The Lo Pati Center in Amposta was the stage where the new Terres de l’Ebre Cultural Collective was presented. It is an entity promoted by the cultural manager Xènia Gaya and designed to network and connect all the cultural agents and promoters of the territory, a creative digital platform where “to connect local talents”. The Col lectiu also wants to claim the work carried out on the Ebro in recent years, “an authentic cultural revolution”, to show “with pride” the potentialities and identity of initiatives in metropolitan areas, where 85% of the cultural sector from the country. The objective is to create a unique brand for the festivals of Ebrense and for culture to be an asset and an important pole of attraction in the territory.
The Col·lectiu Cultura Terres de l’Ebre wants to create a unique brand with an identity for the Ebro festivities, to encourage the hiring of professionals from the Ebro -they have created a directory- and, above all, so that young people find employment opportunities in the cultural sector without leaving home
As the promoter of the platform, Xènia Gaya, resident cultural manager in Ulldecona (Montsià), pointed out, it is about connecting local cultural talents and creating their “own voice”. Gaya pointed out that professionals who work in metropolitan areas tend to be hired for services “that can be obtained close to home”. “You realize that they hire communicators or designers in Barcelona because you know someone who lives there, while in the neighboring town you can even find a Chinese translator. Fascinating… why do you have to going to Valencia or Madrid?” he asked.
The professional cultural sector is concentrated in the big metropolises, with 85% of cultural workers registered in Barcelona, but culture extends to “non-metropolitan areas”, as Gaya calls them, and that is what the association wants to claim and empower. . The Ebro has experienced “an authentic cultural revolution” in recent years, as Aïda Boix, director of Lo Pati, points out. The presentation was made at the Center d’Art des Terres de l’Ebre and about fifty cultural agents, managers, producers, artists, directors of festivals and equipment from the Ebro -and from outside the territory- are reunited.
Twenty festivals in the regions of the Ebro
The entity already brings together twenty festivals of different cultural disciplines from the four regions of the Ebro that will work to make culture one of the main axes of the attractiveness of the territory and promote its own and shared cultural cachet. “We have potential that sometimes we don’t believe in. It was complex. We are here to claim ourselves from the periphery of the periphery with pride and carry out projects with identity and with our way of doing things, both from here. We have nothing to envy but many virtues that others do not have,” said Agustí Vericat, cultural animator and member of the group.
The platform has been in the making for a year and a half and has begun to develop hand in hand with Gaya, a cultural manager with a long professional career in the field of management, production and the search for funding for cultural projects. The association already works with 6 municipalities and has more than 100 identified professionals. This year he wants to reach all the towns of Ebrenses and he foresees that he can triple and have more than 300 cultural agents.
The project opens in the Ebro but wants to take it to other “cosmopolitan rural” areas in the next two or three years. He has the support of the Provincial Council of Tarragona, received the first Irene Vázquez de Eada scholarship from the Barcelona Business School and was a finalist in the Impulsa program of the Catalonia Foundation. To make herself known, she launched the ‘Fem cultural match’ campaign.
In the field of education, Col·lectiu Cultura works to link training and companies with the collaboration with the Higher Education Cycle of Audiovisual of the Ebro Institute, which will create the audiovisual piece for the presentation of the Festivals of the Terres de l’Ebre.