It's cold in Matadeix, I have frozen legs, I'm sitting, listening to Koldo Izagirre's speech. Greenwich's is not the only meridian. I'm going to record it on the caset and for many years I'm going to get back in the car, to know where, long before I discover Jacques Ranciere and his dissent. It is a prize not to have ever published this conference in the form of a book. Today it still holds, more than ever before, when it seems that the world is governed by a single meridian and a single president. I don't know where I saw it, it was a picture taken out of the news of the mega television channel, a shot, a screen shot. Donald Trump talked and down said: Donald Trump, president of Venezuela. That is to say clear things. Or mega-lights.

What Koldo Izagirre claimed in that intervention was, in quick and mistaken terms, not to accept as such the natural order of the world. To think for yourself, that today has become difficult. The philosopher Jacques Rancière proposed an instrument for this: against consensus, dissent, the possibility of feeling different, the way of questioning what we should all accept, data, for example.

I am increasingly exhausted by what we should all admit. I could say more elegant, but now it's not the most important thing: fascism is at our doorstep. And I don't know where to start.

It's a very indirect issue, but to start from somewhere, I've always been struck by the fact that someone who is so demanding in their work, in their art critique and at the police station says that they have carried out their activity at the local, national and international levels. These common places are the ones that cause me horror, accepting them so easily.

It has always made me happy, to say something, that Tabakalera defines itself as the International Center for Contemporary Culture, and not to see that this self-definition automatically brings out its symptoms, in negative.

I understand, you understand, it's over, contemporary culture, but is there a culture that is not contemporary? These are years, but time is not the distance, as Edorta Jimenez and Erramun Landa have created an exciting exhibition: Time is not distance. And there I learned that Federico García Lorca is a Basque poet, within me, by metabolism. From the eyes to the soul that is reborn in me. And since then, I know that every culture is contemporary today.

And for the same reason I know everyone, including the one who, after so many years without ever leaving his house, escaped, but also who never left his house, we are all international within us, because the world is one and only. And that the public library of any country is international, but also a people without libraries, in their austerity, in their elegance. We all carry the world within us, and we are international on our own, as we are from the world.

I remember how Ruper Ordorika joked at the Hiru Truku concerts when he asked when Bob Dylan was in Euskal Herria, as the trio picked up in a traditional Basque song a story very similar to that sung by the American. And I remember how I flipped when I heard His Lord Zuriano, who took the sword out of the rock as in the history of King Arthur.

So if the world is one and unique, and the stories are similar around the world, I don't understand how everything is still in those three areas: local, national, international. And how we ate that speech without showing any dissent. And how the Basques make it so easy, also seeing our size and form of archipelago, that other miserable division, the people vs. the national, as if it were just for the people and the national for the whole nation. I do not know why we still use such old schemes. Well, I know, it's comfortable.

But perhaps Harkaitz Cano explained the extent of our tragedy in the interview they did in Argia. As I myself am reading this book, I could not resist the temptation to bring it here: “Iván de la Nuez has published a nice pamphlet, Rearguard Theory, and says that we have been sold multiculturalism as a reaction against globalization, but that multiculturalism has been the exotic phase within globalization, and that is over. And it seemed to me a phrase as true as the lapidary: the visibility of small languages and small cultures -- a word so fashionable -- the place we occupy or have believed to occupy in the ecosystem, is very much in question. The roller is overtaking and that requires a heroic resistance that is not foreign to us, we are trained, but there too I see the Basque culture’.

And I'm not so sure that we're ready for heroic resistance. Hopefully. Unfortunately, there is still an urgent other way of being international, that of the translation of Aresti.

This article has been posted in Berria and we have brought it to ARGIA with the license CC by-sa