Study the management of HONDALEA project (by Cristina Iglesias) in Donostia/San Sebastian
Discussion node – February 21, 2022 13.00h (Mexico Time)
Participants:
Jaime Otamendi – Donostia Cultura Director
Jon Insausti – Councillor for Culture, Donostia/ San Sebastián City Council
Lourdes Fernández – Artingenium Director
For a long time, cultural management was a function linked to the planning and controlling of labor processes, in other words, administrative work. Nevertheless, it is from the 1970’s that artistic promotion and production and culture gradually displaced the administrative realm of labor, until they became the nucleus of cultural management.
In this century—and particularly during pandemic times—there seems to be a growing posturing in terms of cultural management. Managing is now conceived as an arena of reflection and dissent in order to turn public and exhibition programs into a tool that has an impact on cultural policies and that can favor accessibility, inclusion, gender perspectives and cultural justice.
Nowadays, going hand in hand with social, economic and environmental dimensions, the practice of cultural management can be conceived as one of the transversal pillars of sustainability. Mediation is a tool that can make the struggles against patriarchy, against racism and against colonialism visible. In this sense, participation in the current cultural environment becomes an act of empowerment and co-creation that can vindicate the open nature of management in the eyes of many communities and groups, so that it doesn’t only remain under the perspective of cultural consumerism, but that can also offer access to the means for its production.
It is not odd that the new models regarding cultural management—both in the actual space as well as the virtual—require new crafts, words, professions, even an unfinished lexicon that transforms and builds itself in our everyday experience.