Yesterday was July 13, 2022, but the 2020 National Culture Awards were presented at the Prado Museum. From the year in which the world changed and also left the award ceremonies suspended. The Minister of Culture, Miquel Iceta, recalled it at the beginning of the ceremony, presided over by the King and Queen: "Seeing 2020 in the invitations reminds us of everything we have experienced in these last two years, the uncertainty, the sadness, the fear, but also how the culture helped us in the most complicated moments. In these two years we have learned that culture takes care of us and that we also have to take care of it”.
With a speech in which he recalled – as the King would also do – the late José Guirao, "sensitive, elegant, in words and dialogue", he gave way to the parade of thirty winners, who were represented by Irene Vallejo's speech, National Essay Award for El infinity en un reed. Always smiling, she set out to demonstrate how, despite the fact that the "bizarre trades of the winners today do not enjoy a good professional reputation", it is through fiction, "with stories, songs, poems and metaphors" that we learn "to sleep, eat , overcome pain, love”.
The winners and their bizarre trades were the theater of Guillem Clua, the dance of Jesús Carmona, the literature of Luis Mateo Díez, the comics of Javier de Isusi, the music of Raquel García-Tomás, the painting of José María Yturralde, the photography of María Teresa Ortega, the cultural journalism of Sergio Vila-Sanjuán or the television of Andreu Buenafuente. A culture, King Felipe would conclude, that contributes almost 700,000 jobs and 3.4% of Spain's GDP and that these last two years "has revealed itself as an essential component for our lives."
Vallejo demonstrated it with the poetic flight of his speech. He recalled that "words keep images inside them like amber keeps insects from remote eras" and that "the term culture evokes peasant roots." “Our farmer ancestors devised the metaphor of cultivating the mind, that little rustic parcel that we have behind our foreheads between our ears. Thus we begin to be gardeners of ourselves. That is what it is about, turning ourselves from head to toe into a work of art”, he said, and assured that “it would be hard to resist life without rivers of ink of images, music, dance. We need to dress the real, embellish it, draw it, balance on the edge of its abysses, read it, dream it”. And he warned that "the fictions we create shape our gaze and our actions, and therefore they exist."
“Hopefully in childhood we are taught that along with practical life there are stories, comics, verbal games, the circus, the reverse of everyday life. If a child thinks that you feed him just to feed him, he gets bored, if the spoon flies like a plane everything becomes a game, a metaphor that seduces him”, he drew, and concluded that “every day you have to continue cultivating, creating and caring for our garden, the common meadow, the amber of dreams”.
