The Congress of Catalan Culture presented this Friday the initial Call that sets out the steps to be followed in the next two years to solve the main challenges of Catalan society. The spokespeople for the initiative have claimed the need to “recover collective self-esteem”, as well as define “new leaderships” that allow us to build shared horizons in a particularly “complex” context. The director of the congress, Esteve Plantada, has explained that work will be done on around forty challenges, divided into different areas. Although 2024 will be used to hold sessions and work committees, 2025 will be the year that will host the program and presentations. “Culture is what defines us”, he stressed.
The popular initiative led by Plantada arises from the historic Congress of Catalan Culture (1975-1977), which according to the promoters, became an event of “great impact” that contributed to designing “the structures, the consensus and the institutions on which we have developed as a society in the last decades”. Fifty years later, the new Congress of Catalan Culture will unfold in its entirety between 2024 and 2025, with two clear objectives: to be an open meeting space where to recover “collective self-esteem”; and be the seed that generates “new illusions, horizons and leadership”.
According to Plantada, 2023 has been a year of work that has mainly been based on the recruitment of “resources and human talent”, which will make it possible to structure, starting this coming February, some work sessions that will be held throughout the Catalan-speaking territories, such as the Valencian Country or the Balearic Islands.
As for 2025, it will be when the “most visible” part of the work will be shown, with proposals that will have been generated from the debates and dialogues of the previous year. “We must create a framework of coexistence and consensus that will help us to have a better society”, insisted the director, who warned that the current situation is “complex” and that major issues such as climate change, the rise of radicalism or demographic changes.
In fact, he adds that precisely these changes in society mean that another of the points that will have to be put on the table is that of “rediscovering and rethinking who we are”. To do this, the proposals will be articulated based on four main axes: how we communicate, how we bond, how we take care of ourselves and how we maintain ourselves. All of them, he assures, will be “very transversal” at the same time because in many aspects they “touch each other”.
Another important aspect is to find “new leadership” of a social nature and, above all, among young people. This was explained by the president of the Congrés de Cultura Catalana foundation, Agustí Alcoberro, who insisted that one of the objectives of the congress must be to seek “new reliefs” and that the proposal must also serve to weave this network. “It is one of the ingredients and the objectives we set ourselves”, he added.
“The world has changed a lot in recent decades, including the Catalan countries, and we have to rethink ourselves in many ways and consider certain conclusions we live with as not definitive”, he said. For this reason, he opined that “young generations” are needed to contribute “new ideas” already thinking about the horizon of the 21st century.
The legal expert Josep Ramon Barberà also participated in the presentation of the initial call, which took place this morning in Barcelona. During his speech he stated that culture is a “good way” to overcome the current context of fragility and, at the same time, to become more “resilient”. For this reason, he insisted that it is necessary to leave behind “defeatism” based on two premises: trust and generosity.