The Bunge y Born Foundation is leading this project with the Centro de Estudios Históricos e Información Parque de España with support from the Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional and the University of Harvard.

Subsidies will be provided for the microfilming of bibliographic and documentary material, awarded in an annual public competition whose winners are selected by a jury made up of “top researchers in the field of history”.

The main objectives are to promote the safeguard of historical documentation, by preserving documentary archives on microfilm, following the international quality standards for archiving related to the production and storage of the material preserved, as well as to facilitate and enhance the task carried out by professionals and researchers alike.

During 2011 a public call for tender was held for the submission of projects to preserve and document historical photographs and paper documents.

There were three winners selected for the preservation of paper archives and two for photographic archives. The Bunge y Born Foundation has donated special equipment to the CEHIPE in order to further the preservation tasks for each project, including digitalization able to handle a monthly workload of some 5000 images.

This project is being carried out in collaboration with Fundación Espigas. The main idea is to help researchers, specialists, artists, critics and other interest parties Access the documentary material stored by the Fundación Espigas.

Furthermore, the project aims to provide information to museums, public and private art collections and cultural institutions to assist them in the documentation of their own collections.

The work carried out so far has covered the preservation of the special files held the Foundation’s own Documentation Center. Work was carried out with six issues of the Contrapunto magazine and twenty-one issues of the Cabalgata magazine from the 1940s, as well as a good number of Augusta magazine issues, which were cleaned, rebound and filed using acid-free materials. Five university interns studying art related to the classification, digitalization and cataloguing of documentary material were also trained. 

At the same time, the Photograph Library of the Fundación Espigas was catalogued for preservation purposes. It contains a number of valuable documents which tell the story of the development of culture and art in Argentina. The digitalized photographs may be seen online at www.espigas.org.ar/fototeca

The project is being carried out in collaboration with the Austral University and aims to digitalize the photographic archives housed in the Central Library of the university by the same name. It involves a collection of some 50,000 pieces which make up two major groups of material: the legacy of Julián Cáceres Freyre and a donation from the anthropologist Jehan Vellard. The photographs are of a vast range of subjects, from family snaps and portraits, to photos of trips through different countries, including pictures of small villages in the Argentine provinces showing daily life and culture, religious images, and stills of South American native peoples taken in the early 20th century as well as postcards. The Bunge y Born Foundation will be purchasing equipment to digitalize all the material so that it can be catalogued and preserved. This will ensure that anyone who is interested can consult it, be they researchers, scholars, university students and those from other institutions working in human sciences.

The Bunge y Born Foundation is contributing to the restoration work of the oldest church in Buenos Aires with a donation for the restoration of the ironwork handrails on the first floor of this historic building. The restoration of the side handrails in the aisles has taken over six months and they have already been put back into place.

Still to come is the restoration of the main set of railings which stands at the back at the opposite end from the altar, by the organ and the choir. This is the largest piece of work and it is only expected to be finished some time at the end of the year.

The project has been made possible by a General Conservation Plan financed by the World Monument Fund through the Bunge y Born Foundation which is managing the funds assigned to the project. The objective is to restore the stained glass windows in the Nuestra Señora de La Merced Basilisk, which dates from 1779.

The task involves dismantling the stained glass windows piece by piece, starting with the series of twelve that are in the dome and chancel. The pieces, darkened by the passage of time, cumulative soot and grime, will be washed with special detergents and finally reassembled on a new lead structure. The work started in May 2008 and is expected to take some nine months.

The Leonor Hirsch Prize was set up by Octavio Caraballo and Claudia Caraballo de Quentin in memory of their mother, a great patron of the arts and in particular of contemporary classical music.

Leonor Hirsch (1915-1973) was always keenly aware of the latest national and international trends in music and actively promoted them, generating opportunities for audiences in this country to know them.

The contest, managed by the Bunge y Born Foundation, was open to creators of all nationalities without any age limit and the only condition was that the entry should consist of a work which had never been published or performed.

The objective was to promote contemporary creativity using electroacoustic music and images. There were a total of 57 entries from all parts of the world, involving an electroacoustic part and a visual component based on digital video.
The task of selecting the winner was given to a jury panel made up of Gerald Bennet, Francisco Kröpfl and Nina Colosi, after a performance of the three winning entries given at the Recoleta Cultural Center.