The Argus: Brighton Festival Thumb With no Big Splash this year, Brighton Festival is closing with a family-friendly picnic – albeit one with a thread linking strongly to this year’s guest artistic director.

As part of the alfresco nosh-up, artist Monica Ross will be leading the Anniversary: An Act Of Memory at 3pm.

Ever since 2005, Ross has been giving public recitations of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration Of Human Rights 1948 solely from memory, in venues including the House Of Commons and the British Library.

To mark the 60th anniversary of the declaration in 2008, she began inviting others to join in the project, with the aim of creating 60 public recitals of this cornerstone of international democracy.

The event in Brighton will be the 31st time it has been performed to mark the anniversary and the fourth time it has been read in Brighton since 2008.

Ross was inspired to start the project following the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in Stockwell Tube station by armed police who erroneously believed him to be a suicide bomber.

“It was a terrible incident for everybody involved,” she says.

“Sometimes we face a moment where we have to make a decision that is not popular, or goes against what a voice of authority tells us to believe.

“How do you have that different voice, or a different point of view or opinion, when all around you is different? The policemen could see that there wasn’t a bag or bomb but the pressure on them was so great they couldn’t believe the evidence of their eyes.”

The performance of reciting the declaration from memory was a way of Ross putting herself under pressure.

“It asks the question whether, under pressure, you would remember the rights of someone else,” she says.

“How do you get to be brave and stand out and say things?

“An Act Of Memory is a way of taking responsibility for human rights and bringing them close to us – they are our responsibility.”

The 30 articles in the declaration are being memorised and performed by volunteers, who have chosen which articles they want to read out, and in which language.

Among the languages featured in the Brighton event are Irish Gaelic, Mapudungun, Armenian, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Russian, Polish and the Mexican indigenous language Yucatec Maya.

“On a good day from memory I can read the declaration in 35 minutes,” says Ross. “As a work it is subject to mistakes and errors. That’s human frailty – we are talking about human rights, which it is up to humans to try to deliver. We are all human and we all make mistakes. We say to people it doesn’t have to be perfect, it’s the attempt that matters.”

Today is the last day to volunteer to take part – for more information email rebecca.fidler@brightonfestival.org

To read the declaration, look out for one of the 50,000 bound copies which have been printed for free by Shoreham’s Gemini Press as part of the Brighton Festival or visit www.actsofmemory.net

* Picnic starts 2pm, free, reading from 3pm, call 01273 709709