What was going over the cultural cement of those years was, at the same time, the conclusion that voluntarism could not take on the activity and identity of an entire culture, and the underlying realization that far from public support there was almost no movement for a cultural sector to gain operational capacity, room for manoeuvre, to gain a horizon that would allow self-determination. And self-determination means: having one’s own public and economic capacity. In reality, it is a single circumstance because in contemporary society, having an audience means having economic capacity.<\/p>
Culturgal has been exemplifying the Galician cultural system for the last decade. Yes, there is one, but it is frustrating because it increasingly shows a lack of muscle to stand on its own two feet. Culturgal explains in three days what complete reports do not want to synthesize: Galician culture has enough supply to meet the needs of a country, but the demand is not so resounding. To explain it without aggression: the offer of the country’s culture is varied and, even at low moments, it provides entertainment and depth. It has a popular spectrum and high culture. It even has posturing, which is something that every cultural system needs to insult itself. It has everything but the conviction of the public. It has everything but the certainty that when it offers something there will be people watching. Nor is it a coincidence.<\/p>
In the last forty years, the fundamental concern of culture has been to be homologated. Homologated with the environment. This was a not very reflexive and somewhat self-conscious task: perhaps it would have been more operative to see what the singularities were and make of them an identity that would try to demonstrate that we are like the rest. The concern, in part, was inherited. But with the arrival of autonomous culture, this need for homologation was transformed into the stimulation of the offer through the professionalization of the previous processes, mostly voluntary, and the setting up of cultural sectors that reaffirmed the existence of professions capable of understanding society and of having an interlocution that also aspired to be economic.<\/p>
The strategy may be considered mistaken, but from the point of view of the creation of professional sectors, it was successful. Simplistically speaking, it was more successful in theatre and audiovisual than in literature. It was not very successful in contemporary art. And it had the expected success in music because it often happens that in countries with self-esteem problems, music is the only one that assumes identity without tarnishing it. It was more successful in music than in journalism.
The strategy could have been the other way around: to stimulate the use of culture until that use led to the implementation of the sectors. But it sounded neoliberal, and the pressure of professionals in a society is always more constant than that of the public. This pressure from the sectors that wanted to professionalize pushed Galician culture forward. From a general perspective, this progress slowed down at the moment when the second phase should have begun: finding an audience for all this offer.<\/p>
Now, as then, Galician culture has to find an audience. This task was historically pending. Each sector tried to settle its own accounts and the idea of a culture that had assumed itself as a complete section became a horizon without details, a diffuse reality. Not even vindicable.<\/p>
Every year Culturgal demonstrates the same thing as the bookshops, the same as the cultural agendas, the same as the stalls: only culture aimed at the family\/children seems to attract the public to the Galician offer. And this could be a circumstance with a future, were it not for the fact that when adolescence arrives, cultural use seems to move in a different direction. Without return in most cases.<\/p>
The Culturgal has had carpeting for years. But it’s not to show off. It’s to keep its feet warm. Whatever the romantics and their vital errors may say: a culture, like a country, must keep its feet warm and its head cool. The cool head points out that Galician culture did not do the job of finding audiences as well as it should have. The idea that audiences appear is na\u00efve and, perhaps, is sponsored by systems that have no problem with audiences. The public for Galician culture is a subject that is still pending. But it is the subject. There can be no culture without audiences. And a culture cannot look for itself without looking for its audience.<\/p>
In a general sense, Galician culture has advanced sector by sector, but it has forgotten the common ground between them. It forgot to present itself as a complete culture, even as what it is: a complex, contradictory culture with that constant tension between being revealing and being representative. That constant and indispensable tension between being a culture of authors or a culture of audiences. With the shadow zones, with the crossover spaces.<\/p>
The cultural sectors took on the daily battle of survival, of institutional dependence, of moving within a culture whose operational field was limited in order to turn it – I will insist on this idea – into an Indian reservation. In order to turn it into a section of something superior that did not need to be named, it was only necessary to situate it as superior. In the daily battle, a piece of the strategy of calling for the public was lost, and also the essential theory of understanding all culture as a network in which the vibrations of some threads must produce movement in the others. The idea of the whole remained an almost political and impractical approach. The feedback from one sector to another was lost. The idea of belonging to a culture rather than a profession was lost.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the first editions of Culturgal there was no carpet. Under the feet of the visitors was the cement of the palace and this perspective of horizontality and lack of posturing, that Galician perspective that cement is the solution to so many of the country’s problems, had unexpected consequences: it lowered the temperature of the atmosphere. Cement is like that: it removes water from the roads, but it is not very comfortable indoors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":309634,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[191],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fatiga-ocular-en"],"acf":[],"post_template":"reportaxe","post_subscription":"no","pretitle":"","content_extract":"What was going over the cultural cement of those years was, at the same time, the conclusion that voluntarism could not take on the activity and identity of an entire culture, and the underlying realization that far from public support there was almost no movement for a cultural sector to gain operational capacity, room for...","reading_data":{"word_count":"971","reading_seconds":"233","reading_time":{"minutes":3,"hours":0,"seconds":53},"reading_string":"3'53''","reading_human":"4 minutos"},"announcement":{"finishdate":"","finishdate_text":""},"opinion":{"subject":"","subject_info":[]},"event_info":{"startdate":"","starttime":"","enddate":"","endtime":"","entertainer":null},"interview":{"interviewed":""},"phototext":{"text_author":"","text_photo":""},"video":{"video_source":""},"promotion":{"action":"default","action_data":""},"categories_list":[{"name":"Eye strain","id":191,"slug":"fatiga-ocular-en","parent":0,"template":"default"}],"visible_author":"Camilo Franco","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309721"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309721"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309721\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":331586,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309721\/revisions\/331586"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/309634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}