Banksy graffiti removed in Venice

▲ Photo Ap

La Jornada Newspaper, Saturday, July 26, 2025, p. 4

A deteriorating graffiti attributed to Banksy, titled "The Migrant Child," was removed by art restorers from the side of a palace overlooking a Venetian canal to preserve it for future public display. The removal from the wall of Palazzo San Pantalon was carried out in consultation with people close to the enigmatic British graffiti artist, according to the art program of Venice-based Banca Ifis, a bank that promotes culture and the arts. The piece, depicting a shipwrecked child holding a pink smoke flare and wearing a life jacket, appeared on the riverbank of San Pantalon in Venice in May 2019 and was recognized by Banksy. After becoming popular for being marked on online maps, it has become a tourist destination. However, six years of neglect had led to the deterioration of about a third of the work, the bank said. The bank is financing the removal and restoration project, but did not disclose the cost or completion timeline.

▲ Prieto Hernández (standing, center) participated in the opening of the Afro-descendant Women's Gathering at the National Museum of Popular Culture. Photo: Germán Canseco

Alondra Flores Soto

La Jornada Newspaper, Saturday, July 26, 2025, p. 5

A week after his appointment as head of the newly created Strategic Unit for Living Cultures, Intangible Heritage, and Interculturality, anthropologist Diego Prieto Hernández said in an interview with La Jornada that the Mexican government needs to focus on implementing a robust public policy on community outreach and attention to living heritage.

He briefly outlined the four basic functions of this new area of the federal Ministry of Culture: research, promotion, safeguarding and dissemination, in a vision that is more necessary at this time of transformation, of recognition of plurality and of the configuration of Afro-Mexican peoples as subjects of public law .

He stated that these cultural expressions will continue to be studied, especially because they are constantly changing in their vitality, but the research we will promote is more participatory, action-oriented, we call it. That is, it will not simply extract ethnographic data to write an anthropology book, but above all, it will aim to generate knowledge from the community, with the community, and for the community .

Participating in the inauguration of the Meeting of Afro-descendant Women at the National Museum of Popular Culture, in one of the first public activities after assuming his new position, he joked: “Today, a colleague asked: 'Why living cultures, when there are dead ones?' Of course! I have never greeted a Teotihuacan, much less an Olmec,” said the official, accustomed to being among the pyramids, the cultures captured in stone and monuments, which are also very good .

Prieto Hernández explained that living heritage, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, is not preserved, but safeguarded. When we have monumental heritage, we do talk about conservation, one of the tasks of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

But, he added, expressions of living heritage—those whose creation and recreation involve the intervention of their bearers, communities, and sociocultural environments—are by nature always subject to a process of continuous change and transformation.

He asked for an understanding of the term "cultural promotion," another action to be undertaken, with the idea that this action involves contributing to a movement driven by the people, not the State. Institutions promote and support cultural processes that address what Guillermo Bonfil would call the cultural control of peoples and communities; that is, allowing them to take ownership of their cultural processes and expressions and, therefore, acquire empowerment .

He then defined that speaking of safeguarding has to do with how the State and institutions create the conditions for the reproduction of cultural expressions.

Every living cultural expression involves a set of different conditions, such as territorial, environmental, and social ones. Therefore, it is very important to understand that when we talk about intangible heritage, we are not referring only to ethereal things, but to something that is based on tangible supports.

Alondra Flores Soto

La Jornada Newspaper, Saturday, July 26, 2025, p. 5

We, black, coastal women, but also historically marginalized and impoverished, when we begin to name the margins in which we have lived, it causes conflict , said Aleida Violeta Vázquez Cisneros, who represented the female voice at the inauguration of the Meeting of Afro-descendant Women, at the National Museum of Popular Cultures (MNCP).

Faced with a system that has made us uncomfortable all our lives simply by existing, today, as a political stance, I love to provoke discomfort in those who listen to us , she stated, while thanking a space that is the result of a collective struggle planted with a seed of at least 500 years, where Black women have resisted with words, work, and knowledge.

A poet, activist, and artisan from Cuajinicuilapa, Guerrero, a coastal town in the south where Blackness is prevalent , called for people not to search for them solely on July 25, International Day of Women of African Descent.

The word "inclusion" causes me a lot of trouble because it implies that we have never been part of public policy or society itself . At the same time, I express my gratitude for the spaces that represent constant recognition on the path to historical reparation for women and people of African descent.

Surrounded by dances of devils and runaway sirens, music from the leeward side of the southern Ariles, poetry and literature, the broad textile tradition, gastronomy, and a craft fair from the Costa Chica region of Guerrero and Oaxaca, the knowledge and resilience of the third Mexican root were evident.

At the start of activities within the Creators of Dreams and Realities program, Diego Prieto Hernández, head of the Strategic Unit for Living Cultures, Intangible Heritage, and Interculturality, announced that 42 women exhibitors, artisans, activists, composers, and dancers from the Costa Chica and Chacalapa regions of Veracruz will participate, starting yesterday and continuing tomorrow.

She stated that the meeting is an effort to vindicate women and Afro-Mexican communities, although much remains to be done in the fight against racism, discrimination, classism, and exclusion.

Activities continue today and tomorrow at the museum located at 289 Hidalgo Avenue in the Carmen neighborhood of Coyoacán.

This Saturday at noon, a lecture will be offered on Afro-descendants: The Role of Women in the Long Struggle for Recognition. This will be followed by a musical performance by Las Nietas de Nicolás. At 4:00 PM, a discussion panel will take place on Afrohistorias: Memory, Resistance, and Power. At 5:00 PM, a fandango jarocho will be performed.

Tomorrow, three of the most traditional dances of the Afro-descendant community will be presented: the Diablos de El Quizás at 11:00 a.m., the Sirenas Cimarronas at 1:00 p.m., and the San Juan Colorado masked dance at 4:00 p.m. All activities are free.