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First Draft of the New Culture Law
Artists and cultural administrators worked for two days on a document, agreed by consensus, with proposals for the new Culture Law.
Even though there is at least one common aspect between a law and a work of art (that both invent something from nothing), there is a fundamental difference between an artist and a lawyer: the first one creates (or dreams) a universe, the second one normalizes (i.e. orders and systematizes) that universe.
The 240 artists and cultural administrators that gathered yesterday and Friday in Ciudad Alfaro tried to bring together those two worlds in various serious and intense debates to come up with a proposal for the new Culture Law.
The meeting was organized by the Ministry of Culture to give a symbolic closure to the campaign “Cien días por la Cultura”, created by the Minister Ramiro Noriega as a mechanism to democratise the creation of this Law.
Ecuador’s Constitution established a period of a year, since it was approved, to create a new Culture Law. The Ministry’s staff is in a hurry now since two months after the deadline have already passed. The Campaign “Cien días por la Cultura” began on May 4 with a meeting celebrated in Ambato attended by approximately 200 people, according to the Ministry.
Then came eight more meetings that also gathered between 200 and 300 participants. In total approximately 4000 cultural administrators, artists and people from the cultural milieu were summoned.
But, how were these people summoned? Do they represent the state of affairs of Ecuador’s national culture?
Noriega said “representatives of the existing associations of each province were summoned, as well as people that had taken part at the Arts congresses organized previously. The purpose was to shoot a portrait of the Ecuadorian cultural milieu and we were able to do so”.
This portrait was the result of one month of hard work. During May nine meetings took place. But since the Ministry’s staff was not going to build something out of nothing, it organized cultural administrators and artists in categories and variables defined privately and through consultations with specialties.
One of the specialists contacted directly by Noriega was Eduardo Puente, Flacso’s librarian and restless cultural activist. Puente made clear that “taking part and accompanying the process did not mean necessarily agreeing with the approach to certain matters”.
Puente thinks that the Law focuses too much on heritage. He prefers to talk about the variable of social memory and heritage that focuses on “the use and social meaning of people’s symbolic codes”.
Other more critical voices have come from the Organizing Committee of Cultural and Social Movements. Hernán Vásquez, its representative, has questioned to what extent can a process, qualified as symbolic by the Minister himself, be considered inclusive. Vásquez wrote that “texts that could be considered part of the Law have not been presented, nor their validity agreed by consensus”.
However, during both days long discussions took place and reached agreements. From 13:00 to 20:00 on Friday, and from 08:00 to 17:00, yesterday, the 240 participants worked to produce documents for each round table.
The round table subjects were: Culture, Cultural Production, Social Memory and Heritage, Education, Research, and Symbolic Goods Circulation. Each round table also discussed common subjects: Institutional Matters, Public Space, Resources, and Social Participation, amongst others.
By midday yesterday the results of the discussions were read by a group of lawyers of the Firm Legal Trade (hired by the Ministry to convert these texts into legal format).
Gabriel Andrade, from the law firm, considers that the majority of the texts contain matters that are too specific, and that are more appropriate for a regulations document. As an example, “the Culture Law should guarantee the possibility of creating institutions, but it should not give specifications about their functioning”.
It was also announced that for next Wednesday there would be a preliminary version of the bill resulting from the texts agreed upon at Ciudad Alfaro.
For additional information, in Spanish, please visit: http://sariga.pair.com/contacto/contacto_ministeriocultura/boletinciendias/boletin1.html
For more information about the Campaign “Cien Días por la Cultura” you can watch a video, in Spanish, at: http://www.ecuadortv.ec/ectvprogramas.php?c=1963
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