The Diplomat The Secretary General of the Organization of Ibero-American States for Education, Science and Culture (OEI), Mariano Jabonero, has offered the technical and operational capacity of his organization to the Barcelona City Council for the celebration of the UNESCO World Congress of Culture (Mondiacult), which will be held in Barcelona during the second half of 2025. Jabonero made this offer on July 22 to the mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, and to the director of the Cervantes Institute, Luis García Montero, during the opening ceremony of the Annual Meeting of Directors of the Cervantes Institute, which took place in the Catalan capital. Recently, this offer was also communicated to representatives of UNESCO, according to the OEI in a press release. “The OEI makes available its objective capacity, created over 75 years, for the best development of the UNESCO World Congress of Culture (Mondiacult) that will take place next year in Barcelona, an event that has to be and will surely be a great global project that will put the city on the scene,” said Jabonero. Mondiacult is a major event in which the 194 member states of UNESCO define together the global agenda for culture. The next edition will take place in Barcelona in the second half of 2025, in an event that will seek to give birth to common solutions so that the use of artificial intelligence is fully respectful of the rights of creators, both in relation to intellectual property and remuneration. The OEI has recently been working as a priority on proposing solutions applicable on both sides of the Atlantic to address the challenges presented by digital culture and intellectual property through a chair created together with the University of Alicante, which since 2020 has awarded scholarships and developed research and training initiatives in this field. On the other hand, the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI) played a prominent role in the latest edition of Mondicult, which took place in 2022 in Mexico City and which focused on the role of culture in sustainable development. On that occasion, together with several Ibero-American academic institutions and the Government of Mexico, it organized a series of forums in order to discuss topics of maximum regional interest such as artistic education and the challenges of the present or sustainability and cooperation in relation to the cultural routes and itineraries that can be developed in the region.
