El purgatorio de un dictador: Crisis,memoria y narrativas iconoclastas

ABSTRACT

In the autumn of 2005, the museum of Vilafranca del Penedès (Catalonia, Spain) programmed a cycle of cultural events in order to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Francisco Franco's death. Among them, the performative one-piece exhibition Listen, Franco! The Purgatory for a Dictator showed a bronze sculpted bust of the dictator (belonging to the museum collection) and invited citizens to freely participate and “tell to him” all they would have liked to say if they had had the opportunity to. The unusual shape of the event and the high level of participation made the exhibition become a media success. However, a last-day surprising performance experience—as a result of which the bust was “vandalized” or, should I better say, “re-signified”—became a source of reflection about the boundaries between preservation and transmission of cultural heritage, as well as about museums as places for collective elaboration of public memory. This case appears as a catalyzer of a cultural crisis that exploded after 2008, and a prefiguration a new exhibition around another sculpture of the dictator, which took place in Barcelona in 2016.     

Teatro crítico contra la conciencia en crisis: Nada que perder

ABSTRACT

In this article I introduce how the 2008 financial crisis appears in the Spanish recent drama. Although the impact of the crisis has been studied in other genres and artistic expressions such as narrative, poetry, or comics, this issue needs more attention in Spanish contemporary drama. The article proposes a critical analysis of Nada que perder (Bazo, Romero, and Yagüe, 2016). In this play, we can observe a new perspective of the crisis that not only holds the ruling class responsible for the situation, but also charges the ordinary people with irresponsibility and lack of public conscience.     

Sound and identity explored through the Indian Tamil diaspora and Tamil Nadu

Sound is very much a part of identity. While identities are neither singular nor stable, they can be expressed through sound in daily life. Scholars have used soundscapes in geography to understand urban environments within cities, rural national park systems, and provide musical insights into cultural landscapes. However, furthering discussion on the role of sound in identity can move concepts of soundscape and cultural landscape forward. The goal of this paper is to investigate how identity and culture, though they are dynamic, can be performed and stabilized through sound in particular moments and yet also exist banally. Soundscapes through both spoken language and music can give geographers further insights on identity and place. Sound can also show how non-dominant identities distinguish themselves from larger national identities. With research in Tamil Nadu, India and Cleveland, OH, this paper examines sound’s role in identity, belonging, and community through lived experience and performance. Focusing on intersections and tensions between soundscapes, this paper investigates how the Tamil soundscape is used to assert and perform identity.     

Changing histories and ethnicities in a Sámi and Norse borderland

Hedmark County is a large inland district in southeast Norway that represents the southern part of the Sámi settlement area, and a Sámi–Norse borderland. Centred on the municipalities Rendalen and Engerdal, the study investigates the long-term cultural and social processes involved in the construction and maintenance of a borderland using theories of ethnicity and cultural tradition. Over time, different groups of people have used the diverse landscapes, and two periods are highlighted: the Late Neolithic and the Bronze Age (2350–500 BC), and the Iron Age and the Middle Ages (500 BC–AD 1500). The focus is on how different groups of people used the landscapes as seen through variation in settlement, subsistence, borders and contact networks with neighbouring and distant regions.     

‘Culture’, ‘sustainable development’ and cultural policy: a contrarian view

Abstract

This essay offers a critical analysis of the ‘culture and sustainable development’ discourse, notably among cultural activists and in actually existing cultural policy. It interrogates the utility of the narrative, seeks to uncover the semantic manoeuvres it employs and challenges the conventional wisdom it represents. The essay first explores the itinerary of the ductile notion of ‘sustainability’, the ways in which it has been stretched far beyond the original intent of those who coined the term, and identifies the conceptual discontents that this semantic multiplication has entailed. It hypothesizes that precisely because the term ‘sustainable’ and its derivatives are so acceptable and malleable at the same time, they have been easy to yoke to the bandwagon of the many-faceted and totalizing process that is ‘development’, allowing many different actors to project their interests, hopes, and aspirations under this composite banner. The essay then analyses the campaign to make culture ‘the fourth pillar of sustainability’ under the banner of the movement called ‘Agenda 21 for Culture’. It concludes with a plea for a return to the original ecological focus of the term ‘sustainability’ – notably as regards climate change – and outlines some cultural policy responses such a focus can and should generate.     

Cultural rights and their contribution to sustainable development: implications for cultural policy

Abstract

This article aims to analyse the meaning and implications of cultural rights for cultural policies concerned with sustainable development. Although references to both cultural rights and sustainable development have become widespread within cultural policy documents in recent decades, the actual conceptual and operational implications often remain vague, as an ambitious discourse that may conceal a poverty of resources and capacities. As a result, the ideal horizon suggested by cultural rights and sustainable development may not always be achieved in practice, nor are the mechanisms to achieve it always well known. In this respect, the article aims to dissect the actual requirements posed by cultural rights and sustainable development, including their different notions and areas of synergy and intersections, in order to shed light on relevant cultural policy approaches. To this end, a range of examples taken from a variety of contexts will also be examined as areas of expressed needs or areas of possible solutions.     

Culturally sustainable development: theoretical concept or practical policy instrument?

Abstract

This paper outlines the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development, and considers the evolution of efforts to integrate culture into sustainable development policy and practice over recent years. The specific concept of culturally sustainable development (CSD), first promulgated more than 20 years ago, is re-assessed in the light of contemporary circumstances as a theoretically plausible proposition and as a basis for application to cultural policy formation. The paper proposes a set of principles by which consistency of a cultural policy or cultural development strategy with CSD can be judged. The application of each of the principles is discussed, drawing illustrations from particular policy areas in both developed and developing countries. The paper argues that CSD is a concept that has both theoretical substance and potential for practical policy application.     

Towards Culture 3.0 – performative space in the public library

The aim of this article is to analyse and discuss the development of performative spaces in public libraries from a cultural policy perspective. First, a framework of three concepts of culture, 1.0–3.0, is used as a tool to analyse the overall development of public libraries. Against this background, we introduce the notion of performative spaces in public libraries by highlighting Nordic examples. The tendency can also be seen on a broader level in European and North American libraries, where a ‘performative turn’ can be seen as the relationship between the library and its users, especially the younger ‘digital natives’. The rationales behind the emergence of performative spaces in public libraries are analysed and discussed: democratisation, empowerment and economic impact. This article concludes that the performative spaces are legitimized by multiple rationales in the same way as cultural policies and cultural institutions are legitimised today.     

Cultural participation in Europe: shared problem or shared problematisation?

Europe has a ‘problem’; it is becoming a ‘less cultural continent’ as fewer Europeans are ‘engaging in cultural activities’. This conclusion has been reached due to the findings of the latest cross national cultural participation survey. This paper questions the existence of this ‘problem’ and instead suggests that there is a shared problematisation across Europe sustained by common discursive archaeology that employs various discursive strands in relation to a dominant institutional discourse. The argument is that the ‘problem’ of ‘non-participation’ legitimates a ‘solution’ that predates its emergence: the state subsidy of arts organisations. The paper recaps the comparable problematisations that the researchers have previously identified in the policy texts of their respective countries. It progresses to consider three distinct but interwoven discursive strands upon which the problem representation in both countries, and potentially across Europe, appears to rely.     

Cultural policy through the prism of fiction (Michel Houellebecq)

Cultural policy studies tends to talk about fiction without actually using it. A typical move is to place it in an aesthetic realm to be protected, situated and/or critiqued. This is an eminently worthwhile activity. However, this paper explores some ways in which works of fiction may, following their own dynamic, yield significant perspectives upon the world of cultural policy itself. In what ways do fictional works offer us prisms through which to reappraise the worlds of cultural policy? What are the effects of the reconfigurative imaginative play to which they subject the institutions of that world? How are the discourses of cultural policy reframed when redeployed by novelists within free indirect style or internal monologue? The article begins by distinguishing four broad modes in which fictional works refract the world of cultural policy, and then analyses in more fine-grained detail two novels by the leading French writer Michel Houellebecq.