Recovering “collective self-esteem” and achieving “generating new hopes, new horizons, new spaces and new leaderships” are the objectives set by the new Catalan Culture Congress, which will be held during the years 2024-2025, four decades after the history of 1975-1977. The poet and journalist Esteve Plantada, the historian Agustí Alcoberro, the jurist Josep Ramon Barberà and the history doctoral student Blanca Garcia-Oliver presented this Friday the “Initial Crida” of the congress, which is presented as “an open meeting space” in a very different time than the seventies.
The challenges, as they have all agreed, "are much more complex", which will address all types of issues, from those related to demography, energy, finance, food and agriculture to those related with new technologies, health, climate change, urban planning, mobility or political institutions.
For Alcoberro, “our society is much more plural, diverse and segmented and we miss an agora, a collective space in which to meet, a place in which to reflect on where we are and where we have to go.” For all this, he specified, the congress will have a “reflective” part, but “there has to be a mobilization to excite people again, generate self-esteem, generate the capacity to build their own future.” “If we do it collectively we will be unstoppable,” he predicted.
Some 150 people have already been working on the preparation of the Congress, which will officially start in February, and with which the entire society, all citizens, are “invited to participate.” The idea is that over the next few years the congress will have “an impact throughout the territory and on many social groups.”
Barberà has warned of the risk that exists of “social polarization, of confrontation, of disruption” in a Catalonia, in his opinion, of “weak institutions to face these great waves, some uncertain, others unpredictable” and with “one language, "which is our most precious, fragile treasure." The organizers believe in culture “as a way to overcome this fragile situation and to guarantee our community, which is at stake.” They also point out that they will seek to “birth new social leaderships” and add: “We are not talking about politics, that too. We are talking about society, about the people, about young people, for whom this congress is held, so that they take command and leadership.”
Esteve Plantada has indicated that after the preparatory meetings, it has been agreed to create four major areas of work: “How do we maintain ourselves? How do we communicate? How do we take care of ourselves? And how do we unite?” Each of these areas has ten challenges and each challenge will generate two actions, a presentation and a performative action, with which 40 challenges have been identified, which will involve 80 events, in addition to the opening and closing. We want to “think about the country we want for the next fifty years, know the challenges and how to do it.”
Regarding who will financially support the organization of the congress, Esteve Plantada has indicated that the ideal thing is for the administrations and civil society to do it halfway, creating the figure of the promoter for this purpose.
