The 2019 edition of the Caribbean festival of Arts (CARIFESTA), the region’s premier arts festival, will be launched in Trinidad and Tobago on Tuesday next week, the Guyana-based Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Secretariat has announced.
It said that Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley and his Minister of Community Development, Culture and the Arts, Dr. Nyan Gadsby and the Program Manager for Culture and Community Development at the CARICOM Secretariat, Dr. Hilary Brown, will address the launch of CARIFESTA XIV.
The Secretariat said that the roving Caribbean Festival of Arts will be held in Trinidad and Tobago from August 16-25 next year under the theme ‘The Tangible and Intangible – Connect, Share, Invest’.
It said planning for the Festival started in late 2017 and a meeting of the Interim Festival Directorate (IFD) was convened by videoconference in April 2018, followed by a meeting of the Regional Cultural Committee (RCC) in Guyana in June 2018.
“Directors of Culture as well as representatives from various Regional Cultural stakeholders converged at the CARICOM Secretariat to discuss cultural matters, chief of which was CARIFESTA XIV. Issues such as leveraging CARICOM’s cultural assets, Reparations for Native Genocide and Slavery, Animation and financing culture, were also on the agenda,” the Secretariat said.
It said that the 16th meeting of the Interim Festival Directorate (IFD) and a meeting of the Regional Cultural Committee (RCC) Working Group will also be convened in Port-of-Spain.
