The confederal comital cultural country
In another life I want to be an accordion. Sorry. In fact… Isn’t life an accordion? Up, down. Movement. Existential swing. This wheeze-wheeze. This air that comes and goes. Life is air. Love is in the air. Death, too. I fold. And I unfold.
I remember my birth as an accordion. It was this July in Canillo (Andorra). Wheeze-wheeze. All day long, accordions jumping through the squares. We were like the accordionists of Hamelin. Zigzagging. Hypnotized. Stopped. In front of the church of Sant Serni (the tallest bell tower in the country, 28.5 meters), the wheeze-wheeze makes us climb some stairs. Up above, the sky is cut out by scissors made of stone words. Canillo is not only the northernmost parish in Andorra: it is the most Nordic peak of a culture. And here there is a slide.
We go down sharply. At full speed, but straight, straight... Without stopping for even a nanosecond. We travel along a sidereal highway. There is a moment, however, when we turn towards a small-great metropolis: Peramola DF. Here, this summer a creature has been born that already speaks: Casa Rotxé. A 19th-century grocery store is now a bookstore, a cultural center, for Pyrenean literature: the feast of the 21st century. From a capital of accordions to a capital of poetry. Amidst the 3D yum-yum, this feast of life, we are forced to keep going down. They are waiting for us. All towards the galactic skyscraper.
We are in a hurry. There are crumbs on the path. And a blinker suddenly turns on as we pass through Vallfogona de Balaguer. Here there is a pregnancy in progress: Cal Covet. In the old cinema, in one of the buildings most filled with the village's memory, a House of Culture is being spiritually raised. Another capital. By 2027 there will already be a program and it will be like a small and infinite coca de recapte. There is hunger, but we have to return to the slide road. They are about to fall. Here we are again.
Ilerda vale! Lleida, capital-capital. But capital of more things. The Sant Miquel de les Lletres (promoted by the Horitzons Foundation) turns Lleida into the capital of Catalan literature and culture this week. It was already the idea, the seed, the crumb, the hope, the future. It began in 2023 at a flea's pace and four years later it already has the flight of a sparrow. Where many were not looking (nor did they want to), now they already are. There are no longer enough eyes: the Organyà Book Fair, the Encontats and the Sala Mercantil in Balaguer, the Crit in Lleida, the Minúscul in Mollerussa, the Rentadors in Juneda… Because on this road, this journey, this voyage, there is an asphalt, a direction, a common destiny.
From Canillo to Lleida there is an invisible infrastructure that has governed the visible for centuries: the County of Urgell. Born in present-day Andorra and stretching like a bellows of folds, like molds, like crumbs, to the Franja de Ponent. Now the Cultural County of Urgell emerges. Up and down. Without stopping. Everywhere. A 21st-century infrastructure in motion with the DNA of the fixed asphalt of time. A map, a GPS, a satellite that points out to us that the sky, the common sky, is the same and can be seen from everywhere. We are going at the speed of light, the galaxies, because today the paths, the roads, the geographies, are upon us. The country is in the air. And we are bringing it down to the earth, which is, as always, firm. A path, an axis, a track of allied Cs, cosovereignties. C: cultural, confederal, comtal. The country is an accordion.
