The board of directors of the Ateneu Barcelonès and the workers of its Escola d’Escriptura issued a joint statement last night after a meeting of more than two hours “in order to find solutions to the conflict over mutual relations”.
The president of the Ateneu, Isona Passola, assured La Vanguardia after the meeting that it has effectively served to reduce tension, and to “smoke the pipe of peace”. “We are very happy to sit down and talk,” said Pau Pérez, director of the Escola.
The statement is brief and makes explicit the start of a dialogue “which necessarily has to conclude in a new framework that guides the relationship between the Escola and the board of directors of the Ateneu Barcelonès” with “a peer group to advance” in this regard, in addition to express the “will to put an end to manifestations of discrepancies and start a new stage of close collaboration.” A majority of the members of the board and about thirty of the 52 teachers of the Escola attended.
And it is that when Passola acceded to the presidency of the Ateneu, in March 2021, he highlighted the objective of promoting the Escola, in addition to “reversing the economic situation” of the entity. Two objectives in fact parallel, because if in the previous courses the school had been one of the economic lungs of the Ateneu, the outbreak of the pandemic and the virtualization of the courses made the members who came from the school drop, which added to the increase disproportionate electricity spending has upset the budget balance: some 250,000 euros of unforeseen deficit between the two.
In an interview with this newspaper, on Thursday Passola had already insisted that “the board’s first obligation is culture, but also not to have a deficit, as a private entity, and it must be remedied”: “If the Escola falls, the Ateneu, and at the same time if Ateneu falls, they fall. It has to be fixed.”
The conflict had been escalating as a result of statements in which the president detailed the bad financial situation of the entity, for which it was proposed to the Escola that the virtual students pay a membership fee, and that happened in a context in which two resignations on the board over the firing of the library director sparked accusations of presidentialism. Passola insisted that she is “willing to show her face, but the decisions are collective.” In fact, on Thursday he wanted to maintain the conversation with the participatory presence of part of his team, the vice president and head of Culture, the philologist Lluïsa Julià, and with the member Jordi Jiménez Guirao, philosopher and part of the young renewal of the board, at 26 years old. He also assures that they accuse him of being presidential, but that the dismissal of the director of the library, Àlex Cosials, was requested by management for professional reasons.
Passola uses a metaphor to explain the situation: there is a whale stranded on a beach and you have to push very hard to return it to the water to save it, and it may break a rib, but you have to save the whale. Their perception, which Julià and Jiménez corroborate, is that there are people who are uncomfortable because they want to open the Ateneu –there was already controversy when they opened the restaurant on weekends beyond the members–. But there is a project, they say, such as the Catalan classes for foreigners offered by the Consorci de Normalització Lingüística, or the project to digitize the audiovisual collection, a heritage for which an agreement has been signed with the Fundació La Caixa, in addition to aid from the City Council and the Generalitat that with the pandemic had been stranded. And they also get muscle for a certain rejuvenation of the members and a good cultural programming.
In any case, Julià explains that the history of the Ateneu is full of disagreements and resignations in the boards, because “it is a living entity that reflects society”. From the outset it seems that the Ateneu finds a certain calm again before the celebration of the 150th anniversary, at the end of this month.
Catalan version, here
