Produce Culture

5.5.08

A week ago, the presentation days of the projects selected in the
BCN Producció 08
call took place in
La Capella
(Barcelona), a call that aimed to “encourage and support the production of artists from the city of Barcelona and its area of influence“; beyond the usual controversies surrounding the artists chosen by the selection committee (formed by Amanda Cuesta, Eloy Fernández-Porta and Martí Manen), the call has sparked a much more useful debate around the production models that could or should be implemented from official policies and more specifically from platforms such as BCN Producció (linked to the
Institut de Cultura de Barcelona
). Although the organizers have insisted that the initiative was defined as “a framework focused especially on the methodological process, on the dynamics of work and monitoring” understood as “a priority condition to consolidate, later, solid structures of promotion and dissemination for the artistic context of Barcelona“, it has been criticized that the call ended up being too similar to a contest in which the final prize would have been the final exhibition of La Capella, produced, yes, without the usual precariousness in which the work of the artists develops.

In reality, the controversy broke out as a result of the presentation days mentioned at the beginning of this entry which, despite the initial intention of the organizers, seemed to reinforce in a certain sense the dynamic of “winners” and “losers” typical of the contest format. This point seems to be what the YP were pointing out in this post, which was followed by a trail of comments.

From that debate, we would highlight as a conclusion that the idea of ‘production’ should not be reduced to a question of ‘financing’, understanding that production encompasses an extensive and complex set of processes that result in the creation of value (symbolic and economic). This consideration is especially necessary in the Barcelona context, since municipal cultural policies are placing the emphasis precisely on the idea of production and whose most visible sign are the famous “factories of cultural creation”. We wonder if a truly “holistic” approach to this issue should not be limited to the observation of processes linked in a strict sense to cultural production (such as training, research, development or the commercialization of artistic productions) but extend to the analysis of the entire series of tensions and negotiations that within society as a whole, result ‘from’ and ‘in’ the valorization of these productions; tensions and negotiations in which issues related to power and the construction of identities are put into play.

Finally, link here a couple of proposals that deal or have dealt in a direct way with some of these issues, on the one hand,

PILOT PROGRAMS: Alternative support structures for artistic production

, a panel discussion organized by
Temporary Services
at the end of last year in which Sara Black, Brett Bloom and Brian Holmes to discuss artistic practices that reinterpret the present public and private structures of support for creation or that directly create their own infrastructures and means of production, and on the other La Fàbrica Transparent, an initiative currently underway, launched by Octavi Comerón which aims to “address a debate around certain challenges and questions facing artistic practice in relation to new forms of production in the so-called knowledge society, […] and the redefinition of the economic, political and social space that art can occupy in this new context“