Zaragoza Culture continues working from its lockdown. It is difficult time for us in Spain but we trust we will be able to face this crisis and support the local cultural sector. Actions are being studied to support the cultural sector and alternative dates to carry out, as far as possible, the canceled activities. Zaragoza City Council is analyzing the damages in the cultural local enterprises, collectives and associations.
Field Hospital in a concert hall
But we are not only working on culture, the serious situation we are experiencing has forced us to transform our largest concert hall in the Zaragoza Auditorium into a Field Hospital. At the moment, it has not been necessary to use it but it is ready to use. Here you can see how the place where musicians like Prince, Motörhead, Van Morrison, or Brad Meldau have played, has been transformed into a hospital: https://www.heraldo.es/multimedia/videos/aragon/zaragoza/asi-es-el-hospital-de-campana-del-auditorio-de-zaragoza/
Harinera ZGZ
Harinera ZGZ closed its doors on March 13rd and postponed all the programmed activities since then. We still don’t know when we will be able to reopen the venue so we can’t reschedule those projects right now, but our desire is to develop all of them as soon as possible. Although it seems that the open activities won’t be back in a short term, we hope that in a few weeks the public officers will be working again on the building and we will be able to allow the resident projects to come back to their residencies, as they are their working spaces.
As we decide our whole program every four months, at the beginning of the lockdown we were selecting the projects from May to August. We finished this job from our houses, and now we are waiting some clear news about when the cultural activities can start again to put them on the agenda. An important part of our activities are designed for small communities, so we still have faith that we will be able to develop some of them during the summer. At the same time, we are thinking on how to reshape them if restrictions are not lifted in a short term.
Most of our projects are ongoing, keeping in touch online with their communities. Some of them are working with elderly people, people with intellectual diversity and so on, so they have been really important for them to feel better during these days at home.
Meanwhile, we are thinking about the role Harinera could play during the next months. We think that community culture and the right to access to culture will be crucial to get over this crisis. It’s not easy to manage to have virtual meetings with such a huge and diverse community like us, but we tried and somehow it worked, so we had some informal meetings and this week we will celebrate our first assembly since the lockdown started.
One of the residents in Harinera teaches us how to fight the coronavirus from home, learning to embroider, its form of expression and activism, enjoy the @historiasentela video, you can follow the different tutorials on her YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/DosOrillasFFU
Culture on the network
Zaragoza Cultural has opened their archives and we are sharing culture in #ZCulturaEnCasa strategy. The strong community around the Audience Development Plan for the whole city is sharing and interacting with us in these hard moments. But the culture is waiting for people.
Text: #ZgzEsCultura
