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PRINCE CLAUS FUND
What beauty creates – happiness, comfort and respect – is the opposite of what war engenders, namely: misery, death and unhappiness.
The first organisation to lend financial support to the NairoBits project was the Prince Claus Fund. Its core mission, ‘increasing cultural awareness and promoting exchange between culture and development,’ found almost perfect resonance in the original NairoBits proposal to give ‘unheard’ young people from Nairobi slums a voice, a creative outlet on internet,which is perhaps the ultimate medium for cultural exchange.
Culture as a basic need, rather than a luxury is the premise on which the Prince Claus Fund builds its activities. So rather than using culture to get certain messages across – theatre productions to inform about HIV/AIDS, for example – the Prince Claus Fund looks to stimulate culture as an end in itself.
The Prince Claus Fund was established as a ‘birthday present’ for the 70th birthday of H.R.H. Prince Claus of the Netherlands. It awards prizes to artists and cultural organisations, funds projects and creates networks of partnerships all over the world. In 2007, the Prince Claus Fund staged ‘Bintou Were, a Sahel Opera’, an international opera production that was originally conceived of by Prince Claus himself. The opera, composed by musician and composer Zé Manel (Guinea-Bissau) and written by Koulsy Lamko from Chad, premiered in Bamako, Mali, in February 2007.
Another interesting project by the Prince Claus Fund is the Cultural Emergency Response (CER), which director Van der Plas describes as ‘the red cross for culture’. When a natural or man-made disaster threatens to destroy cultural heritage, the CER sets up a rescue mission. The first mission was in Baghdad just after the looting of the National Museum, where the CER helped save one of the University Libraries. Other ‘responses’ include the maintenance of archaeological sites in Mozambique, restoration of historical buildings in Palestina and stabilising an Afghan synagogue after it had been flooded.
Whilst a Sahel Opera and the red cross for culture have a spectacular ring to them, an aspect of the Prince Claus Fund’s work which is at least as important is the support it gives to artists and thinkers who work and live in difficult circumstances: ‘people and activities that are hidden and silenced through exclusion, war and/or unjust local or national government,’ and ‘people who are oppressed or who express opinions that differ from the general consensus. ’ Finally, the Prince Claus Fund is a strong advocate of a ‘cultural policy of curiosity’, which integrates development cooperation with international cultural policy.