The artists who have cancelled their performance at Sónar in solidarity with the Palestinian people once again raise the question of what we can do with our convictions in a world where, if you are not radically outsider, the real kind, not just the ones you just pay lip service to, you're caught in a web of economic interests that indirectly end up fostering speculation and/or legally despicable business dealings. Therefore, no matter how much a festival claims its management and artistic independence after accepting money from an investment fund to "save" it, (the financial movement is justified by the need to keep the festival going after the COVID-19 shutdowns), it's clear that independence is much more relative than the need for money to come in. This is objectively the case, without any moral judgment. And that's how so many things work, far beyond a festival. Because the alternative is to close. Or to decrease growth, which isn't even considered. That's why we live amidst contradictions and justifications, making greater or lesser efforts to maintain a certain coherence between thought and action. It's also true that there are those who strive for the maximum coherence within their means, and those who resolutely launch the ethics they claim the moment their wallet or their ego speaks to them. With the argument, of course, that the system is most effectively dynamited from within, something we've already seen isn't the case. The system, well thought out, can make people believe it has a voice, but it usually has the last word.
It's always laudable to defend just causes, and while protests don't stop the Palestinian genocide—just as they didn't, at the time, stop the Iraq War, despite the mobilization of millions of people around the world—they do position us both on the side of those suffering and against it. Utility is highly subjective, and the obsession with making everything practical is excessively persistent. In any case, the world doesn't change anything by nodding along. And to try to throw us off the scent, the factual and tactical powers have already sufficiently guarded themselves against leaving a loophole for protest, which is increasingly diminishing, so that it cannot be said that we lack freedom of expression. A double-edged sword, because in the end, those who always end up having the upper hand are those who proclaim war, not peace. Peace is claimed, and war is justified. The world is very strange.
A The deer's rut, the latest show from La Calórica, asks, with their usual irony, whether doing theater serves to change the world, if culture really transforms us as it claims (some cultures, not all), and if it isn't contradictory to write Marxist plays from a comfortable house in California. And while they ridicule the character, it's inevitable that, as spectators, we also feel ridiculous ourselves, believing that by going to the theater to see how others criticize the world we are already taking a step towards making the world a better place. But those who have decided to perform at Sónar do worse? They assume that we live with many inconsistencies and that we cannot accept them all.
