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.

Our national blue monday is on September 12, 1714. According to chronicles, Barcelona opened its gates to the Franco-Spanish troops and the Duke of Berwick was surprised to see that the Barcelonians were working in the shops and workshops as if it were any other day: a moving example of tenacity. For me, the saddest day of the year is usually the day after Sant Jordi, when the aroma of roses and the bustle of writers and readers fade away, when the banners are folded and put away, and language and culture retreat again after a brilliant day of prominence. On April 24th, we realize that Sant Jordi is a mirage while the dragon continues to wag its tail. This year, despite everything, I have the feeling that something is stirring. Perhaps because of the success of Correllengua, perhaps because Òscar Andreu has conquered the podium with his Manual for the Defense of Catalan, or perhaps because believing is wanting to believe, but I detect a progressive linguistic awareness around me. It is a feeling that exudes anxiety, but also conviction. The emergency situation that Catalan is experiencing has contributed to visualizing the risks of an economic, political, and cultural model that, gradually but constantly, uproots us, dilutes us, and impoverishes us as a community. And it is not only Catalan speakers who notice this, but also many newcomers who, regardless of their linguistic choice, love the country and want it to continue being what it is. We must be smart enough to discern, among the enemies, these possible allies. And be inflexible with the rest. Òscar Andreu says: “Social bilingualism is a trap by those who demand that you be bilingual so that they can continue to be monolingual.”Language must be the battle of our lives. My parents' generation had the challenge of recovering democracy and autonomy, and they succeeded. My generation doubled down with the independence process, and did not have the same success. And the fight for language will be the great challenge for new batches of citizens. A titanic challenge steeped in history, because Catalan has been spoken in this country for a millennium, and it has been language that has forged us as a territory and as a country. The conservation –and expansion– of Catalan is a challenge as difficult as, or more difficult than, the preceding political struggles, because it implies a personal, daily, tenacious commitment. Not only from those who maintain Catalan, but from those who, sooner or later, will have to join it. Everything depends on the firmness of some, the empathy of others, and on policies as demanding with the native language as they are in all the countries of our environment.

There are people who buy a book for Sant Jordi to give to someone who never reads any books, which is like me being given a ticket to go see Formula 1. There are people who lament that there are people who buy books for Sant Jordi who then don't read them. But how many of us don't have books from previous years piling up that we haven't opened yet? There are people who want the celebration to be perfect. But perfection is a theoretical concept.

In the midst of the streaming era and omnipresent screens, a growing segment of youth is looking back. Vinyl records, cassettes, film cameras, or VHS tapes, formats that just a few years ago seemed doomed to disappear, are circulating again among young people as objects of cultural consumption and symbols of identity. Far from being a fleeting trend, the phenomenon reflects an increasingly complex relationship between the digital generation and the technology that dominates their daily lives.

The Art Explora Festival opened its doors this Wednesday at the Barcelona dock, in Port Vell, on its first stop in Catalonia. The event, which runs until April 6, offers free admission – with prior reservation to access the museum ship – and can be visited daily from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM, with the last entry at 7:45 PM.

The Art Explora Festival opened its doors this Wednesday at the Barcelona dock, in Port Vell, for its first stop in Catalonia. The event, which will run until April 6, offers free admission – with prior reservation to access the museum ship – and can be visited daily from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM, with the last entry at 7:45 PM.

Antoni Gorgues was still living at home with his parents when he decided to make a radical change in his life. He was 24 years old and had been working as an accountant for a company in Lleida for some time when, in 1996, he decided to leave it all behind to dedicate himself to his great passion: music. Exactly thirty years ago, from his teenage bedroom, he founded Guerssen, an exclusive label now known for reissuing psychedelic rarities. "It all started with few resources, simply with a lot of enthusiasm and little knowledge," recalls Gorgues himself, who is now immersed in the commemorative events, which have kicked off with the release of a collection of fifteen limited and numbered singles, featuring garage, psychedelic, and other sounds and bands. freakbeat and hard rock, mainly from the sixties, with some surprises from the eighties such as the two singles featuring the earliest demos by Los Negativos, never before released on vinyl. On March 28th, the Morera Museum in Lleida will host a talk about the history of Guerssen, featuring Antoni Gorgues himself along with some of his collaborators: Álex Carretero, Marc Argenter (the label's designer), and journalist Àlex Oró. Following the talk, the documentary will be screened. The Negatives: Graduated from Underground (Víctor Carrey, 2024) on the history of the group. Also at the Museu Morera, a small exhibition on the history of Guerssen will be on display, featuring records and memorabilia. Finally, the Café del Teatro will host a performance by Los Negativos with a lineup that includes two founding members of the band, Carles Estrada and Robert Grima, along with a string section, performing the entire album. Kaleidoscopic Piknik as never before.

Deep, guttural vocalizations. Loud, thunderous screams. Lamentable sounds in the purest Cro-Magnon style. Facial expressions of extreme torment. A whole testosterone-fueled menagerie that the free weight rooms and machine rooms shelter day in and day out. It's also true that this type of user isn't the only one found in gyms. The diverse range of people who share these spaces fosters a biodiversity that, at the very least, is healthy.