EPSULA: Closing meeting
On 15 December, the online closing meeting of the EPSULA project took place, marking the conclusion of a three-year collaboration coordinated by the Masaryk University Language Centre.
EPSULA in Brno
In May, our Language Centre welcomed special guests from Latin America in Brno as part of a unique combination of an international project to save indigenous languages, a biennial on Ibero-American culture, and an exhibition on the Amazon.
Delegations from Ecuador and El Salvador traveled more than ten thousand kilometers to meet their colleagues from the international EPSULA project in Brno. The project is helping to create an online portal that will preserve selected endangered indigenous languages of Latin America. “The EPSULA project is one of the university’s successful international initiatives. Its results can have a significant impact on language teaching at European universities, which will be able to include unique original pedagogical materials in their programs. At the same time, the good practice of Masaryk University and other European partners in the field of soft skills in education will be extended to universities in Ecuador and El Salvador,” explains Michal Bulant, Vice-Rector for Education and Quality at Masaryk University.
Representatives of the Spanish and Finnish universities and Latin American guests were welcomed on Monday, May 13, by Anna Putnová from the Brno City Council. The invitation of Masaryk University was also accepted by the ambassadors of Peru and Brazil from Prague and El Salvador from Berlin, the honorary consul of El Salvador and representatives of the Colombian embassy in Vienna. Together with the Latin American guests of the EPSULA project, they will be part of the Ibero-American Week in Brno on Thursday, May 16, where interested parties can hear more about the online portal of indigenous languages and other activities in the Amazon. This week the Language Centre also organised the project Info Day. The Masaryk University Language Centre is involved in the programme of the biennial, which is sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, for the first time. Director of the CJV Libor Štěpánek sees this as a great success: "The whole week is extremely important, especially from the perspective of the global reach of Masaryk University's activities. In addition to teaching languages and developing language skills, the goal of the Language Education Center is also to support the intellectual and personal growth of individuals, to point out the richness of different cultures and to bring foreign-language communities closer to the public. The EPSULA project and the center's involvement in the Biennial of Ibero-American Cultures exactly fulfill all of these goals."
An unprecedented overlap and connection of dozens of institutions and experts in Brno will also be offered by the exhibition A Thousand Faces of the Amazon in the Moravian Museum, in which the Masaryk University Language Centre is the main partner. It presents the cultural and natural diversity of the Greater Amazon region, and the CJV has involved members of local ethnic groups in its overall preparation to an unprecedented extent. The exhibition will thus bring visitors closer to their understanding of nature, mythology, religion, customs and other aspects of Latin American cultures.
The author of the exhibition is hispanist Athena Alchazidu from the CJV MU, who, thanks to an international university project, has gained access to unique recordings from the Amazon. “In order to truly open the exhibition to the widest possible audience, we invited students from the Smetanova Primary School in Brno to read audio guides for the blind, as well as stories and myths that were recorded through the project. These will show Czech visitors the thinking of distant ethnic groups and their perception of the world,” says Alchazidu. The exhibition is also co-authored by Narcisa de Jesús Ullauri Donoso, an anthropologist from the Universidad del Azuay in Ecuador, who will bring collection items from her native country to the Anthropos Pavilion.
The exhibition at the Moravian Museum will also illuminate the lives of distant communities with the help of authentic video recordings, haptic objects from the Teiresiás Center (Center for Helping Students with Specific Needs at Masaryk University), Braille labels, and other elements. Visitors will also be able to choose between Czech, Spanish and English, which opens the exhibition to the large community of foreigners in Brno and the entire Czech Republic.
More about the unique exhibition A Thousand Faces of the Amazon will be revealed by the creators in the presence of foreign delegations at the opening, which will take place on Thursday, May 16, 2024 at 5:00 PM in the Anthropos Pavilion in Brno.
