Eduardo Duarte Yañez is
a chilean cultural manager. In this post, he shares with us his concerns
regarding what he calls his government's obsession with the impact of culture –
a concept which he thinks has been very little or even not defined at all by
those using it. At the same time, he places his trust on local communities
which, together with international cultural cooperation and local political
authorities, are building management models aiming to blaze a trail for
actually making cultural programmes happen. mv
To talk about cultural processes in Chile, from the
perspective of registering city management models, where the role of culture,
although not that of a protagonist, is of vital importance in public policies
of local development, is not something very exciting for cultural managers,
artists and community cultural movements, the organized civil society.
There is, of course, an approved national cultural policy
up to 2016, where we are offered a series of mainstream concepts, where the
value of Intangible Cultural Heritage is mentioned for the first time, a number
of measures and lines not associated, almost transversally, to a management
plan that will take them forward.
Moving beyond this landscape, we’ll try to focus, in a
general way, on the local realities of the different communities. In the last
four years, there was no advancement with any concept or criterion that would
help us understand what the Culture Ministry of Chile (without a ministerial
classification, yet another contradiction) means by “impact” and its obession
with it. What’s the impact of a poem or a musical composition? The number of
people who read or listen to it? The quality of reading or hearing? And what’s
the deadline for measurig it? How many decades for Gabriela Mistral’s work
having an “impact” on national culture, if it’s actually having one...? How to
quantify the “impact” of a painting? By the number of eyes that viewed it in a
specific period of time (months, years?) or by its value in the art market? I
am afraid that the legitimate concern regarding the results of a certain public
policy (in this case, a cultural public policy) obsessed with “impact”, if one
is not careful, might end up in a dead-end.
On the other hand, also the debate regarding gratuity or
not for cultural activities (access to culture) is taking place in a marginal
way, and not as a debate among citizens. Most of the cultural offer is free,
and in many cases it is mixed and confused with entertainment shows for the
masses, which can cost as much as the annual budget of the Municipal Department
for Culture.
There are 345 municipalities in Chile. According to the
second national survey on culture (carried out by the National Councilfor
Culture and the Arts), the artistic form that draws the largest number of
chilean audiences is cinema (34%), followed by concerts (29,3%). This situation
prompts an interesting debate regarding the cinematographic contents, where
traditional cinemas were substituted by rooms in big shopping malls, and where
the programming is based on Hollywood’s cinematographic industry, in which
“choosing” the film to see actually means “choosing among the films I oblige
you to see”, there is no variety in content where there can also take place
independent cinema festivals or cinema events in public and private
universities.
The promotion of reading is another chapter, even longer,
of ambiguities. Chile has got 19% tax on books, something that drains
publishing houses, emerging authors and authors in general, and mainly the
common citizen, who’s not able to buy books which, quite often, equal a 20% or
30% of a monthly salary, with which one must sustain his/her family. A worker
cannot buy books with quality contents, it’s become prohibitive.
Contrary to everything that has been said so far, local
communities, as is the case of Coquimbo, together with international cultural
cooperation and local political authorities, are designing cultural management
models as flexible tools built together with all local cultural agents, in
order to be able to draw a navigation route which will result in the delivering
of cultural programmes, sustainable and with a larger number of indicators,
through the registration of every action. There have been projects such as the
Sociocultural Mapping of Popular Neighborhoods of Coquimbo and School
Ethnography, following the successful models of Heritage Education of Brazil
and Colombia. In 2012, with funding from the municipal budget for culture,
there was the starting of the Seminars and Debates of the Microneighborhoods
experience, in order to include, following a disciplined and scientific way in
the gathering of data and also with multiple formats for aquiring those
indicators, without being necessarily academic, issues that arealso important
to take into consideration.
In this way, the municipalities are creating a world
visualization of their principlal biocultural assets and they move forward with
experimenting city cultural management models, in an inclusive way that
involves the community. It’s a large task and it has, for sure, many ups and
downs, nevertheless, the most important thing in the cultural process of the
Coquimbo region – from which originated the first woman to win a Nobel prize,
Gabriela Mistral – is that there is an inter-relation between its cities and
the wish of all manages, artists and political authorities to work together in
an articulated way. We hope to have by the end of 2013 the first register of
this process, which is being adapted and receives many impulses on behalf of
the local community.
Eduardo Duarte Yañez is a writer and cultural manager,
creator of various cultural projects and programmes for local development or
cultural integration. In 2006 he received a national award for Municipal
Cultural Management in Chile. He has a degree in Cultural Management from teh
Arts Faculty of the University of Chile; he has a postgraduate degree in
International Cooperation and Cultural Management from the University of
Barcelona, Spain. He publishes in various media in Latin America and Spain.
