NEW NORMAL: Harinera ZGZ, enjoy culture, stay safe

As soon as the mandatory quarantine finished, the public officers in charge of the venue came back to Harinera ZGZ, in order to adapt the building to the new situation. At the very beginning that was our main priority, as a way to allow our resident projects to came back and use their working spaces. It was a hard job, but all the sanitary measures stablished by the Spanish Government were applied: specific routes and signals inside the building in order to guarantee the social distancing, hydroalcoholic gels almost everywhere, screens, face masks, extra cleanings, new capacity limits and so on. A week later, residents were back on their offices in a safe way.

Then, we started to think about how to adapt every single postponed activity to these measures. More than seventy projects brought to the table. Some of them weren’t easy to adapt -DIWO workshops, circus, theater…- Tons of phone calls and discussions until we clarified how to develop all of them without risks.

On the 17th of June, Harinera ZGZ finally reopened its doors to the citizenship after the lockdown with our first adapted workshops. We were convinced about all our job, but we can’t deny we were nervous. Fortunately, pretty soon we saw that despite the masks, the gloves and all the restrictions, everything was working fine and people were having fun. They were enjoying culture, like in the old times. And this made us feel that all the effort of our community to give people the chance to enjoy their cultural rights, staying safe at the same time, was a worthwhile job.

The new normality is an uncertain time. The future of some of our residents and members of our community is still unforeseeable; specially for those related to performing arts. Most of them have subscribed temporary labor force adjustment plans that have been useful in the short term to avoid the consequences of two months without any activity, but they still don’t know when and how they will be able to restart their whole activities, in order to be sure that their incomes are enough to continue with their projects. All of them are trying to figure out how to adequate them properly to the bunch of sanitary measures. The upcoming months will be still tenses. But even in those complex circumstances, Harinera ZGZ and its community keeps on rolling. Right now, we are designing our programme for the next four months, and we hope we will be able to develop our Adeste+ prototype during the autumn, starting the process with teenagers and youngsters as soon as they will be back to school. Our commitment with culture as a tool for social well-being is strong, and we feel that more than ever, we can contribute to help people to develop their own culture; to enjoy and stay safe. 

Text and pictures: Harinera ZGZ