Two cooperative bookstores, La Lluerna de Ripoll and El Refugi de la Seu d'Urgell, have launched La Traça Cultural, a web platform with a unified cultural agenda for the Pirineu and a resource bank to add synergies with entities, spaces and artists local. They start with around thirty proposals: music, cinema and theater and they want to add many more.
“Culture was concentrated in Barcelona and the metropolitan area, but innovative things also happen here,” says Carla Esquerra, one of the promoters and coordinator of La Traça Cultural. With this virtual space they want to promote entities and artists so that they become a benchmark in the country.
The platform wants to remedy two shortcomings: on the one hand, unite the different cultural proposals, which were already being made in the nine counties without knowing each other. And, on the other hand, break the idea that emerging and innovative proposals are carried out in Barcelona and rodalies.
"It seemed that here they were always trailing and following the traditional, but we saw that it is not true because we have published the website two weeks ago and there are already 27 cultural initiatives that take place in the Pirineu", explains Esquerrà in ACN. The idea is to say “we are here, we are linked and things also happen”.
Another of the promoters of the initiative, the cultural manager Maria Giró, points out that the "territorial context" contributes to a "disconnection" between the entities, taking into account that the Pyrenees is "much more extensive and disseminated". In the future, the platform plans to incorporate a directory of artists from these regions and an intranet space where entities can share resources.
The idea is that they help and "accompany" each other and that users can see, on a map, what they do and offer. In addition, it is a tool that allows you to consult updated information on cultural events.
The two bookstores were born in the middle of the pandemic and are managed with the cooperative format. They have many points in common, such as the defense of critical thinking and the role of culture as a dynamizer of a territory. They did not know each other, but they immediately found ways to collaborate. From here they saw the need to create a single cultural circuit and bring together all the offer on a single platform.
Esquerrà explains that one of the functions is to share resources, such as scheduling presentations by the same author who plans to hold an event in the Pyrenees and take advantage of the route to make it more sustainable.
The other promoter of Lluerna, Marta Barceló, admits that technology has a great ally for this type of initiative and that important coordination work has been done to contact everyone. It was launched a few days ago, but they are very happy with the reception. “People really want it,” she says. They emphasize that they have been surprised by the offer that there is, for example, in film and music festivals and they hope to be able to continue making the programming grow”.
For his part, Miquel Albero, one of the worker members of the El Refugi de la Seu d'Urgell cooperative, praised that the bookstore project is “intrinsic” to his “way of being” of creating a network “based on transformation ” where to make visible the “small realities of the Pyrenees sites and how culture can create imaginaries”. In addition, he explains that in this year and a half of his career they have been able to meet various entities and collaborate with them.
To start it up, they have had help from the Federation of Cooperatives of Catalonia, where they presented the idea. This year will serve as a test and then they will study how its financing should be to make it viable. The official presentation was made in Konvent de Berga during a day of cultural revitalization in rural areas and they plan to do it in other points.
