The vice president of the Generalitat Valenciana and Minister of Culture, Vicente Barrera, assured this morning that the Valencian Executive will be “a containment dam” for the policies of the Ministry of Culture. Its owner, Ernest Urtasun, announced yesterday that his department will review the collections of State Museums to “overcome a colonial framework” and added that there will be a General Directorate of Cultural Rights “to fight against censorship”, two ideas that Barrera has criticized because, considers, is a “colonization” of the autonomous communities and the transferred powers.
Barrera has declared that “we are very concerned when he talks about colonization or decolonizing culture” and added that “we do not know very well what he is referring to, but we think that the greatest of the minister’s responsibilities is to promote culture, not dictate. culture”.
When asked by journalists about what the Valencian Government will do if it receives orders about the content of museums such as the San Pío V, Barrera acknowledged that “we will not accept instructions.” Likewise, his attention to the media was also linked to the announcement of the creation of a General Directorate of Cultural Rights to “fight against censorship”, an issue in which he acknowledged feeling challenged.
In this regard, Barrera wonders if this General Directorate will also be related to situations such as the one decided with the cultural bonus, since “as the court ruled, the cultural world of bullfighting cannot be censored, for example.”
Barrera has also acknowledged that what the new department of the Ministry of Culture means is that “they mean the opposite, that they are going to create a general direction of censorship and of course we feel challenged.”
After the plenary session of the Consell, in the subsequent press conference, the vice president of the Valencian Government, Susana Camarero, has supported Barrera’s statements and has indicated that the vice president “has all the freedom and logically he is the one who has to answer the statements of the Government of Spain”. Likewise, Camarero added that “this Council has always said that it is going to promote culture, which is diverse and plural. The Vice President is doing it magnificently from his department,” she added.