A few days ago, Sílvia Pérez Cruz, upon accepting the National Culture Award, ended her acceptance speech by saying that if we take care of culture, culture will take care of us. It seemed to me that I had heard her say it on some other occasion, and I found it very fitting: it is hard to think of anyone who can state it with such conviction, and at the same time with such meaning. One only needs to evoke one of Sílvia's songs, or any of her concerts, or even her way of speaking, moving, acting, to see that, certainly, she takes her craft as an act of caring. And of responsibility, too. Mireia Sallarès says this, that having an idea is having a responsibility, and I like how both ideas resonate together because, beyond the political thing or the social dimension of creation in terms of a manifesto or a claim, there is a political action in the gesture of writing (poems, songs, ideas, art...) that deals with a more delicate and sinuous political intention, I would say, more subtle and perhaps imperceptible, which is that of caring and that of having responsibility.

I am not very up to date with the music scene, nor have I been a big fan of Oques Grasses, and I had always thought, perhaps from the original sin of Barcelocentrism, that these guys from Osona moved in the more or less modest figures of the rest of the leading groups in Catalan. But I read that they accumulate millions of plays of their hits more popular, and at the time of their farewell they filled the Montjuïc Stadium for four days, with 225,000 tickets sold, equaling a feat that until now only Coldplay had achieved. I have seen the videos of the concerts and they make a great impression. So many young people singing their anthems by heart; quality music, with diverse influences; celebrities and guest artists, and above all a feeling of resounding success, of mainstream, which is still not common in artistic expressions in our language.

When Diego Luna (Toluca de Lerdo, Mexico, 1979) was just two years old, his mother, the artist and set designer Fiona Alexander, died in a car accident. Upon reading Brenda Navarro's novel Ceniza en la boca (Sexto Piso, 2022), the actor and director recognized the echo of his own experience in a character as different from him as Lucila, the Mexican teenager who migrates with her younger brother to Spain –first to Madrid, then to Barcelona– to reunite with the mother who abandoned them eight years earlier. But above all, he was fascinated by the clash of perspectives: “The daughter sees her mother's departure as an act of abandonment, but the mother feels she is making a great sacrifice for her children. As a father, I cannot stop thinking about how painful it must be to live away from one's children and start from scratch in another place. But I am also a son, and the absence of the maternal figure is a subject that has occupied my thoughts every day of my life”.

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.

We were not facing the same The Weeknd that occupied the same Olympic Stadium Lluís Companys 2023. Although the tour and the space were the same, and the musical proposal had only incorporated a recent album —Affrettati domani (2025), which completes the trilogy with which it seemed to want to close an entire era, and even say goodbye to thealter ego of Abel Tesfaye—, it was hard to recognize the man who a few years ago enchanted with such forcefulness.

The scenography has a first and last name, doubly. At Llorenç Corbella i Burgués (1997), alias Passerell, and to his father Llorenç Corbella i Sambola (1958) a generation separates them, but a vocation, some projects, and even the same Tàrrega study unite them. We are talking about the art of scenography, about circuits, and, obviously, about the Street Theatre Fair.

“We'll see each other around here or in Barcelona”, “Before your boss left”, “No rewards for the worker”. Southern accent between a sea breeze and the cry of a seagull – I don't agree! – The blue strip of the newspaper Mediterráneo allows the red drop of Paco Navarro (“An oxymoron is to say military intelligence”) and that of a small report – a pleasant surprise – about Ramon Usall's Futbolítica : once footballers defied tyrants. Three tables, one Valencian (*Raimon: “I sing in Valencian, which is the way we have here to refer to Catalan”) and another bilingual one that acts as a transition to the last one, Castilian. In Castelló de la Plana the language is a real mess.

The arrival of August is synonymous with major festivals, popular culture, and music throughout Catalonia. From Ascó to Roses, passing through Granollers, Alcarràs, or La Seu d’Urgell, the town councils are rolling out their musical posters these days before events like La Mercè or Santa Tecla will put the finishing touches in September to a summer full of festivals, cycles, and concerts that, in many cases, will extend into the autumn.

There is a test that can be done any evening of theater, concert, or dance festival in Catalonia: look at the audience. In many cases, almost all faces are of native people, from a recognizable middle class, even when they are children's shows. Then, we go out into the street, take the subway, and return to the plural reality of a country in which, in Barcelona or Girona, between 20% and 25% of the population has migratory origins. The question is inevitable: where have they stayed?

We think and make decisions from mental frameworks conditioned by digital media and the global agenda, rather than by tradition or the classical public sphere represented by the work and family environment, traditional media, or informal networks and public space. Everyone has their own leading cultural references, often because they are the most cited, or simply because we find them fascinating. Citing is, in a way, revering, making a certain way of doing culture appear and – why not? – of making a country. This cultural vision of citation clashes with the academic and mercantile vision, which strive to turn it into a metric, the metric into a ranking, and knowledge into a pole position. The snowball of citation is growing bigger and bigger, and it's no longer known whether authors are mentioned to create a genealogy, to do intellectual penance, to feed a private business based on academic impact journals and bestsellers, or a bit of everything at once. That's why, when I was able to interview the philosopher Judith Butler years ago, I ended up asking her how she could escape "Judith Butler". Academia and agents in the cultural and educational sector act as cultural bubble filters. These filters have become a framework that works to position a series of topics and authors on the public agenda. In the book Marge de maniobra (2025, Bòlit) I called it "premium epistemology", that is, the capacity and privilege that cultural and educational institutions have to generate forms of knowledge and capture public attention towards certain topics, a type of language, and values. Cultural policies and academia orient creation towards an agenda; this discourse is ratified by the press and social platforms, where it encounters the mainstream –hegemonic culture– as the primary site of symbolic production and, therefore, of generating culture. As with any intensive cultivation, after the initial fervor, the topic devalues or shifts to a low frequency. The mainstream, however, is not the street corner; rather, due to the impact of platform capitalism, we can say it is its underlying engine. Platform capitalism, with its networks and metrics, has managed to convert cultural consumption and the production of academic knowledge into data and reintegrate it in order to orient symbolic capital and user behavior, their tastes, and affiliations.

When we return from a stay outside Lleida (whether longer or shorter) and we see the profile of La Seu Vella on the horizon welcoming us, we feel deep inside that very local and popular: “I’m home!” Even if it seems unbelievable, we even say it when the temperatures climb above 43 °C. Mind you: with our mouths more pursed and fans in hand. In any case, the emotional bond we have with the city’s most iconic monument is glaring. La Seu Vella is a symbol of Lleida. It is pride. It is love. Yes! All in all… do we know it well enough? And the rest of the city’s heritage?

Her real name is Eva Espejo Fajardo (Lleida, 1988), but she is building a brand with her artistic ingenuity. She calls herself Hippiiaa, a symbiosis of the hippie universe with the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for her cultural dissemination goals on social networks (she has nearly 50,000 followers on Instagram and 30,000 more on TikTok). But, she also makes herself known as La Catalana Indígena, because she also wants to assert herself as a defender of two heritages, that of Catalan and that of nature simultaneously. An amalgamation of proposals that betray her multifaceted character.

The (Z)ona Ponts festival consolidates this summer its commitment to turning Ponts' heritage into a vibrant cultural stage with a second edition that, until September 4th, offers five music and performing arts proposals in emblematic spaces of the municipality. After the good reception of the first edition, launched following the millennium of Sant Pere, the festival reaffirms a small-format model that seeks to create artistic experiences linked to each place.

In an era marked by screens, artificial intelligence, and hyperconnectivity, more and more people are dedicating part of their free time to manual activities such as ceramics, embroidery, crochet, furniture restoration, or clothing making. This phenomenon, known as DIY (Do It Yourself or “Do it yourself”), has ceased to be an activity exclusively associated with specific generations to become a widespread practice among people of all ages.

Tourism has become an opportunity for the cultural projection of cities and a source of funding for many cultural facilities, and in Barcelona it contributes to internationally reinforcing its heritage, creativity, and identity.

Tourism has become an opportunity for the cultural projection of cities and a source of funding for many cultural facilities, and in Barcelona it contributes to internationally reinforcing its own heritage, creativity, and identity.

Despite being a convinced atheist, I have a past where I went to catechism. This involved, to make matters worse, having to go to the twelve o'clock mass on some Sundays. The most intense and anticipated moments for the children (and not so much for the children) were when the music came into play. Especially on the most significant days, when acoustic guitars appeared. Without a doubt, the closest to Harlem gospel we could experience. Hallelujah!

Catalonia has for decades opted for a model of cultural policy focused on financing the supply. The main instrument has been editorial, audiovisual, and artistic subsidies. The logic of this model is sound. Many cultural activities generate high social value but have insufficient or too uncertain private profitability. Without public support, a part of the cultural production in Catalan would simply not exist.

The future Catalan patronage law completes one of its major steps. This Monday, the PSC, Junts, and ERC registered in Parliament the first bill to promote patronage in the country, an initiative that had been in institutional paralysis for a decade and had been widely requested by the different actors that make up the cultural sector. This Tuesday, the announcement has been made official.

—If we buy the prepared calçots, the essence is lost”, I said to the group chat of the gang a few days before our traditional annual calçotada.