A close look at the cultural agendas that proliferate across the Algarve allows us to identify a chronic separation between audiences, contemporary creation, programmatic diversity and cultural programmers.
The cultural offer is, in the Algarve today, much more marked by political matrices than by cultural missions with strategies and goals to achieve, which is reflected in the fact that the agendas function as instruments of copy paste from previous years' schedules.
In the particular case of culture programs in the public sector and especially in the local government, the wrong idea of thinking of the public as a single entity, abandoning its diversity, leads the cultural programs of municipalities to build stereotypes that stigmatize citizens, with programs that they reduce people to mere audiences.
Populist shows, simple choices for many, programming disasters for many others. The fact is that, if we analyze this matter, we will reach a conclusion proven by the paths of many of those who technically produce culture in the municipalities. There is no curiosity and when a programmer is not curious, he shouldn't program anything.
Human sensitivity, combined with community roots and deep knowledge of what is done in every corner of the city, the country, and the world, should be an inherent characteristic of any cultural technician from a municipality or any other body working in this area. .
Programming has to be an exercise in breathing the city, in training people and building the future, much less in animating and entertaining the masses.
This controversial wandering between programming and cultural entertainment is a subject that tells us a lot about the present.
In a country with a chronic disease installed in its cultural policies (or in the absence of them), the representation of culture with a blind government devastated, the discourse based on the political character of those who defend the fireworks in culture, is a mistake and a false paradigm, as it results in a populism that does nothing to contribute to the cultural growth of the population and leads to stupefaction.
Popular culture and its creative exponential is a subject that can, and should, be an instrument of economic growth and that has been debated and amplified with the no less dangerous discourse led by economists on the creative industries, in a community framework that is coming and for which there are no strategies for culture.
I therefore defend the creation of a national program to encourage curiosity and value Portuguese culture, with training schools that should open with our government to constitute the first class of students.
Curiosity would allow those who do not have it, to discover that omelets are not made without eggs and that only with the revitalization of the culture, the appreciation and support of cultural agents, and the understanding of traditions based on contemporaneity will we be able to achieve formative goals, which allow the common of citizens to realize that popular culture has nothing to do with the culture of bad taste and mental desertification that reigns between the lines of cultural programs implemented by politicians with creative deficit and executed by technicians without a voice.
Let's think then that the technical staff of a city will have the difficult task of countering political ignorance and programming culture. Also here we will find the blockage caused by the lack of curiosity, when those who program do not leave the office and choose based on catalogs and what they see on TV, knowing that the television media are the ones that discriminate the most, as in the relationship between cultural elites that do not know the real country and the power that controls the media, does not augur well.
In recent years, the Algarve has been the target of this festive media coverage of culture, with mega events that do not settle anything and commonplace marketing that does not take into account the specificities of the place.
Culture and Tourism will only come out richer on the day when curiosity increases the feeling of belonging and the rebirth of each corner of the Algarve, of the specificity of each sign that helps us establish connections with the region's identities.
Unfortunately, this practice has not been included in the culture and tourism programs that Allgarve has intensified and whose impact on the ground in the real Algarve has left little.
Therefore, I speak of intangible heritage, the creation of knowledge based on the development of society, valuing its products in the sum of its assets.
Cities should be understood with their satellite spaces, radiating their surroundings, so that those who visit us know that they can breathe culture in every pore of the Serra de Monchique or Caldeirão, that there are hidden treasures on the coast of Arrifana, or simply that the Barão de São João village has much more to offer than just a visit to the Zoo.
It is this symbiosis between culture and the curious that should be felt throughout the region, and not just in small isolated cases of success such as São Querença.
Because if we are not curious to the point of getting to know ourselves, we will never have and we will know what the power to make ourselves known means and thereby attract the curiosity of others.
Author Jorge Rocha is an Independent Artist and Producer
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