Towards a Balanced Representation of World Heritage Sites

Adrian Jo Milang is a musician and performer from the Kayan community, an indigenous tribe in central Borneo, Malaysia. He is recognized as one of the youngest practitioners of Parap and Takna’ – two Kayan oral traditions – that he began practising at the age of twelve. Reflecting the way of life of Kayan ancestors, these two art forms carry traditional metaphors and formulaic phrases inspired by the environment. In addition to performing Parap and Takna' at various events including the Borneo Jazz Festival and the Festival of Masks, Milang hosts workshops and demonstrations to pass on these traditions to future generations.

Milang serves as a Community Manager at The Tuyang Initiative, a community-led company concerned with improving the economic skills of the Dayak (Borneo indigenous) people. He cooperates closely with cultural practitioners from various communities to create livelihood opportunities and to promote expression of their own culture.

Mariam Kamara is a Nigerien architect and founder of Atelier Masōmīi, an architecture firm that works on public, cultural, residential, commercial and urban design projects. Her design focuses on open living spaces that serve and improve the lives of African communities, often constructed using locally produced materials. A further aim of her designs of public spaces is to give women in Muslim culture more freedom of movement.

She also cofounded ‘united4design’, a global network of architects who collaborate on projects in the US, Afghanistan and Niger. Her team worked with UN Habitat to rehabilitate an urban village in Niamey, which won the AIA Seattle Merit Award in 2016.

Internationally recognized for her innovative architecture with local communities at heart, Kamara received the Prince Claus Award in 2019 and the Gold Award for the Regional LafargeHolcim Awards in 2017. Her recent work for the Niamey Cultural Centre was exhibited at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Kidlat Tahimik is a Filipino filmmaker, writer, visual artist and actor. A celebrated figure in the independent art world of the Philippines, his medium ranges from film and photography to free-style architecture and carved installations. His films are centred on critiques of neo-colonialism and globalization, while offering a promise of hope. His debut feature film Perfumed Nightmare (1977) received the FIPRESCI Award (International Critics Award) at the Berlin International Film Festival.

As a life-long advocate for indigenous and local cultures, Tahimik has organized conferences for indigenous peoples from around the world, called the Kapwa Conferences. He also launched the Sunflower Film Collective in 1997 to share user-friendly video technology for tribal people.

Tahimik has received numerous awards including the Prince Claus Laureate Award (2018). His work was also presented at the Sharjah Biennial in 2019.

Bahia Shehab is an Egyptian-Lebanese multidisciplinary artist, designer, political activist, historian and professor at the American University in Cairo. Her work is concerned with identity and cultural heritage, and uses Islamic art history, calligraphy and graphic design to raise awareness of contemporary Arab societies, feminist discourse and social issues.

Shehab is interested in the ways art can be used to promote social change and explores this process through her artwork. Her graffiti series, ‘No, A Thousand Times No,’ illustrated the one thousand different ways to say ‘no’ in Arabic in relation to political and economic situations.

Shehab was named one of BBC’s 100 Women of 2013. She was selected as a TED Global Fellow in 2012 and received a TED Senior Fellowship in 2016. She was the first Arab woman to win the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture in 2016.

Nicolas Nova: is a Swiss researcher, writer, design researcher and anthropologist of technology. His work focuses on observing and documenting digital and new media practices and environmental changes.

Nova adopts ethnographic approaches to understand people’s needs, motivations and contexts. Using such information, he maps new design opportunities, encouraging fellow designers and engineers to implement solutions.

He is a co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory, a global network to create projects exploring design, engineering and anthropology. It examines how design can help generate prospective scenarios through everyday artefacts. Nova also co-founded and curated the Lift Conferences, a series of international events about digital culture, design and innovation.

Habiba Djahnine is a writer and filmmaker whose body of work consists of cinema dedicated to accurate portrayal of Algerian realities.

Her documentaries reveal diverse facets of Algerian society and its history. In Lettre à ma soeur (Letter to my sister), she denounces violence as a solution to social disputes.

To share her knowledge and skills as a documentarian with Algerian creators and storytellers, Djahnine co-founded Association Kaïna Cinéma, offering training courses to emerging professionals. She is also a co-founder of Cinéma et Mémoire Association, a network to empower young Algerians in the documentary sector. It hosts space for the film industry for debate, networking and the exchange of knowledge.

Since 2003, Djahnine has been active in curating several international film festivals.

Ibrahim Mahama is a Ghanaian visual artist and author. Mahama employs the transformation of materials to explore themes of commodity, migration, globalization and economic exchange.

Mahama’s large-scale installations use materials gathered from urban environments. He is best known for his installations that encase public structures with jute sacks, exhibited at Documenta 14 and in the Arsenale complex at the Venice Biennale.

Mahama has set up Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA), an open-access cultural centre and research hub that creates opportunities for artists and community members and provides access to multipurpose facilities in Tamale. He also founded a vast studio complex, Red Clay, to provide employment, education, studio space and creative activities for local communities.

He represented Ghana at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. He was recently appointed as an artistic director of the 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts.

Azra Akšamija is an artist, architectural historian and Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at MIT. Her work is concerned with blending cultural heritage from different contexts to spark the creation of new art forms and future heritage. She also researches the representation of Islam in the West, as well as the destruction and restoration of cultural heritage in the Balkans.

She advocates for the cultural and emotional needs of the displaced through art, design and architecture. She published the book Design to Live: Everyday Inventions from a Refugee Camp in 2021 after observing the resilient and inspiring movement of a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan.

Akšamija received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2013 for designing the prayer space in the Islamic Cemetery Altach in Austria, and the Art Award of the City of Graz in 2018. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Generali Foundation and Secession in Vienna; Biennials in Venice, Liverpool, Valencia and Manila; the Royal Academy of Arts. London; the Jewish Museum, Berlin; and the Kästner Gesellschaft, Hanover.

Rita Keegan is an American archivist and multimedia artist based in the UK. She has experimented with new media as part of the British Black Arts Movement. She often approaches the subjects of memory, history, dress and adornment of Black artists.

Keegan has a deep interest in African women artists. From 1992 to 1994, she served as a Director of the African and Asian Visual Arts Archive, an online collection of over 140,000 images gathered across the UK, freely available for educational use. She recently held the first solo exhibition at Fire Station South London Gallery, exploring the intersection of new media experimentation, feminist practice and the Black Arts Movement of the 1980s. Keegan is a founding member of the Brixton Art Gallery, an artists' collective aiming to showcase Brixton culture to the international audience.

As an archivist, she is known for her contribution to establishing the Women of Colour Index at the Women Artists Slide Library (WASL). She also collaborated with the African Asian Visual Artists Archive to collate slides of the work of women artists from exhibitions and compile folders on each individual.

Laura Yawanawa is a Mixteca-Zapoteca activist originally from Oaxaca, Mexico. She is the President of the Yawanawá Sociocultural Association (ASCY) dedicated to the Yawanawá people of Brazil. She heads a Yawanawá fashion line inspired by indigenous designs, as an alternative economic livelihood for women.

As the President and Director of ASCY, her life’s work is dedicated to promoting the Yawanawá culture and providing sustainable income-generating opportunities for the Yawanawá peoples. She is also committed to triggering change towards an open and inclusive community where women achieve their full potential.

Yawanawa was previously the Executive Director of the South and Meso-American Indian Rights Centre in Oakland. She also co-founded organizations to support indigenous peoples, such as the Nawa Institute and INIYA (Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Alliance). She has worked with the Institute of Climate Change and Regulation of Environmental Services (IMC), a government agency created in the State of Acre, Brazil. She organized workshops in indigenous communities about the climate crisis and environmental services.