Cultural rights: a public policy for (re)imagining futures
Jazmín Beirak, Director General for Cultural Rights of the Government of Spain

More than a politician – after almost ten years as the deputy spokesperson for culture in the Madrid Assembly – Jazmín Beirak is an art historian and cultural policy researcher. In 2024, she took up the post of Director General of Cultural Rights for the Government of Spain.

Culture is a territory of dispute, desire and possibility. Faced with extractivist or instrumentalising models, it is urgent to build cultural policies that place culture as a fundamental human right and that allow us to imagine desirable futures, affirming and sustaining participation, cultural plurality and freedom as the bases for their construction. Facing the challenges of our present from the perspective of cultural rights implies understanding culture as a horizon in which the future is a cultural act that belongs to us, without forgetting or neglecting the structural exclusions, inequalities and multiple barriers that still cross our cultural practices today.