Freedom Picnic ends festival

Organisers are promising an alfresco celebration of liberty for all. Bring food, bring friends, bring family, bring umbrellas of all colours.

Among the highlights on the day will be a recitation from memory at 3pm, in the voices and languages of Brighton & Hove, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948.

Artist Monica Ross and her co-recitors will become a collective embodiment of the Declaration, “transforming it into a riveting and poetic act of performance and witness”.

Ask the point, and Monica will ask you directly: “Have you ever read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948”. The chances are you will answer no - and yet when it was framed, the intention was that it should be taught in schools and displayed as much as possible.

“I was shocked when I first came across that statement about it being taught in schools and displayed, and that’s when I started to think about learning it by heart.”

Shocking too is the assumption that you don’t really need to know it, that it’s the kind of thing that you need much more in places such as Africa.

“I was shocked by my own complacency. And then I started asking myself why I didn’t know it because when you read it, there are rights in there that we simply don’t have any more.”

As a solo recitation, it will take maybe 35 to 40 minutes, but here it comes in a collective form. Monica delivers the Preamble, which is effectively the foreword, and then others step forward to recite the various articles in turn, choosing their own language in which to do so - a way of underlining the internationalism of it all and its universality.

“On the internet you can find it translated into more than 370 languages,” says Monica - and for the speakers of each it has relevance.

“It’s all about an opportunity to take responsibility for yourself and to take the next step. We ask people to read the Declaration and then chose an article that means something to them or feels important to them. We try to get things right, but we are all human. It is the attempt that matters.”