We leave you with the chronicle of the first meeting L’H CAP A ON? Collective debate on cultural policies and the future cultural district in L’ Hospitalet, focused on the interventions of Montse Santolino and Rubén Martínez. You can download it in Catalan and Spanish and in pdf format here and you also have the complete audios of their interventions by Montse Santolino and Rubén Martínez here and here respectively.
We take this opportunity to remind you that the proposed date for a second meeting is March 13. From the debate after the talks, the proposal to continue the initiative and that this second meeting should serve to map cultural actors and initiatives in the city, as well as the existing support networks in the territory, was clear. For this reason, the group promoting the first meeting calls a preparatory meeting on Wednesday, March 4 at 7 p.m., at the headquarters of the Grallers Bellvitge (Avda. Mare de Déu de Bellvitge, 190 L’Hospitalet) in the physical space of LaFundició (c/ Prat, 11, baixos 2, Bellvitge, L’Hospitalet) to which it invites all those interested in joining and contributing to this open, citizen and collective process.
Chronicle of the 1st L’H CAP A ON? meeting
Friday 02/13/2015, Espai Salamina
The presentation of the meeting was made by Víctor Gómez and Francisco Rubio. Víctor, a member of Laboratori Teatral Patates amb Suc, raised some of the reasons that have led a group of L’Hospitalet residents related in different ways to culture to promote this idea.
On the other hand, however, it is true that the appearance on the scene of the cultural district project in L’Hospitalet is important, since if initiatives that are more related to urban planning than to cultural regeneration have so much weight in the city’s cultural policies, a response is necessary.
Next, Francisco, a partner in the cultural work cooperative LaFundició, introduced some more nuances regarding the proposed meeting. Specifically, he made explicit the intention to overcome certain dichotomies that usually appear in open meetings on cultural issues: the distinction between professional, community and amateur and the dialectic inside/outside: the agents who have been operating in the city for some time versus the newcomers.
Likewise, the intention to give continuity to the initiative beyond this specific event and to open the promoting group to all those who wished to do so after the conclusion of the meeting was put on the table from the beginning.
Next came the turn of the two people invited to open the debate: Montse Santolino and Rubén Martínez. Montse Santolino is a journalist and resident of La Florida, one of the neighborhoods of L’Hospitalet; researcher of the struggles and cultural projects in the city; the purpose of her intervention was to review the cultural field of the city in the last 35 years. For his part, Rubén Martínez, a culture researcher, member of
La Hidra
, of the
Metropolitan Observatory of Barcelona
and of the
Institut de Govern i Polítiques Públiques
of the UAB was entrusted with the task of linking the picture elaborated by Montse with an introduction to the concept of cultural district.
Montse made a story that although, in her own words, marked by her own biography as an activist, was accurate when addressing the main points of interest in the recent cultural history of L’Hospitalet. She began by launching a hypothesis: there is no identity, a strong articulation, of the cultural fabric. For Montse, when explaining this phenomenon, it is necessary to go back 35 years. Specifically, she emphasized the disarticulation of neighborhood movements by the political parties of the time as one of the main inputs to take into account. There is a very clear parallelism between the current historical and political moment and the years where the Culture of the Transition is forged —in the words of Guillem Martínez—, this historical episode being a “lost opportunity” from which to learn in order not to make the same mistakes.
From 75 to 82 there are some years of experimentation, a popular culture very linked to the street. Based on her own experience, she highlighted the Centro Social de La Florida for being a case she knows firsthand. Spaces like this functioned as centers of Catalanization without this contradicting their basic popular character in neighborhoods with a large number of migrant populations, coming from other autonomous communities. «The concept of culture was not separated from everything else» she concluded. From 82 onwards, the social and cultural wealth that occurs at that time declines in parallel to a progressive process of “managerialization” of culture. The incentivization of associationism is used as a transmission belt for government policies, the Festival Committees become a very important center of power. Technification, bureaucratization, sectorialization, deactivation, clientelization are some of the words used to describe this displacement «We no longer make culture, we have all become users of culture». This fragmentation helps to ensure that there is no global vision of culture in L’Hospitalet in later years.
As a consequence, there is a division of initiatives and audiences that Montse proposes to name in a curious way: «Telecinco, La Dos and La Directa». Within a social class there are different subclasses, when it comes to understanding culture, that do not recognize each other. There are a series of cultural manifestations of popular origin that become the main milestones for a majority of the city. This is the case of 15 + 1, a cultural milestone that moves large audiences, that transcends the borders of L’Hospitalet as an event and that therefore becomes a space of political power and that takes a good part of the economic resources destined to culture.
On the other hand, there would be experiences such as the
TPK
or the specialization of the Biblioteca de La Bóbila in black novels that are characterized, among other things, by being isolated experiences, resulting more from individual efforts or reduced affinity groups than from a support network.
Finally, with La Directa we can associate places such as the Centro Social de La Florida, later La Vakería or now more recently L’Astilla or La Locomotiva that to a large extent would be the redoubt where the culture built communally has been maintained and the context most alien to that clientelization that she identified throughout her intervention as the main cultural problem of L’Hospitalet.
Before finishing, Montse leaves the following note about the future of culture in L’Hospitalet: what is to come in the immediate future is being developed in the spaces of socialization of migrants: Bolivians, Dominicans… Bars are a place where many of the city’s cultural initiatives have emerged and the bars, now, belong to the new migrants. Finally, she added that, if initiatives like this, referring to the meeting, take root in L’Hospitalet, they could be capable of having a multiplier effect throughout the metropolitan area.
Next, Rubén tried to link this diagnosis with the new forms of governance of culture. Rubén brings printed the document on the cultural district that is disseminated from
MUTE
:
Create Creative Clusters
, the force ideas of the article will be the basis of his intervention when looking critically at the cultural district project in Santa Eulàlia.
Although the L’H ON report «is more of the same» there is a phrase that draws attention in the document for the lucidity with which it describes what is really behind this type of operations: «It is not about commodifying culture but about humanizing the economy». This phrase refers Rubén to some of the previous works developed within YP around the genealogy of the relations between culture and economy. The original conception of the concept of cultural industry coined by Adorno and Horkheimer in the 40s is reappropriated 30 years later by Unesco to transform it into that of the creative industries and turn it into a form of urban regeneration. One of its expressions in the nearby context is found in the creation factories of Barcelona. But the plan that looms over Santa Eulália speaks of creative industries and these «
The creative industries are not only the result of the culmination of the economization of culture, they are not “the distant cousin” of the cultural industries; they are a new economic model for cities that previously lived off an industrial fabric and that now want to settle in the knowledge economy, etc. That is what the creative industries are, the result not only of the economization of culture but also of the culturization of the economy. These activities have the capacity to create a brand for the city since they generate social distinction, brands of distinction in the territory, in the words of David Harvey. The
creative industries and the creative districts are, in some way, performative: When do they begin to exist? When they are enunciated. The fabric is regenerated at a low cost, simply by valuing its supposed creative capital.
On the other hand, it is also about promoting the culmination of certain structural processes: in all the peripheral areas of the cities there are, in contexts of crisis, processes of social segregation, of non-homogeneous distribution in the territory of the population according to income levels.
From the conclusions of the study, Rubén also highlights that according to Panos the local working class is not enriched by the process. As a result of this, and taking as a premise that the land is under a capitalist regime of supply and demand, there is a progressive expulsion of these populations. That is, what we call by incorporation of English, gentrification. Another of the effects that occurs is that the social centers of community management and other spaces that do not enter into these forms of institutionality, etc. are also condemned. In the cultural districts, it is regulated to ultimately make spaces of these characteristics disappear.
Finally, and linking with the beginning of the intervention, what this type of urban governance provokes is the ability to systematize and put to work a whole series of socially produced resources (the memory of the territory, public infrastructures…) without there being any type of redistributive measures.
Faced with this panorama, Rubén mentions a whole series of policies and resources that are not in the matrix of cultural districts and that would give rise to a different conception of the urban: free culture practices, cooperative management of the city, the social solidarity economy, etc. However, these operations usually work. Why? And why is the cultural sector questioned in them if they are not really related to culture? To counteract policies such as those that are on the table in Santa Eulália, according to Rubén, a prior organization is needed that allows not to act reactively but with a follow-up, a continuous audit of public policies and the cultural sector is not generally given to organization in terms of class, rather solipsistic and focused on its own doctrines. With this provocation on the table we went to the break, on the way back there was an interesting debate between the, why not say it, nourished and heterogeneous group of people who met in Carrer Salamina from which we hope that some organized initiative may emerge that can face that follow-up.
Another of the explicit purposes of the meeting was to leave it with some concrete proposal for continuity. At this point there was a great consensus on the need to organize a next meeting and that this would serve to get to know each other and know what each one of us is doing, as cultural agents, in the city. The possible date of