Spanish Cooperation Cultural Centres
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Cultural Centre of Spain in Montevideo
This year, the Cultural Centre of Spain in Montevideo celebrates its sixteenth anniversary and reaffirms its commitment to the culture of Uruguay, supporting local cultural initiatives and promoting a varied programme of free, open-access activities in all areas of thought and art, including exhibitions, seminars, training workshops, debates, conferences, concerts, film screenings, theatre seasons, artistic residencies and creative laboratories. The cultural centre in Montevideo is sited in the imposing headquarters of the historic Casa Mojana, a former commercial establishment dating back to 1921 and part of the nation’s cultural heritage. Spanish Cooperation saved this building from threatened destruction, with a rehabilitation project that highlighted its age and historical importance, while adapting it for cultural use today. From the beginning, this cultural centre has made avant-garde expression a hallmark of its identity, supporting experimentation, contemporary creation and new artistic languages, foregrounding the work of Spanish and IberoAmerican artists, both in the capital, Montevideo, and in the rest of the country. The Centre has a modern media library that houses a growing collection of books, magazines, films and disks, focusing particularly on Spanish and Latin American bibliographic content, within a space that has been adapted and organised for different age groups. The media library provides an open space for consultation, with the daily press and fitted with internet terminals. It currently has 20,553 items, in different formats and by May 2019 had 2,722 registered members. There have been 156,326 loans of material since the Centre was inaugurated in 2012. In 2018 alone, 15,572 items were lent out, either within the library or for home use. The media library organises its activities in line with the overall philosophy of the Centre, with programmes and projects to support archival and
library-science systems. In addition, a bibliographic resource for artistic workshops has been created. The media library plays an essential cultural, educational and social role. Among other aspects, it provides a specialised, professional service for social groups in situations of special vulnerability, for whom the library not only represents a space for cultural integration, but also supplies advice and accompaniment and fosters empowerment. The area for children and adolescents, which participates in all of the Centre’s cultural and artistic concerns, aims to strengthen the relationship between education and culture, and to expand knowledge of art, culture and science, particularly as concerns the environment, among younger children and teenagers, as well as their families and teachers. On request, this area offers guided tours for educational centres; it also organises weekly activities for young people, from pre-school to pre-university, and undertakes longterm projects such as seasons of children’s theatre with Spanish-language playwrights, performance residencies, a chess space and a reading club. This younger population is also the driving force behind the creation of the Centre’s urban organic garden, the first to be implemented within a cultural space in Montevideo, an initiative that offers a participatory platform for research, a versatile teaching resource and a learning space for a sustainable society. The Centre’s programme for the elderly also features a range of cultural activities, with particular attention to groups at risk of exclusion. This programme helps make culture available to all, regardless of age and condition, thus assuring cultural and social rights. The programme includes regular courses in fields such as literature, creative writing, memory and cognitive stimulation, handicrafts and chess; the courses are held all year round, to avoid situations of loneliness and isolation in critical periods such as holidays.
