Cartagena is sick. Her disease lies in the culture, and her other insufficiencies – inequality, poverty, deterioration, insecurity – are ramifications of that first evil. This implies a notion of Culture that goes beyond artistic praxis, and includes the concepts of citizenship, civility, respect for others, the adverse and Life. As such, the city must be intervened as by a doctor, and referentiality, criteria and artistic technique must be imposed on it like a diet or a medical prescription.
The Arts are balm, but they cannot act alone: they need priority budgets, administrative muscle and managerial transparency. Imposing criteria without distorting will always be a controversial exercise, but there is no doubt that this defensive vulgarity that Cartagena society erects into identity behavior must be uprooted, being the crux of our cancer as well as the entrenched corruption that is tacitly tolerated. That folklore will have to reinvent itself.
The allergy to technique as protection against the constant eviction to which the people have been subjected, the crude equivalence that a majority of citizens intuitively realizes between artistic tool and colonial hegemony, are the product of the serious semantic error that plagues us daily in all its endings. social. Culture is inseparable from society, and in order for it to function now as a remedy, it must be admitted that, at least for a certain time, Art must take responsibility and, therefore, also be a political body. This supposes that a true union be forged where before there was oil and quarrel, and that they know how to work as a team towards an identity repertoire that redefines what Cartagena means.
Proposing a cultural agenda for the district, radiating from the Mejía Theater, would mean that this space would carry the great responsibility of a citizen pedagogy, and this would be insufficient in a city with more than a million inhabitants. Cultural spaces must multiply, businesses that employ artists must rethink the entertainment function to which they are subjected, and provide their spaces for the training of the public and not just for their delight.
The artist must be well listened to and paid, since a hungry and dissatisfied doctor is not effective.
The difficulty should not be achieving a budget that already abounds in other areas. The hard part will be deciding how adequate medicine will be defined, what the criteria will be and who will practice them.
And the apt thing will be to lean towards technique and experience: classic forms do not go out of style, even if the industry has made them up. Pleasantly, the “liquid modernity” that Bauman describes takes time to catch up with us, and that is an immense advantage to achieve the phenomenology of cultural empowerment, and heal Cartagena.