Artibarri: To Share and Debate in Catalonia

Members of Catalonia's Artibarri network meeting in Girona on "Art for social change, from principles to action" (October 2006)

In July 2007, I spent a few days in Barcelona, having been invited to give two talks, one as part of a conference on public art and public space, the other to an audience of cultural administrators and officials in a small town south of the city. I’m always a little nervous when asked to meet with community artists abroad: will the ideas and approaches that seem sensible in the U.S. translate to other contexts? When I describe my own work or the work of colleagues, will its essence survive the trip across the language barrier? But so far, over decades of travel from California to Hong Kong to London and back, the underlying values of community cultural development seem universal. The differences show up in how people put the same ideas into practice.

I began to relax on my first full day in Spain, as striking commonalities emerged from Xavi Pérez’s presentation of a research project on community cultural development in Catalonia. Xavi is a founder of Artibarri, a network advocating “art for social change based on citizen participation and community work.” ( “Artibarri” is an amalgam of Catalan words for “art” and “neighborhood.”) He was reporting on Artibarri’s research into groups working with young people, focusing on projects that “emerge from civil society,” rather than those created by the public sector.

What the researchers found could as easily apply to projects in very different countries, including the U.S.:

• Community-based and community-generated projects are underdeveloped; there’s a large gap between need and existing projects. Adequate funding hasn’t been available to sustain community cultural development.
• Broad participation is often more of a goal than a reality. Support most often goes to limited-term projects, not to ongoing work that builds participation. Generally, funding is not sustained long enough to support deep collaborative relationships with other partners active in the same communities.
• Most of the work takes place in urban centers, with inadequate provision for rural communities.
• Many projects are driven by independent community artists working on a project basis with public agencies or community groups. When a project ends, there may be considerable community interest in continuing local work, but that doesn’t necessarily lead to ongoing support by the sponsoring agencies or to extending the collaboration with community artists after funding ends.

The message is familiar, but words can have very different meanings depending on context. Like most European countries, Spain has a level of social provision we do not see in the United States. One nation’s underfunding can be another’s vision of abundance, even as both fall short of achieving fully adequate financing for community cultural development. Thus, even in the most economically stressed neighborhoods of Barcelona, such as El Raval, home to many North African immigrants, a community center like L'Associació per a Joves Teb (Teb Youth Association) has a newly renovated space housing video projects, an Internet radio and recording studio, a public-access computer bank, job assistance, after-school programs and its own comic-book history, featuring young peoples’ immigration stories from India, Pakistan, Ecuador and Morocco.

So, while consistent themes resonate between the situation in Catalonia and the U.S., the contexts are very different. Politicians’ words must always be taken with a huge grain of salt, but to provide a little instructive contrast, let me quote from the 2004 inaugural speech of Spain’s Socialist President, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who started his remarks with a lengthy discourse on terrorism, occasioned by an attack on Madrid in March of that year, then — unlike our own chief executive — moved on to other questions:

I therefore propose to focus this government's activities on the five basic points I defended repeatedly during the election campaign: a renewal of public life; a European and pro-European standpoint with respect to foreign policy; economic development based on education, research and innovation, which allows us to create stable employment; setting up new social policies to deal with the changing needs of families and individuals; the development and expansion of civil and political rights, and thus of the value of equality, to achieve an advanced state of peaceful coexistence.

Animated by Ideas

The best part of my visit was meeting three of Artibarri’s most active members. Xavi Pérez, Aida Sánchez and Javi Rodrigo were kind enough to translate for me, show me some of the relevant sites, and join me in a marathon conversation about what arts activists thousands of miles apart may have to share:

• Cal Ninyo, a community center in a historic building in Sant Boi, includes a restored theater, exhibit space, classrooms, workshops, offices, a coffee shop

  Xavier “Xavi” Pérez is a veteran community cultural organizer who works as the director of Cal Ninyo, a wonderful cultural center in the small town of Sant Boi. Cal Ninyo, in a historic building, includes a restored theater, exhibit space, classrooms, workshops, offices, a coffee shop—just about everything you might desire for neighborhood access in this well-served section of Catalonia. Xavi is great networker who takes part in several international groups, serving as one of the “ambassadors” of Trans Europe Halles, a European network of independent cultural centers.
• Aida Sánchez de Serdio Martin is a Ph.D. candidate and member of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona. Her thesis is entitled (loosely translated) “Political Relations in the Practice of Artistic Collaboratives: Cooperation And Conflict In the Development of a Community Video Project.” She is thoughtful and articulate, and has provided much of the available English-language material on Artibarri.
• Javier “Javi” Rodrigo is an energetic, imaginative young community artist who describes himself mainly as an “arts educator,” and who has undertaken a series of projects sponsored by museums, community centers and other social institutions across Spain. Right now, he’s involved with a transnational project called Bordergames, an online game collaboratively created with immigrant kids in which the player takes the role of a young immigrant without papers. (You can download a BETA version of the game and access the blog, mostly in Spanish.)

After many hours of fascinating conversation with these three organizers, the thing I found most interesting about Artibarri is the way the group is animated by ideas rather than practical structures or programmatic aims. There’s an extremely interesting English Artibarri Web page, which appears alongside others in Catalan) that shows just how seriously the group takes concepts such as social transformation and cultural democracy. Indeed, in a way I don’t often see stateside, they seem to value reflection and dialogue as self-evident social goods. Here’s how Aida characterized the group in a presentation she prepared for a conference this past January, convened by the Dublin-based group CityArts: “As Artibarri, our aim is to provide a platform for all participants (practitioners, students, community members, artists, teachers, researchers, etc.) to share and debate the issues that make our work important both for others and for us.” (Download Aida’s full presentation from CityArts.

Artibarri came into being through a dialogic process. Beginning in 2001, the Fundació Jaume Bofill, an independent progressive foundation, sponsored a series of dialogues on “Youth, Creation and Community,” bringing together Catalan community artists, educators, students and activists who work with young people. In 2004, the foundation published the working group’s report (currently available only in Catalan). Its three authors — Carme Mayugo (I saw some of the video she co-created with immigrant kids from North Africa in Gironella, a small town in the interior of Catalonia west of Barcelona), Xavi Pérez and Marta Ricart, an arts educator — became three of Artibarri’s founding members. The group was officially incorporated in 2005, by which time it had already sponsored a series of meetings, conferences and dialogues on issues of community and culture (such as the state of community-based arts in Catalonia; and art, youth and social inclusion), drawing participation from just about every public agency and scores of arts and community associations.

Cultural Contradiction in Catalonia

Catalonia on a map of Spain.

Questions of culture are alive in Catalonia in a unique way. Spain is an old country, but during the nearly four decades of the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, minority and regional cultures were actively suppressed. It wasn’t until Franco’s death in 1975 that some measure of Catalan autonomy began to be recognized, and not until last year that an amended Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia — something very like a constitution for what is considered an autonomous community within the Kingdom of Spain — was adopted by referendum, including this basic statement of cultural policy: “The only truly free country is the one in which each individual may live and freely express different identities without any hierarchical or dependent relationship between them.”

Since the end of the Franco years, Catalonia has been involved in a singular project of cultural restoration. It seems to be the opposite of that confronted by most minority cultures: generally, the oldest people are the repositories of cultural knowledge while the youngest have the most remote relationship to heritage. But in Catalonia, 85 percent of young people between 10 and 14 can write in Catalan, whereas for the entire population, written Catalan literacy is about 50 percent. One result is that older people have longer cultural memories and are the repositories of lived experience, but younger ones may have more day-to-day facility in the language and culture as it is being developed.

The painful history of cultural suppression before the restoration of democracy has sometimes led to a deep ambivalence, a simultaneous desire to be connected and to be protective. Catalonia’s relationship with Spain is conflicted, sometimes symbolized by the actively contested question of whether Catalonia is its own nation (nacion) or a nationality (nationalidad) within the Spanish nation. That ambivalence is being elicited by high rates of immigration, mostly from Latin America and North Africa, bringing many newcomers who have no particular relationship to Catalan cultural heritage or language. This has an economic dimension, too: Spain has benefited from immigration, with newcomers making up about 12 percent of the population (it’s about 11 percent in the U.S.). So, while there’s some of the usual jingoistic rhetoric about immigrants taking away jobs, in fact, newcomers’ contributions have staved off the collapse of the social-insurance system: Spain has a low birthrate, well below the replacement level, and without newcomers and their families contributing to the economy, the system was projected to run dry.

Those who feel protective of Catalan cultural heritage naturally want to preserve and defend what they have, especially since it has so recently been threatened. Yet community artists like the Artibarri organizers I met understand that social inclusion (the current European term for the project of overcoming poverty, discrimination and other barriers to full social, cultural and economic citizenship) is at least as important a value. They see that if the predominant atmosphere is one of suspicion and resistance, the result is perpetual alienation and conflict, escalating fear and mistrust. Many of them work with immigrant communities, attempting a difficult and worthy task, which is to behave toward newcomers as the members of a culture under stress wish others to behave toward themselves: with respect and a spirit of inclusion, recognizing and appreciating differences within a presumption of equality. Community cultural-development practitioners in Catalonia have a great opportunity to extend a hand in both directions: to people who have been there for generations and feel threatened by newcomers; and to newcomers who fear that they are unwelcome. It certainly makes sense that they want a forum to engage these questions deeply and thoughtfully.

Ideas Matter

Three central ideas are driving Artibarri’s conversations now, grounded in a strong belief in “the principles of participative democracy.” We want to stop being spectators of politics, economy, cultures, etc. Rather we want to be active and independent.” Here are some key value statements adapted from the group’s Web site:

• The goal of community work is to empower citizens, so that they can take the initiative in individual and collective social improvement… The challenge is to find a way to insert artistic and cultural projects within community processes.
• A culture built collectively is the only guarantee of a strong civil society, with a solid network based on the principles of civic responsibility and standards of social interaction based on trust, horizontal self-organization, participatory processes, working with new methodologies, and new socio-educational processes intended to change our experience of art and culture.
• Creativity is not a gift, it is an attitude. Creativity works on personal and collective development to evoke new responses to our everyday life. It implies rethinking oneself (and one’s group) and also rethinking one’s environment.

As I spoke with Xavi, Aida and Javi, I felt the immediacy and importance of their grappling with ideas about their work. I’m not sure how to infuse this point with the sense of radical amazement it evokes in me, but here goes: To them, ideas matter! I was impressed with how fully they had thought through the constellation of issues any community cultural-development project might reveal, arriving at their own clear guiding principles for their work. Consider these statements of principle (ever-so-slightly tweaked for translation purposes):

Quality: It is necessary to assure the quality of both the objectives and the final products of all projects. This correspondence must be guaranteed especially during the process. We therefore emphasize the value of the process, without forgetting the importance of developing a public dimension for the results of the project.

Integrity: We start with projects that work with all the dimensions of the person as well as the social reality that envelope it. For example, it is very important not to forget perspectives such as work from emotions.

Transformation: We understand this in two dimensions: 1) looking outward from the people participating in the process to their surroundings—the social dimension; and 2) looking inward, to the introspective, psycho-biological dimension. In this sense, we seek out active methodologies such as research-action, horizontal learning, learning by doing, etc., in order to reach new goals.

When I visited Barcelona, Artibarri had recently received a substantial grant from the government of Catalonia for the purpose of regranting to community cultural-development projects in the region. Longevity in a field has its value: Having heard something like it so many times before, this news stimulated that section of my mental card file labeled “double-edged sword.” “That’s good news,” I told my friends, “and it also complicates things.” When an organization makes the transition from a collegial, egalitarian group to one in which some become grantors, while others become successful grant applicants or join the ranks of the disappointed, things tend to change. In my experience, people are less willing to acknowledge problems if they feel that doing so may affect their chances for future funding. What may formerly have been wide-open discussions of issues, where people admit vulnerabilities as well as strengths, can start to sound like rehearsals for a grant proposal. There’s little that can be done to entirely avoid this, but fair and transparent grant-making policies can help.

Arlene Goldbard in the theater of Cal Ninyo, addressing education and cultural workers in the local public sector. Next to her: Ramon Mora, head of social and cultural programs for the city of Sant Boi.

But when I asked what to me were the next logical questions — What are the requirements for membership in Artibarri? Who will make the grant decisions? What will the criteria be? — I learned that these things had not yet been established. One member told me that with everyone so busy with projects and the challenge of supporting them, most people hadn’t prioritized the time to debate and determine such internal policy questions. It appears this is another cultural difference: Often, groups in the U.S. start out with a general sense and purpose and fairly concrete rules of engagement. When they get really busy, their problem is to allocate time for deep exploration of ideas.

Still, I have a hunch that when Artibarri resolves these issues, the outcome will be thoughtful and humane. My talk at a Barcelona conference on “Public Art and Public Space” was entitled, “Community Cultural Development: Justice Permeated By Love.” My primary intention was to inspire, to draw attention to a realm of work of unacknowledged power and potential. Aida’s talk, derived from her thesis, was called “The Repoliticization of Community Art: Explorations of the Challenges of Artistic Collaboration.” She opened with a joke about the two of us debating who should speak first (in the end, I did). Then, announcing that she would depress her listeners, she continued through a tough-minded examination of the ways that community cultural development can be appropriated and compromised as an instrument of bad social policy or commercial exploitation. “The hope and the challenge,” she said, “go together. I want to explore difficulties and challenges, so that possibility emerges.” What could be better than that?

Arlene Goldbard is a writer and consultant based in Richmond, California, whose focus is the intersection of culture, politics and spirituality. Her most recent book, “New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development,” was published by New Village Press in November 2006. Visit her Web site <http://arlenegoldbard.com> to read her blog and download talks and writings.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2007