Distances have disappeared, more and more people move around the world incessantly, more business is done than ever before, we have long-distance relationships, we communicate and interconnect all the time, it seems that life leads us to let go of a specific territory.
What at first sounds like the logical consequence of an interconnected and globalized world, has other faces, that of mobility, which has allowed ideas to circulate and the creative diversity of humanity to emerge in others mirrors and find bridges that unite what was previously a kind of broken mirror that is recomposed into images that unite performing and musical artists according to criteria other than the merely geo-referential ones, appearing aesthetic, generational affinities, in a dynamic creative universe.
But there are other mobilities, those that come from conflicts, poverty, risk, from the realities derived from climate change, becoming one of the most sensitive issues in reality. socio-politics of the world, and that is not assumed with the force that is urgent, resulting in a fight against fear and terror, as happens in an analogous way, in a world that witnesses with amazement this ghost that runs through Europe, in the form of refugees who carry their hopelessness on their shoulders.
On the other hand, with the global panorama of the advent of a new strong and aggressive right ruling, this deficit appears in the role of culture as a space for peace, dialogue and local participation. We are facing a cultural space that has a long tradition of creative groups in the field of theater, music, literature, cinema, poetry, and intellectual elaboration, but at the same time experiences an insufficient link between its networks of conversation and action, in a context where levels of exclusion persist in different spheres, deeply accusing the world of gender, Afro-Americanism and indigenous people.
It is clear that in Latin America, particularly in those countries that have experienced periods of acute violence, a culture of solidarity continues to be generated. and actions are articulated that face violence in all its forms and origins as alternative and altering acts of this lacerating reality.
It is necessary that the social group assumes as centrality the relationships of logic and consensus as ways of living together respecting the uniqueness of each one, the emergence of the new rights as a cultural issue, the terrible situation that the world is going through today cannot be alien to the articulation of national and regional cultural proposals, and our current process You must be informed of contextual situations that serve as a reference.
Culture has always been the true space for reflection in society. Theatre, literature, music, plastic arts or philosophy have provided more counterculture or state culture responses than political-social responses themselves.
The risk we run as a “cultural ecosystem” (Rowan) is that kind of Darwinism of a future based on the “survival of the fittest” (institutions or sectors of the cultural industries that are larger, more established and more profitable in the discourse of the “orange economy”) We ask ourselves: In times of networks that surpass the barriers of borders, geographical and technological, how can networks of cooperation and solidarity be created? How to avoid the exclusion of the traditionally excluded?
These times test our ability to combine empathy and action. It is time to stay in touch with our friends and partners in Latin America, even if the organizations we have been working on together do not continue to work in the same way. We are all thinking of ways to organize ourselves in different ways. We are obliged to use our imagination and capacity for innovation to continue working across borders, together, for now and for the future.