The Contemporary Culture Center 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 whole world, which has become a central element of Barcelona and Catalan culture and without which 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 are bringing together the journalist and philosopher Josep Ramoneda (1949), ideologist and first director of the center, and the political scientist Judit Carrera (1974) , its current manager, who was 20 years old when the institution opened and took up the position in 2018 after a long period as head of Debates and Education.
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 it was born with a goal, 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, it has now escaped from above, but this is its origin. Trying to make a center with an important capacity to penetrate from a humanistic way, understanding by humanistic the arts, sciences, philosophy… And with the singularity that we did not have a collection, which is usually a fundamental piece for to an institution that aspires to hold exhibitions. We were looking for a breadth of thinking based on contemporaneity and projection into the future. What has changed? What was contemporaneity. But the goal is the same. Without forgetting the past, looking to the future to see if we are able to understand where we are going.
Judit Carrera: Despite the fact that neither Barcelona nor the world are the same, that they have changed radically, the model remains valid and, for me, continues to be more relevant and more necessary than ever. It is true that in the mid-1990s 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 of Rwanda… It was the beginnings 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 pre-eminent political regime in the world. And 30 years later we see that the world is not only more unpredictable, but much more uncertain. Barcelona is also another. In the mid-1990s there was practically no tourism, no immigration. At the moment, it has 30% of its population born abroad and there are 30 million visitors to the city. And well, we continue to see these wars on the European continent itself. Now is the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We are watching the annihilation of Gaza live. Humanity’s violent impulses remain the same, but in a world totally transformed by this acceleration of scientific and technological change, which we seem not to catch.
It opened its doors two years after the Olympic Games, a moment of maximum euphoria.
J.R: Yes, although Pasqual Maragall and his project had their enemies, who somehow had to adapt. The definitive impulse is when Frédéric Edelmann talks about the Barcelona model in Le Monde as a mark of the transformation of the city. Then history followed its path and new things appeared. But returning to the CCCB, I think it is important to remember the exhibitions of that period because they are very significant for the idea of ??a center that we wanted, since they integrate it and make it visible. For example, a significant innovation is made, and I want to acknowledge Jordi Balló [one of its first heads of exhibitions] in the sense that events such as Chernobyl are exposed, a significant example that things were starting to go wrong . Cinema, literature is exhibited and the road to science begins to open, which will later develop much more thoroughly when it enters another stage. Apart, of course, from the issue of cities.
J.C: The world cannot be seen from a single perspective, but needs the different artistic, academic and intellectual disciplines to understand its multiplicity. And this is more valid and more necessary than ever. We talk about the transformations of the world and we cannot ignore the crisis of freedom of expression. The extreme right is in many European governments, in many parliaments, and in the best of hypotheses it is leading opinion polls, so that we are at a very critical moment in which spaces for free, plural, choral, interdisciplinary, they are the only spaces of freedom we have left.
Has the CCCB been free from the dangers against freedom of expression, from political interference, or has it had to defend it?
J.R: My experience, and I will always be grateful to Manuel Royes, the president of the Provincial Council who entrusted me with the project and with whom I worked for the first time – and his successors did not change – is an experience of total autonomy. I’m in charge of this, if one day there’s a problem I’ll tell you and you’ll leave, but as long as you do what you have to do I won’t interfere for anything. This worked and worked all this time. This marks a line of respect that I believe extends to the activity. The Provincial Council, on which the center depends, is a comfortable institution because it does not have a large political profile and it has money. And this avoids being in the center of political battles.
At some point it seems to have been there. His departure itself was related to a change of political color in the institution.
J.R: Well, yes, apart from me it was a long time ago… The center has gone through some difficult times, but Judit was there to recover it and Vicenç Villatoro to save it, something 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, warning or request, it is really a relationship of absolute respect for the intellectual independence of this center, which is its most valuable asset, this practically absolute freedom which, as Josep said, brings a level of responsibility to understand very well in which context you are working, that you have to be a very plural space, that you have to include as many voices as possible to really be a mirror of the impulses that concern the society to which you owe, since you are a public center.
J. R: It’s that it’s an institution that doesn’t have a comfortable room, let’s say, it’s built day by day, of course, and every time it starts again. And what holds it? It is supported by a history and a continuity in which the systematic presence of people at the highest level of the almost universal cultural world has been very important, because it is clear that Europeans have predominated, but 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 every continent. And it should not be forgotten that, despite the fact that it is not a CCCB project, it also contributed to giving a certain diversity to Sónar, which was born and had its first tour here. In a way, it anticipated the era of a period in which the technological was beginning to be much more important than we believed at the time.
Can the world continue to be interpreted from a purely humanistic perspective?
J.R: The human being must continue to raise the questions. And don’t take things for granted, don’t fall into digital welfare.
J.C: The foundational humanism of the CCCB is still a child of the European Enlightenment, but some layers have been added that were not considered either in the 18th century or thirty years ago. The climate crisis has opened or added layers to understand that the human being is at the center, but we are part of a much wider ecosystem in which we relate to machines, we relate to other species that also inhabit the planet. And this much more plural look at what is the role of humanity in the planetary ecosystem is important.
J.R: Among other things, because it is necessary so that we don’t believe the fantasy that it is the machines that do it. There is always someone behind.
Thought today no longer belongs to an intellectual elite.
J.C: The CCCB has had the ability to attract the main voices of thought in Barcelona and this has given the opportunity to participate first-hand in the world’s great debates, but above all it has created links with the local fabric. We have an average of 350 speakers per year, which is fast, 30% of which are international. I believe that there is no space in Europe for the generation of public debate and the circulation of 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 bit of what it raises, in these 30 years we have indeed seen a certain fragmentation of how public opinion is generated. And in this sense, it is important to open up to other voices, perhaps more marginal, or less consolidated, to enrich a public sphere that must be more choral.
What other topics will focus the debate in the coming years?
J.R: 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, crisis in the sense that we know where we were but we do not know very well where we are going. Here we had a great exhibition about the war. Now the theme is more current than ever and with unique coordinates because they have a lot of atavistic foundations, but also a lot of contemporary technological use, which complicates everything.
J. C: I recently read a report that said that the year 2023 had been the most violent year in the world after the Second World War. In other words, this question of how we should live together, of how we can generate a space for coexistence, seems fundamental to me and is part of the CCCB’s great raison d’être, to create a space for plural and public reflection that allows us to fight against discourses of hatred and against the violence that is proliferating in the world.
Before, he also referred to the irruption of the extreme right…
J.C: The discourse of hate has appeared and it is essential to confront it not in a reactive way, but by creating a mobilizing alternative utopian discourse that allows us to trust in the future again at a time when it seems that it has been denied to us.
J.R: That the fractures in today’s world have led to this evolution of Europe towards post-democratic authoritarianism, in which it is no longer the extreme right, but rather a current that increasingly invades the entire right, and, therefore, a part of the population towards positions of manifest reduction of democratic culture, it is very serious. And the signs are not encouraging. It is an area that, as Judit rightly says, you need to enter it and you need to enter it thoroughly.
