On the third week of the month of May 2009 (18th to 23rd) , an enormous cultural event shall take center stage in Davao City, designed as an interdisciplinary, intercultural, multi-media and multi-lingual festival of the arts in commemoration with the YEAR OF THE OCEAN.  Artists of various disciplines, ethnicities, nationalities, generations and from various regions shall converge in Davao City, and, together with the Davao audiences, shall celebrate their creative works as homage to nature. Once again, the innovative showcases shall substantiate how “arts revive the spirit of creative and caring communities in pursuit of the UN millennium Goals”.

As agreed in the BIMP-EAGA Meeting held last October 28, the event is one of the components of the World Ocean’s Conference which will be held in Manado, Indonesia on May 10 to 15. It is also Davao’s contribution to the heightening awareness on the need for consistent efforts for conserving our oceans.

During the festival, the project organizers found it imperative to convene series of conferences and symposia that shall locate and affirm the concrete contributions of the arts and culture sector in the overall human strategy for building a culture of peace and for fostering sustainable development. Likewise, the event shall have spaces for cultural interactions and creativity workshops in order that the participating artists can realize more clearly the connectivity of their creative works, the particularity of their cultural contexts and their shared aesthetic visions towards a “fairer world for all”.

The BIPM-EAGA secretariat has agreed to support the cultural event in Davao City as a side event of the International Conference on the Oceans and shall convince the member-states to send it delegations  to actively participate in the event.