Mediterranean : Common House
The Mediterranean Convention on human rights is committed to making the Mediterranean a space of coexistence and peace. In this section, we explore the concept of the Mediterranean as a common home and the role it plays in promoting democratic participation and a culture of peace.
Changing the narrative of the Mediterranean
The Convention on the Rights of the Mediterranean has the strategic objective of "Making the Mediterranean one of the creative spaces of a humanity that wants to live together".
In this context, it is important to highlight a factor that contrasts the public representation of the Mediterranean and us, people of the Mediterranean, which has been eliceted in the international arena.
It was born in cultures external to the Mediterranean itself and refers to the fundamentally colonial culture that over the centuries has governed relations with the peoples of the Mediterranean and among the peoples of the Mediterranean. Hence the desire to build up and spread, by means of the recovery of identity, an alternative narrative that bases the idea of the Mediterranean on the "cultural stories" of the peoples of the Mediterranean and finally on "our authentic interpretation".
The Historical Atlas of the Peoples of the Mediterranean
The aim is to provide a historical Atlas of the cultures of the peoples of the Mediterranean in order to support a new shared narrative by means of:
- identification of a common language;
- verification and sharing of the language identified among the members of the Convention;
- identification of the key concepts by which we define our idea of the Mediterranean and consequently the narrative themes that represent it in the documents and, ultimately, in the historical Atlas;
- search for descriptions of the cultural histories of the peoples through the help of experts belonging to the cultures represented.
Recognizing Common Roots
The strategic objective will be achieved through a complex and far-sighted path in the history, geography, and cultures of the Mediterranean peoples. This is defined by significant objectives including "recognizing the common matrices of the Mediterranean peoples" and "restoring centrality to a plural Mediterranean identity", in a cultural model that interprets the fundamental needs of all the Mediterranean peoples, such as peace, health, water, food, knowledge, skills..., as public common goods characterizing the reality of the Mediterranean as that to be protected, deepened, developed.
The ultimate goal of the Atlas of the cultures of the Mediterranean peoples is certainly not to create a new cultural product to add to the others in circulation but to apply, make evident the effect of a different way of "thinking" about the Mediterranean, this time with the Mediterranean.
The work of the Mediterranean Common House Group
The first step of the working group, with the meetings of Puntalazzo di Mascali, was to identify in a shared way the contents to be narrated in the future Atlas and the strategies of its narration trying to answer two questions:
- what to tell about the Mediterranean identity;
- how to tell the story of the Mediterranean communities.
The discussions in the group, in plenary as well as in small groups, took place at multiple levels covering three dimensions of identity analysis:
1. either memory or reconstruction of the evolution of the perceived identity;
2. either Mediterraneanness or definition of the common and shared identity contents among the communities;
3. territorialization of the shared identity contents.
We tried with the conceptual maps of Cultural Memory and Mediterraneanness to restore the complexity of the Mediterranean vision that emerged from the discussion and the real breadth and depth of the diffusion of the cultural models co-present in the various local communities.
The Favara meeting signals the necessity of a second step in the first phase of the defitinion of the narrative line of the Atlas, which consists in widening the discussion audience to all the representatives of the signatories of the Convention and their experts, with whom the maps drawn up to now will be shared as proposals to be explored in depth, to be completed and given the greatest possible significance.
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