It is Saturday afternoon and the festival enters its final stretch when Daniel Poveda receives La Vanguardia with a hug that is not without euphoria. One more edition (and there are nine) the Vida festival has filled the space of the Masia d'en Cabanyes with a bet that distinguishes this event from most of the hundreds that take place around these dates. Young promises, or not so promising, have mixed for three days with veterans like Julieta Venegas or Jorge Drexler to give rise to a meeting that still maintains something of that spirit with which the festivals were born in the sixties, although filtered by the comforts of the 21st century, and which has become a benchmark since Vilanova i la Geltrú.
What public figures have they had?
We go to 10,000 people per day, we abide by this. When we reach these 10,000 tickets have run out, we feel bad. One day there were 9,500, another 10,500, it's not a problem because we have a very large license, with 25,000 seats. What we want is for the public to really feel like people and not like units. We do not want to grow, we know that we could get much more economic return, but we consider that, due to sustainability and the responsibility of committing ourselves to the sector, and so that the festival does not generate excess waste, it is necessary not to grow and be sustainable in this sense. We want to make a festival with the right measure, which would be the human measure of things.
Is there no interest in expanding?
There is a way to grow that is vertically, with investment funds and hiring more people, and another way that is horizontal. We have created a record company with emerging talent, we have created an artistic dissemination center, Vida for Musicians, where The Libertines have been rehearsing, they have liked it a lot and they have left delighted, it is a wonderful space where we have the best technical specifications.
Is there the possibility of doing a second festival in another geographical point?
I've been listening to proposals for a long time and we never close together as a band. But I am a musician, I like music and many people in the organization are dedicated to the world of art either as designers, or someone who is a dancer, or making video clips and constantly generating art. We know that our model is sustainable, it is very balanced, and growth is a consequence of the world in which we live. If we find a model that can work for us outside or within our community, and we can contribute things, we love to decentralize culture. El Vida is a festival that takes place in our own city, with help from the City Council that does what it can, which is very small. When I was young I used to come to Mas d'en Cabanyes to work and play pineapple wars with my friends.
Many towns have their festival
Now we see that many festivals are expanding throughout the Catalan geography, invading spaces that already work and perhaps it would not be necessary for these contests to want to grow and grow. What is important to us is life, it is our region, we like decentralizing culture a lot, and we also do not want to disappoint the public, who are waiting all year long for the festival to arrive. We believe that the public greatly enjoys the facilities, the concerts and, above all, discovering new bands.
How is your relationship with the City Council?
We know perfectly well that we are in a very great inequality with the festivals of the big cities, which have large subsidies from their own municipalities. We are from Vilanova and we will not leave this city because we will always continue to love it, we are from here and we have no other choice. What I ask of the City Council is that they understand that we are working all year round, we are professionals and what we do is not a three-day thing. Porto four months working for the 2024 edition. We want to be treated as a company from here, from Vilanova i la Geltrú, a very strong cultural company because we are also doing BAM and La Mercè, the biggest festival in Barcelona. We would like our own City Council to treat us as we are, some very powerful cultural professionals. We can understand each other perfectly as long as they empathize with our work.
What distinguishes Vida from other festivals?
“This is not a festival”, we had to find a way to explain what we are, and we described ourselves from a denial because there was no better word to define our festival. The word festival has been distorted, it has been mistreated. A festival should be something that unites, that generates energy, especially positive. Whatever the artistic modality, what it is about is for people to live a very enriching experience, and what you see is that the idea of a festival is constantly being mistreated by large entertainment agencies, large companies with investment funds behind it. where the only thing that interests them is the maximum economic performance. My partner and I run El Vida, two boys who started going to class together at the Cossetània school when they were 3 years old and suddenly we started having parties with friends because we didn't want to go to Barcelona so much. We have been doing festivals in Vilanova for 19 years.
What have you contributed?
There is a critical derivative where our festival feels very comfortable, and which is helping other festivals understand that they should take better care of the public. Then there is emerging talent, because there are many big festivals that have not been able to have Rosalía on their bill, nor Rigoberta Bandini. We do, because we like to be together with emerging talent. Right now we have a music scene with 20-year-old groups and artists who are very powerful in Catalonia and throughout the country, and internationally we also always have our eyes wide open. But it is very difficult to bet on the emerging talent from home, sometimes they take it to fill the quota for the subsidies. I feel bad that politicians and the people who can decide where these subsidies go do not understand how they are being fooled many times.
If we do something in our city, it is to talk to the sector, especially with restaurants, trying not to be aggressive with the space. I have received a lot of messages from people who are happy that the city is rich. On the other hand, the Mossos have told us that we lower the events of the population, when it should be the opposite because there are more people. We understand that treating the public well and generating this happiness makes everyone take much better care of themselves.
The festival audience is around 30, that will also help
We have a lot of young children who are bringing the average down. A boy who was interviewed yesterday on the festival's Twitch had just turned 18 and has been coming to the festival since he was 9. Parents and children are already starting to party and have a beer together, this is something that did not happen in Spain in the 50s, 60s or 70s because we had a dictatorship and it was censored. What we are achieving today at Vida is to keep up with the English festivals, we make the family feel very comfortable in this concept. This does not mean that it is a family festival, I do not think about families so that people come to the festival, I simply think about what I would like them to do to me. I go to a lot of festivals but they are always small, very exclusive festivals where surely no one knows any group and some I don't even know myself. And what I like is this, living special things.
