How would you explain what Kultura Azpeitiko Kultur Kooperatiba is?

We are a non-profit professional structure that works comprehensively the Basque culture Kultura Kooperatiba. A broad working team working on the development of a management model focused on autonomy, cooperation and social character. We founded the cooperative in 2011, with the help of the Azpeitia Culture Bureau, with the objective of providing the people with different cultural management. We broke some obsolete and vicified forms and began to introduce new forms of organization into the cultural dynamics of the people, instead of waiting for us to do ourselves, articulating more useful the resources that were in the hands of the city council. Thus, we have gone from being a working group of five people to twenty-five; from making an offer of cultural events to creating different cultural projects; from managing a cultural center to managing three cultural infrastructures.

Do you think the Azpeitia model is valid for other municipalities?

Each people must analyse their needs and desires. Other peoples could take into account the Azpeitia model to assimilate some of its features, but they could not install it blindly, as it would not work. It is necessary to respond to the local reality, because there are many evidences and particularities in the cultural dynamics of each people. Moreover, it is not something that is established from one day to the next and forever. A model that works collectively and broadly takes a long time, we have to walk the road, we need development, with its mistakes and achievements.

You are a clear example of public-community collaboration. What advantages do you see to this model? Does it cause tension?

It allows us to disassemble the rigid concepts of the public and the private that we have had for a long time, to understand more broadly the benefit of citizenship through culture, closer to the community. We manage infrastructures of municipal ownership, but of public ownership, through a non-profit professional structure and at the same time promoting multiple forms of participation (open meetings, working groups for culture enthusiasts, citizen projects…). So culture acquires a richer, more shared, more authentic, more alive, more useful sense. There are obviously tensions, and to a large extent they are necessary because they keep us on alert and alive. In unusual collaboration formulas, the roles and responsibilities of each agent are more flexible and sometimes generate concerns.

How do you understand the word “culture” in the Kultura cooperative?

Surely, if we asked each of them, it would respond with different nuances, but in general I would say that we have a broad and rich way of understanding culture as a set of expressions that, beyond the usual shows and practices, shape the character of the society of our country. It should be taken into account that over a dozen projects beyond cultural events, we collaborate with different social and cultural actors, we develop creativity and transmission dynamics, and we have a full program of awareness activities with the three educational centers of the locality, among others. It would therefore be a complex slaughter of values and values that are intertwined throughout this action.

In view of the 2019 data (last year before the pandemic), more than 200 events (an average of almost 4 events per week) were organized with 55,000 viewers. This is data from a city of 180,000 inhabitants, but Azpeitia has only 15,000 inhabitants. How is this achieved?

The number obtained is a transformation of the local cultural movement. This has been the result of at least two decades of work. In previous years we had already done housework through the Culture Bureau, everything we created with the people and for the people. From the beginning, it was clear that the main key to the viability of Sanagustin Kulturgunea’s project was a social pulse beyond being economic. When we opened the doors, the people responded enthusiastically and began to create an interesting cultural wave. It must be borne in mind that eleven years ago in Azpeitia there was no structured cultural activity of this kind, no such offer, nor a habit of paying for the entrance to a cultural event. Although not easy, changes in ways of doing change things from the environment and it is clear that culture is a good tool for social transformation.

90% of the acts mentioned have been in Basque…

Of course, it couldn't be otherwise, we know. One of the axes of our project is to work in Basque and from the Basque country, to live, to love, to work… to use it naturally. It is true that in our region the use of Euskera is high and in this sense we have a natural respiratory system. But that's what gives you the responsibility of taking care of it and the tension point so you don't fall into comfort.

What are your challenges for the future? What projects are you working on?

In the short term, and bearing in mind that we are trying to maintain our self-financing level at around 80%, it is no small thing to make the challenge of maintaining three buildings and 25 workers viable. The creation and education of cultural futures is one of our main challenges in the medium and long term. We have an eye on the generations to come and we want to promote in them the taste for culture. We know that the habits of cultural consumption are changing, that the machinery of capitalism that shapes culture and leisure to their liking is narrowing the screws, that the Castilian ones enter with force in our screens and tabs… we have to do. On the other hand, in the coming months we will open the Dinamo sound field and the creative space will be complete. We are also studying the possibility of opening a bookstore by responding to the gap we have in the region. We're not going to be quiet.