CCS Córdoba

Cultural Centre of Spain in Cordoba

As the tango goes, “Twenty years is no time at all”. The Cultural Centre of Spain in Cordoba (CCSC) opened on 7 April 1998, under an agreement reached between the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) and the Municipality of Cordoba, with the aim of promoting local artists and cultural activity, encouraging collaborative creation between these artists and new forms of Ibero-American expression, and promoting contemporary Spanish culture. The CCSC is located in the heart of the historic city of Cordoba, in a colonial mansion dating from the early 19 th century, with a surface area of 1000 square metres. It contains three exhibition rooms, an auditorium with a capacity for 90 people, a centre for media documentation and its own online radio station, Eterogenia. In addition, there are three patios and an outdoor amphitheatre, which are used for live music shows, film screenings and presentations. Since its opening, the CCSC has become a landmark institution within the city, thanks to the innovative themes addressed, the quality of its productions and the large numbers of visitors wishing to view new proposals in local and IberoAmerican aesthetics. Its focus on areas of cultural interest such as media arts and comics, together with the crosscutting approach adopted towards gender issues and the environment, in addition to the Centre’s commitment to diversity and social inclusion, have all contributed to the joint agenda agreed between the CCSC and local institutions, in the view that culture is both a right and an instrument for the transformation and development of the social fabric in the city of Cordoba. The CCSC has pioneered concern to ensure accessibility to cultural spaces in the city. The first measures taken in this respect were to make the architectural space more accessible, for example by providing ramps and more accessible restrooms; subsequently, the planners considered the accessibility of contents and services. The Centre offers materials in sign language, audio guides, texts in Braille and macro type for every exhibition. In addition to the Tiflo Material and Educational Support Network (MATE), adapted guided tours and movie screenings with descriptive audio are provided. The media library contains the Vero Vanadia-Design for Everyone collection and books for persons with visual disabilities are available through the Tiflolibros Library. The radio station Eterogenia, not only enables ready access to its facilities, but it also has a technical operation console with boards in Braille, together with computers loaded with JAWS software, which allows people with limited vision to read the screen. The radio station transmits two programmes dedicated to inclusion (Atado a un sentimiento and Distintos caminos) (Hooked on a feeling and Different paths). In the customer service area, a programme for the inclusion of persons with disabilities was created following the agreement reached with the Office for Employment Intermediation in the Provincial Secretariat for Fairness and Promotion in Employment. From the outset, the CCSC has represented a node of communication and exchange among cultural agents in the city, offering a wide and varied programme addressing all the languages of artistic creation, including the visual arts, audiovisual work, music, literature, performing arts and education. Ultimately, the aim of the Centre is to facilitate access to culture for the population it serves. The CCSC forms part of a network of municipal cultural centres, and functions in line with the cross-cutting philosophy recommended by the Secretariat of Culture. In this respect, activities it has participated in include Women’s

Month, Cordoba according to the Cordobans, the Art Market and the Book Fair. At the latter event, Spain was the first country to be invited, in 2014, and many outstanding Spanish writers attended, including Agustín Fernández Mallo and Elvira Navarro. For the “Cordoba Kills” International Meeting of Crime Writers, the CCSC invited the authors Alexis Ravelo, Lorenzo Silva and Ángel de la Calle to present their work. The mixed nature of the Centre enables it to operate in conjunction with other cultural agents such as the Cordoba Culture Agency, within the Provincial Government, and to contribute to the programming of events such as the Mercosur Festival, where works such as El cielo de los tristes [Unhappy heaven] by the Catalonian company Los Corderos and Penev, by the company La Teta Calva have been presented. The CCSC has also collaborated with the Teatro Real of Cordoba, in staging El perro del Hortelano (The dog in the

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manger) by the Comedia Cordobesa troupe and Tsunami, by Guillermo Heras, as part of the Jolie Libois Drama Seminar. The CCSC, in addition, has actively participated as part of the cluster EUNIC Fund, organising the six editions of the International Literature Festival, with the presence of writers such as Andrés Barba and Guillermo Abril and the illustrator Javier Zabala. Moreover, the CCSC takes part in the European Cinema Week and in the Diálogos Globales (Global Dialogues) conference, organised in conjunction with the Ministry of Culture. Since 2008, the Centre has been a major protagonist in the world of comic art. It has a comic library, a permanent exhibition space “Suelta de Globos” (Blowing Bubbles) and hosts the annual Docta Comics festival, the only one of its type in Cordoba and which has received contributions from Javier Olivares and David Rubín.

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The CCSC fosters the work of young artists, contemporary thinking and cultural management, as disciplines for local development. As well as its pioneering work in the field of emerging art and in promoting cultural encounters between cultural activists on both sides of the Atlantic, a very significant area of the Centre’s work is its blurring of the boundaries between art and new technologies, in projects such as Agosto Digital (Digital August), Experimentalia, Mediáfora and the International Electroacoustic Music Festival. The CCSC is not only a junction for exchange but also a platform for proposals and an open-access laboratory, as the basis for its cultural schedule, with a strong focus on social and development issues, in which culture is viewed as an aspect of social participation. Our challenge for the future is to incorporate the 2030 Agenda as the core driver for our actions, in the understanding that the concepts of culture and

development have broadened in recent years. And this broadening of the battle field of culture, within a new global agenda such as that contained in the Sustainable Development Goals, encourages us to continue working and to reinforce processes of social innovation, democratic participation, human rights, gender issues and diversity, as an inherent part of our daily routines within Spanish Cooperation.

1. International Contemporary Art Fair ¡Afuera! Arte en Espacios Públicos (Out! Art in Public Spaces), 2010. Globos aerosolares (Hot-air balloons) by Tomás Saraceno 2. Docta Comics Festival held since 2008

The value of a node, open to change

Gonzalo Biffarella

Composer and electroacoustic musician. Multimedia artist. Lecturer at the Seminar on Composition with New Technologies at the National University of Cordoba and coordinator of the International Day of Electroacoustic Music.

Quantum physicists, who might be considered the priests of our era, say that we understand the world not through things, but through events, through processes that occur and transform over time. I have been fortunate, as an observer and as a direct participant, to have witnessed the evolution of the Cultural Centre of Spain in Cordoba (CCSC), throughout its 21 years. Twenty-one years of a space-time featuring conversations, agreements and disagreements with the Spanish Cultural Agency and with the decisions taken by Cordoba City Hall, considering and deciding upon the ideas and the work of the hundreds of people who have found in “España Cordoba” (as we call it here), an open door to the development of cultural projects. This channel has enabled projects in multiple directions to be undertaken, lines of work in which major emerging artists from all over Ibero-America have found valuable elements to enrich and finalise their proposals. One such line of work, and undoubtedly the one in which I have been most directly involved, concerns developing the relationship between the arts and new technologies. Since its beginnings, “España Cordoba” has given generous, constant support to media arts. Events such as Agosto Digital, Experimentalia, Mediáfora, MediaLab and the International Day of Electroacoustic Music, to name but a few that I have been involved in, have enabled Spanish and Argentinian artists, and on numerous occasions, representatives of other Latin-American countries, to meet and exhibit their work. Let me stress, however, that this line of research and development is only one of the many that have been promoted by the Centre. For example, valuable projects have also been conducted in association with

the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (UNC). Many of the teachers in the Arts Faculty at the UNC have presented their work in one or more of the events held at the CCSC, and have obtained support to invite Spanish artists and theoreticians to seminars and workshops at our Faculty. This fruitful relationship between our two institutions has also given rise to one of the projects with greatest potential today in the field of media arts, namely the Latin America-Europe Anilla Cultural (Cultural Ring). With strong initial support from the AECID, the Anilla was born as a decentralised network in the cultural arena, seeking to make the best possible use of the great global networks, Red Clara in Latin America and Giant in Europe, getting theoreticians and creators talking to each other. In Argentina, the Anilla node was installed at the CCSC thanks to its agreement with the UNC, facilitating access to the InnovaRed fibre optic networks. The Anilla began operating in 2010 with active nodes in Argentina (at the CCSC), in Chile (at the Contemporary Art Museum of Santiago), in Colombia (at the Modern Art Museum of Medellín), in Brazil (at the Cultural Centre of São Paulo) and in Spain (at the Centre of Contemporary Culture in Barcelona). Later, other nodes were added, in Uruguay through Infoart, in Mexico through Cenart and a new one in Colombia at the Caldas University of Manizales. The Anilla was rapidly acknowledged as an invaluable international instrument for dialogue and online creation. It facilitated innumerable collective creations, in real time, and contributed to the generation and consolidation of a critical mass in the media arts, especially in Latin America. Visual artists, musicians, designers, performers, dancers, writers, thinkers, researchers, teachers and managers… all became “weavers” of a web, highlighting the value of pooling our resources and abilities. Thanks to the dedication of hundreds of people, that initial project has grown and become transformed into the “España Cordoba” that we have recognise and treasure today. Undoubtedly, many of us wish the energy that runs through the CCSC to continue flowing, and to achieve new forms of expression. The Argentinian and Spanish officials must now respect those wishes and ensure the continuation of this bilateral agreement supported by the CCSC. Its achievements to date bear witness to its value and lead us to dream of many more such achievements in the years to come, in ways that defy our imagination. In my opening words, I referred to physicists and the idea that we only know the world through its changes. Let me conclude this brief text by recalling how much we have learnt of our world through observing and experiencing the changes in our cultural lives made possible by the work of the Cultural Centre of Spain in Cordoba.

PANAMÁ Cultural Centre of Spain in Panama - Casa del Soldado

Address

Paseo Esteban Huertas, Casco Viejo, Panamá

Opened

2013

Web

http://www.ccecasadelsoldado.org/