Ser Principense
newspaper Centre for Functional Ecology · 01/01/2022
The project Ser Principense: art, culture and heritage, past, present and future aims to value the perception of the heritage of Príncipe Island (São Tomé and Príncipe), understanding its inseparability from the territory and the communities that live in it. The project contributes to strengthening identities and to promoting social cohesion and inclusion, taking an intergenerational approach.
Ser Principense includes the identification and characterisation of Príncipe’s cultural and natural heritage, looking, from a historical perspective, at the past and the present, promoting the appreciation of its knowledge and its preservation for the future.
The project aims to give a voice to the protagonists of Príncipe’s communities. The aim is to learn about and record their testimonies through interviews focusing on their life stories, addressing the relationships established with the local context, living conditions/habitability, origins, mobility, education, occupation and/or profession, local traditions and events, also seeking to understand the changes observed in the territory: communication routes, tourism, landscape, biodiversity.
In particular, it seeks to characterise cultural manifestations in their relationship with the natural heritage of Príncipe Island: language, rituals, traditions, artistic expressions, ethnopharmacology, culinary uses, etc. The condition of being an islander should also be considered as a theme, seeking to understand its potential and/or constraints as a factor that characterises/influences the identities of Príncipe Island.
The project Ser Principense: art, culture and heritage, past, present and future is promoted by the Biosphere Reserve of Príncipe Island, in partnership with the Regional Directorate for Tourism, Trade, Industry and Culture, the Efrican Foundation and the programme Memória para Todos® of History, Territories and Communities at NOVA FCSH – Centre for Functional Ecology – Science for People and the Planet (CFE-UC), and funded by the ACP-EU CULTURE programme.
The memories collected as part of the Ser Principense project are being processed.