The complete interview on archive.org
To warm up for the
Street Dogs
game next Sunday, February 15th, we are publishing this interview that we conducted last year with Nelly Peydró, who was the director of the Bellvitge Culture Hall in the early 80s, and one of the characters in the game you can play! As we said elsewhere, the Hall became a nerve center of social and cultural activity in the neighborhood in those years, driven by the population’s desire to access a culture that had been repressed during the years of the dictatorship.
As Nelly says in the interview, once democracy was established, culture took to the streets the place that protests had occupied until then. In Bellvitge, as in many other neighborhoods on the outskirts at that time, there were social problems, but these neighborhoods also experienced an explosion of social and cultural activity that we want to revive in this scene. In the first part of the interview, Nelly talks about the self-managed origin of the hall and its subsequent institutionalization; about the cultural environment of the moment; about the role of women in the Hall; about the occupation of public space and the celebration as elements of social cohesion and culture as a space for citizen empowerment… among many other things. In the second part, she comments on the evolution of the neighborhood movement and cultural policies in the city. She also explains her personal conflicts as a working woman in that historical moment, how care, affection, upbringing, and her emancipation as a woman were also political issues. Towards the end of the interview, Nelly speaks in very critical terms about the Spanish democratic transition and how it has affected social, cultural, and political life in neighborhoods like Bellvitge. The image that illustrates this entry has been kindly provided by Mari Àngels García Carpintero, we do not know the date it was taken, although it may be from the mid or late 80s, when Nelly Peydró was no longer the director of the hall. In the image we see a party of the Vivac entity in the auditorium of the Hall, the room where we will play a part of Street Dogs on Sunday. These photos by Mari Àngels have been, until now, the only images we have been able to find of the Culture Hall in the 80s.
