“Direitos Culturais: uma política pública para (re)imaginar futuros”, by Jazmín Beirak, is one of the conferences that marks the start of Desejar – Movimento de Artes e Lugares Comuns.
Beirak is an art historian and cultural policy researcher and after almost ten years as the deputy spokesperson for culture in the Madrid Assembly, she took up the post of Director General for Cultural Rights in the Spanish government last year. “Cultura Ingobernable”, the book she published in 2022, is the basis of Jazmín Beirak’s work, which advocates a decentralized cultural policy model made for the masses.
Braga 25 (B25) – How can we relate the right to culture to desire?
Jazmín Beirak (JB) – One way of thinking about this relationship is that guaranteeing rights also guarantees the conditions for desire to circulate. We often understand desire as a lack, as something we yearn for because we lack it. But desire is also a power. Sometimes we desire what, within our own world, we believe we are capable of taking further. If artistic languages, if culture, seem foreign to us – because of our origins, our territory, our material circumstances – they are not only inaccessible to us, but also make it difficult for us to even desire them. That’s why guaranteeing rights opens the first door. It allows culture to be desirable, imaginable, part of our very lives. On the other hand, when it comes to the relationship between culture and desire – beyond the law – they go hand in hand. The artistic experience allows us to open up spaces we didn’t know existed, it keeps questions alive and, with them, the impulse to search. The relationship with the question is, in essence, a relationship driven by desire: the desire to know, to understand, to explore other territories, new horizons. There is also the link between pleasure and culture, between curiosity. Both are also related to desire. There are many ways to enter into this relationship between desire and culture.
B25 – In your book, “Cultura Ingobernable”, you say that culture has ceased to be a way of creating bonds between different communities and has become more of consumer goods. How do we get around this?
JB – What I argue in the book is that the concept of culture is trapped in a binomial: on the one hand, an enlightened culture and, on the other, a culture understood as a consumer good. The former is reserved for specialists; the latter is relegated to leisure and produced by professionals. Although they appear to be opposites, they are in fact two sides of the same coin, and both have the same effect: separating culture from everyday life, transforming it into an exceptional, extraordinary language. Faced with this dichotomy, cultural rights can open up space for us to recover the social dimension of culture, to recognize it as a living, shared practice. As Raymond Williams pointed out, as something ordinary: common, everyday. To move in this direction, it is essential to promote cultural policies that put equity and diversity at the center, that foster the transversality of culture and its positive impacts on other areas – such as education, health and the environment – and that promote decentralization and proximity. At the Directorate General for Cultural Rights [in Spain], we have launched lines of support for cultural projects with a social impact and cooperation initiatives in rural areas that respond precisely to this perspective.
B25 – What steps can we take to ensure that culture becomes a fundamental human right?
JB – Culture is already a fundamental human right. This is reflected in both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. We can’t lose sight of this: cultural rights are human rights, inseparable from other rights. What is lacking is awareness of this dimension, to understand culture as a right. And that’s not easy, after decades in which culture has been defended almost exclusively for its economic value. I believe that one of the best ways to reverse this is through public policies. Policies that, through their impact on everyday life, make visible the importance and need that we human beings have for culture. Sometimes we try to underline this importance with declarations. But it doesn’t work: what is needed is experience. That’s why a rights-based cultural policy, which effectively connects culture with people’s lives, is fundamental to re-establishing the link between culture and social interest, to restoring culture’s social relevance.
B25 – What policies can we adopt in Portugal?
JB – Very interesting initiatives are already being developed in Portugal, such as the National Plan for the Arts, among others. I think it’s essential to strengthen cooperation between contexts that share a common approach. We need to build a network of rights-based cultural policies, even if they aren’t always called that. The important thing is not the label, but the meaning: policies that promote equity, diversity and culture as a vehicle for social transformation.
This conference with Jazmín Beirak is accessible to everyone. Desejar – Movimento de Artes e Lugares Comuns’ complete program can be found here.