No

27.9.08

“Hey, no.”

Speaking of discontent, it doesn’t seem that
Daniel García-Andújar
was very happy about Fernando Franco’s invitation to participate in the third edition of the
Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville
(BIACS AKA
BIASC©
), as can be deduced from the letter made public by the artist himself a few days ago, and which was promptly reported by
Catarqsis
and
Aulabierta
. More than anything else, the invitation from the biennial seemed like an attempt to co-opt one of the critical voices with the event that has the greatest public notoriety in that context.

Surely, those responsible for BIACS, aware that “visibility” and “being in the spotlight” are an imperative in the struggle for “survival” within the artistic field, thought that García-Andújar would agree. However, he said “no.” Possibly this “heroic” gesture has its downsides, however, beyond the individual action, García-Andújar points out/denounces some of the “endemic ills” of the cultural sector in the Andalusian context – which can be extended to the rest of the state – and that macro-events such as the biennial help to perpetuate and hide at the same time – which those of us who live/work in Barcelona know very well -. He mentions in his letter the critical and, above all, proactive work of the Platform for Reflection on Cultural Policies (PRPC) – which has one of its most recognizable instruments in the platform
e-sevilla.org
– and how this platform advocates for policies that prioritize the needs of “artists, collectives, works, projects and currents of thought that try to interpret artistic practices and the production of knowledge within the framework of a social and political relationship with the contexts in which they develop“.

We recently talked about the appearance of the
Cultura de Base
platform, which also aims to challenge the policies that affect the cultural sector in Barcelona. It would be too risky to draw conclusions from these two isolated facts, however, it does not seem unreasonable to think that this type of initiative and reaction responds to some extent to the structural and generalized conditions of extreme precariousness in which cultural workers carry out our work. We wonder if Daniel García-Andújar’s “no” is representative of a much broader and more powerful collective “no.”