The Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, ??the CCCB, opened its doors on February 24, 1994 in the old Casa de la Caritat. A center with a singular model, unique in the world, which has become a central element of Barcelona and Catalan culture and without whose existence the city would be unrecognizable today. On the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary, which is celebrated this weekend with a program of activities open to the public, we bring together the journalist and philosopher Josep Ramoneda (1949), ideologist and first director of the center, and the political scientist Judit Carrera (1974), its current head, who was 20 years old when the institution opened and took office in 2018 after a long period as head of Debates and Education. The complicity between them is evident, as is their conviction that this space of thought, which has never stopped transforming, is more necessary and pertinent than ever.
The CCCB was born as a space to think about the present through the confrontation of ideas and critical debate. Now the present has changed radically. What was the world like then and where are we now?
Josep Ramoneda: The CCCB was born at a time when the technological digital space in which we now float was still far away. And therefore it was born with one objective, which is to generate a new cultural center model with the city as a reference, “the city of cities” we called it. Because the city was the engine of the world at that time, now it has escaped from above, but that is its origin. Trying to create a cultural center with an important capacity to penetrate from a humanistic path, understanding by humanistic the arts, sciences, philosophy… And with the added singularity that we did not have a collection, which is usually a fundamental piece for an institution that aspires to do exhibitions. We were looking for a breadth of thought based above all on contemporaneity and projection into the future. What has changed? What contemporary times were has changed. But their objective, which is what Judit is doing, is the same. Without forgetting the past, look to the future to see if we are able to understand where we are going.
Judit Carrera: At its birth it was a pioneering and unique institution in Europe, really. A model that anticipated this model of interdisciplinarity, that model of an institution without a collection. And although neither Barcelona nor the world are the same, which have changed radically, the model is still valid and for me it remains more relevant and more necessary than ever. It is true that in the mid-90s there was a certain optimism, the Berlin Wall had fallen, the apartheid regime in South Africa had ended, but it was also a very violent world: the war in the Balkans, the genocide in Rwanda… They were At the beginning of the Internet, of globalization, there was a certain promise that things would perhaps get better, that democracy would end up more or less stabilizing as the most preeminent political regime in the world. And 30 years later we see that the world has not really gone in this direction and that it is not only more unpredictable, but much more uncertain.
The city of Barcelona is also another. In the mid-90s, there was practically no tourism, there was no immigration. Currently, Barcelona has 30% of its population born abroad and there are 30 million visitors to the city. This is just to say two figures that are signs of how the city has transformed over these decades. And really the world… Well, we continue to see these wars on the same European continent. Now marks the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We are watching the annihilation of Gaza live. Therefore, let’s say, the violent impulses of humanity remain the same, but really in a world totally transformed, as Josep said, by this acceleration of scientific and technological changes, which we do not seem to catch.
It opened its doors two years after the Olympic Games, a moment of maximum euphoria in the city.
JR: Yes, although Pasqual Maragall and his project had their enemies, who in some way had to adapt. The definitive impulse is when Frédéric Edelmann speaks of the ‘Barcelona model’ in Le Monde as a mark of the city’s transformation. Then history has continued its path and new things have appeared. But returning to the CCCB, I think it is important to remember the exhibitions from that period because they are very significant of the idea of ??the center that we wanted because they integrate it and make it visible. For example, a significant innovation is made, and I want to acknowledge Jordi Balló [its first head of exhibitions] in the sense that exhibitions are made of events such as Chernobyl, a resounding and also significant example of how things began. to go wrong, although it was not so obvious. Cinema and literature are exposed and the path of science begins to open, which will then be developed much more thoroughly when another stage is entered. Apart, of course, from the issue of cities.
J.C: The world cannot be seen from a single perspective, but it really needs different artistic, academic, and intellectual disciplines to understand its multiplicity. And that model whose seed was planted at birth is more current and more necessary than ever. We talk about the transformations of the world and we cannot ignore the crisis of freedom of expression throughout Europe, throughout the world. The extreme right is in many European governments, in many parliaments, and in the best of hypotheses it is leading opinion polls, so we are really at a very critical moment in which spaces for free, plural, choral, interdisciplinary debate, They are the only spaces of freedom we have left.
Has the CCCB been free from the dangers of freedom of expression, from political interference, or has it had to defend it?
JR: My experience, and I would always be grateful to Manuel Royes, the president of the Provincial Council who commissioned me with the project and with whom I worked the first time – and his successors did not change – is an experience of total autonomy. I will entrust this to you, if one day there is a problem I will tell you and you will leave, but while you do what you have to do I will not get involved at all. Well, this worked and it worked all this time. This marks a line of respect that I believe contaminates the activity. The Provincial Council, on which the center depends, is a comfortable institution because it does not have a great political profile and it has money. And that avoids being at the center of the political battles in which these institutions are often involved.
At some point it seems like he was. His own departure was related to a change of political color in the institution.
JR: Well, yes, apart from the fact that I had been there for a long time… The center has gone through some difficult times but Judit was there to recover it and Vicenç Villatoro to save it, something that I will always recognize.
J.C: I will simply confirm this level of absolute freedom. In the five years that I have been in charge, I have not received a single call, a warning, or a request. It is truly a relationship of absolute respect for the intellectual independence of this center, which I believe is truly its most valuable asset, this practically absolute freedom that, as Josep said, entails a level of responsibility in the management and in the teams, to understand very well what context you are working in, to understand very well that you have to be a very plural space, to include the maximum number of voices. possible to truly be a mirror of the drives that concern the society to which you owe, being a public center.
J. R. It is an institution that does not have a comfortable room, let’s say, it is built day by day, of course, and each time it starts over, so to speak. And what supports it? It is supported by a history and a continuity in which the systematic presence of people from the highest level of the almost universal cultural world has been very important, because it is evident that Europeans have predominated, logically due to proximity, but that there has been the presence of thinkers from everywhere, from Joseph-Achille Mbembe to Pankaj Mishra, I don’t know, we can find names from all continents and the most diverse experiences. And we must not forget that, although it is not a CCCB project, Sónar was also built to give a certain diversity, which was born and had its first run here. In some way it anticipated the time of a period in which technology began to be much more important than we believed at that time.
How has technological transformation changed the way the center is run?
J.C: The CCCB was born before the Internet or at the beginning of the Internet, I think the first exhibitions were done by fax. And right now we are seeing how videos are generated through artificial intelligence, so the transformation has been very brutal and entails very deep questions about the very notion of the human condition, about what it means to be human today, how we are merging with machines, what will be the future of work, the future of education. These are questions that generate a lot of fascination and at the same time a lot of concern. And we have seen it with our artificial intelligence project. Before opening we had all the school visits full for six months and we are about to reach 100,000 visitors. We have reflected a lot on what the role of technology has to be, how we have to transform ourselves as an institution on a digital level, but as this technological transformation advances, the importance of presence, of being a physical meeting space, is confirmed to me. . Manuel de Solà-Morales said that good public spaces are those that generate urbanity. And I always like to imagine the CCCB as a public space that generates a city, that is capable of mixing different populations that do not know each other, that there is a point of surprise and emotion in meeting people you have not previously met. A space of memory, of learning, of emotion. And this is what the city is, always. In times of metaverse, claiming cultural spaces as public spaces that generate urbanity is very important. Much more than in ’94, which it already was.
JR: For me what is essential is the willingness to put the human condition at the center of the experience.
Can we continue to interpret the world from a solely humanistic perspective when man is being displaced from the center?
JR: Human beings have to continue asking questions. And a house like this has to serve so that human beings can continue asking questions. And do not take the thing for granted, do not fall into digital papanatism. Know perfectly well that it is a human experience, obviously, and therefore that we do not lose sight of the human when we exercise it.
J.C: I believe that this foundational humanism in the CCCB is still a space that is a child of the European enlightenment, but some layers have been added that were not considered in the 18th century or thirty years ago. The climate crisis in this sense has opened or added layers to this foundational humanism to understand that the human being is at the center, but we are part of a much broader ecosystem in which we relate to machines, we relate to other species. that also enable the planet. And this much more plural view of the relative role of humanity in the planetary ecosystem is important. Expand the limits of what classical humanism had done. Many theorists talk about post-humanism, which is a very unfriendly word, but it really means understanding that on those same layers the understanding of the world can be expanded from the hybridization between man and machine, between man and other species with those of us who share the space in which we live. And I think your question was a bit in this sense.
JR: Among other things, because it is necessary so that we do not believe the fantasy that it is machines that do it. Because there is always someone behind you when you use them.
Before they talked about the list of thinkers who have passed through the center. And I have the impression that thought today also no longer belongs to an intellectual elite but rather emerges from very different areas.
JR: Yes, for sure, and before, the humanist scientist was quite strange. There already were, but now humanist questions are being raised. I give an example that is Ricardo Solé, who for me represents this. But yes, many thinkers have passed by, J. G. Ballard comes to mind, that when we did the presentation about him every week he sent me a letter. “Well, are you sure about doing it?” “Yes Yes”. “What if we rethought it?” “What if we didn’t?” There were great interactions, I remember, for example, Bauman’s first conference, but they have been infinite…
J.C: The CCCB has had the ability to attract the main voices of contemporary thought to Barcelona and this is interesting in itself, because it gives the opportunity to participate in first person in the great debates of the world, but above all because it has also created links with the local fabric. We have always made a very great effort to link these personalities, these voices with local universities, with experts, with young people, a real effort to create a bond that is more lasting, that does not end with the conference of the day, but rather that really brings Barcelona and Catalonia a little bit to the world. At the moment we have on average about 350 speakers a year, which is quick to say, 30% of which are international. I believe that there is no space in Europe for generating public debate and circulating ideas with this ambition, a space with a budget of 15 million, 18,000 square meters, but above all this constant vocation to generate debate. And a little bit what you asked, in these 30 years we have seen a certain fragmentation of how public opinion is generated. 30 years ago there may have been only one media outlet, there were experts and the public, everything was more unidirectional, today a new content generation system has exploded, there are many sources. It is very difficult to understand how the mechanism of creating public opinion works. And in this sense, I believe that the spaces for generating knowledge, be it a cultural space, universities, or the media, have necessarily had to open themselves to other voices, perhaps more marginal, or less consolidated, to enrich a public sphere that has to be more choral. Because as we said at the beginning, the world is also much more complex and there is no single formula to understand it. The more voices are needed, the better. And it is in the choral sum, that crossing of voices, that builds the story, or at least allows the good questions to be raised. And in this sense, I believe that there has been a certain process of opening without giving up the great voices of today’s thought.
Cities have also changed. From a container of problems they have become the problem themselves.
J.R: Cities are in transformation like everything else and when communication territories overlap, the situations become more complex. A society in which there are traditional media, the press, radio and television, is not the same as a society in which digital matters above all else. And evidently the cities have changed. Sometimes to the detriment of something that was so central to the reflection of the 90s, which was urban planning. Urban planning seems as if suddenly it is no longer so much on the front line, because the questions are surely more complicated to solve and because a new form of urban planning is probably being coined, which is what we now have to try to discover. I think this is very clear.
J.C: The transformation is really very important, not simply because they have grown globally and locally, but they have become suburbanized. Cities are no longer contained in what at a European level were the ancient walls or now the rings, if they really are metropolitan spaces, in which it is much more difficult to distinguish what is the city from what is not. And this has to do with the growth of the urban population, 60% of the world’s population lives in cities. They are truly unlimited or infinite spaces. And that is why it is essential to intellectually rearrange what a city means. And then there are the effects of climate change. According to figures from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the perspective is of summers at 50 degrees by 2050. This forces us to rethink how we have to live together, which is the city’s great contribution. Understanding how you can share a space where people who are different live together.
JR: In a way, the Olympic vaccine was the last dream of the modern city. From then on, everything becomes much more complex and all these spatial physical plots and also non-physical plots are constituted, but they are evidently changing and also with an added factor, which is the acceleration of the population change of the large cities. cities, which is becoming faster and more intense, let’s say. And also the approach of the world, that is, although the barriers are very large, the world is smaller than 30 years ago.
What other topics are going to focus the debate in the coming years?
JR: Now there is a very central theme which is wars, the return of wars to the world scene, even to the European one, which seemed to be something that had already disappeared. The proliferation of wars is the expression of a crisis situation, a crisis in the sense that we know where we were but we do not know very well where we are going. This should become a central thinking factor at this time. Here we had a great exhibition about the war. Now the topic is more relevant than ever and with singular coordinates because they have a lot of atavistic foundation but also a lot of contemporary technological use, which makes everything complicated. We see the eternal things of revenge and the most brutal and direct aggression, but also the control systems and the exercise of considerable remote wars.
J.C.; He was recently reading a report that said the year 2023 had been the most violent year in the world after World War II. In other words, this question of how to live together, of how to generate a space for coexistence, seems fundamental to me and is in part the great reason for the existence of the CCCB, to create a space for plural and public reflection that allows us to fight against hate speech and against the violence that is proliferating in the world. Other topics that are also focusing the debate are gender issues, the postcolonial issue, the racial issue…
Before he also referred to the emergence of the extreme right…
J.C: Hate speech has appeared that I believe is essential to confront not reactively, but really creating an alternative utopian discourse. Let’s not leave utopia in the hands of the extreme right. We cannot go in tow, we cannot wait for them to set the agenda. The fundamental thing is to create an alternative mobilizing utopia, spaces of hope that allow us to trust in the future again at a time when it seems that the future has been denied to us. The far right says all we have to do is go back to a past that was better but didn’t really exist. Climate change also seems to deny us the future and that there is only the apocalypse as a possible horizon. All the predominant discourses go in the direction of saying that there is no future. And I believe that the obligation of defenders of democracy and basic principles is to create an alternative discourse that is not reactive but has value in itself.
JR: That the fractures of today’s world have led to this evolution of Europe towards post-democratic authoritarianism, in which it is no longer the extreme right, but is a whole current that increasingly invades the entire right, and, therefore , a part of the population took positions of manifest reduction of democratic culture, is extraordinarily serious, and, at the same time, it is really significant. At this moment the signs are not exciting. We’ll see, things change and there are twists. But at the moment it is evidently an area in which Judit is absolutely right, that we must enter and we must enter thoroughly.
