collective imagination and their identity, the latter being converted into another element of the respective socioeconomic fabrics. and productive.
For this, renowned specialists in the field from the Azores, Canary Islands, Cape Verde, Madeira, Sao Tomé, Equatorial Guinea, Senegal, Mauritania, Cuba, Portugal, Catalonia and Spain will participate, who will give their presentations in the morning at the Casa de Colón in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria between March 29 and 31, reserving the afternoons for two workshops on digitalization and management of photographic heritage.
“Over the last 15 years, Gran Canaria has become an international benchmark in the management of this heritage and the Canary Islands Photographic Heritage Days are already a classic in the cultural life of the Atlantic archipelagos,” said Gabriel Betancor, technician. of audiovisuals of the Fedac.
