The texts of José Guirao, former Minister of Culture and creator of La Casa Encendida, that nobody had learn | Culture | EUROtoday

Shortly earlier than José Guirao died – Pepe to his buddies – he gathered his closest circle and instructed them the place he stored every thing he had written throughout his life and had by no means revealed. The letters slept in several pendrives and computer systems, additionally in all of the notebooks that he preferred to purchase, at house in Madrid, in his city Pulpí, Almería, in La Vera, Cáceres, a refuge the place he tended his Japanese backyard, walked with the canines and wrote in order that nobody would learn him. Scattered round there was a scattered and unfinished work consisting of poems from his youth, notes, notes, some performs, some tried novels. “Do with it what you think is appropriate,” he instructed them.

Guirao (Pulpí, 1959 – Madrid, 2022), one of the vital strong cultural managers that Spain has ever produced, director of the Reina Sofía museum, creator of La Casa Encendida, director of the Montemadrid Foundation, lastly Minister of Culture and Sports, died in 2022 —rattling most cancers— on the age of 63. He devoted himself, essentially, to creating others shine, to creating tradition accessible to the general public, to remaining within the background. Now maybe he felt uncomfortable being himself the creator at whom the highlight and letters are pointed: one among his texts, the novel, is revealed for the primary time. The waters of the evening (Pre-Texts). It is curious that the ebook begins with the phrase: “He never knew how to write stories.” It seems that Guirao did know.

“Pepe had been a friend of great writers, such as Juan Goytisolo, José Miguel Ullán or José Ángel Valente, so I think he would be embarrassed if they used that same word, ‘writer’, to refer to him,” says David Calzado, a buddy and shut collaborator of Guirao in a number of of his tasks. “He was a philologist and loved literature so much that he probably would have felt imposter syndrome,” provides Calzado. That adoration for literature, that contact with a few of its nice names, turns into evident within the novel, with very acutely aware prose and nice poetic density. It offers with household relationships and their related tragedies, it incorporates many autobiographical elements, it additionally offers with the event of mining in his city, Pulpí, the place metals had been historically extracted and a well-known large geode was discovered. The author Eduardo Lago says in one of many prologues that Guirao’s method of regarding the world was typical of a author: “His sensitivity gave him away, although he always kept his vocation hidden among the deepest folds of his being. His temperament, unequivocally artistic, had as its secret reference the miracle of the written word, literature.”

Lago, together with one other buddy and shut collaborator of Guirao, the cultural supervisor Carlos Alberdi, had been in command of making ready the textual content. “Pepe had talked to me about the novel a few times, but not much because he was a very reserved man,” says Alberdi, “this text was the most fleshed out of the ones we found and even so we had to do some editing work, removing some unfinished parts that made reading difficult.” Manolo Borrás, editor of Pre-Textos, confirmed quick curiosity in bringing it to mild: he had admiration for Guirao and wished to publish a few of his texts, so long as that textual content was good — and this one, in response to the editor and people near him, is. This Thursday he performs at La Casa Encendida in Madrid, the cultural heart that may be thought-about his nice creation and legacy.

From environmentalism to ministry

José Guirao started lively in environmentalism, within the Mediterranean Ecologist Group, combating in opposition to the destruction of the shoreline as a result of tourism and actual property hypothesis and attempting to cease the development of a nuclear energy plant deliberate for Cape Cope. He was a councilor of Pulpí, went on to the Almería council on the PSOE lists, and stood out within the revitalization of tradition and in selling the creation of the Cabo de Gata Natural Park. His solvency led him to carry a number of positions within the Junta de Andalucía, till Minister Carmen Alborch took him to the Ministry of Culture and he ended up directing, at solely 35 years outdated, the Reina Sofía museum, between 1994 and 2001, a place he held below PSOE and PP governments. “He was a man of consensus, not attached to an ideology: he could understand everyone,” says Calzado.

Many of his pursuits, tradition, ecology, the social, got here collectively in La Casa Encendida, which, inside the Caja Madrid social work, and later within the Montemadrid Foundation, is an unprecedented heart that Guirao created with nice success on the border of the Madrid neighborhood of Lavapiés. It was curious to see him, all the time so neat, skinny, with a tie, in that setting of avant-garde artists, digital musicians, solidarity activists and militants from the close by squatted social facilities (the Laboratory, which was subsequent door to La Casa, shared in lots of elements the identical spirit though, after all, with out financial institution financing). An setting that he himself had created: it was even mentioned that it was an “author’s” heart.

“It was said then that young people did not go to cultural events, but Pepe knew how to surround himself with twenty-something programmers in different areas who managed to do something different and also attract those creators and that audience,” remembers Alberdi, who was La Casa’s Culture Coordinator at first, when he started to handle every kind of up to date issues. David Calzado additionally remembers one among Guirao’s mottos: “To be modern you have to know Latin,” he used to say, in reference to the necessity to know custom, not solely to proceed it, but in addition to confront it, overcome it or, immediately, burst it.

The arrival on the Ministry of Culture and Sports in 2018 was unintentional and bumpy. The first individual elected to the place was the author and journalist Máximo Huerta, an election that prompted fairly a stir, and which ended with the resignation of the chosen one just a few days later, when some fiscal irregularities got here to mild. When Guirao accepted President Pedro Sánchez’s proposal, the world of tradition celebrated the arrival, not very traditional, of somebody with an impeccable resume for the place: How come nobody had realized earlier than that Guirao needed to be Minister of Culture?

Guirao promoted the Artist Statute and lowered VAT on providers supplied by performers, artists and technicians, however the ministry, to Guirao’s nice displeasure, didn’t final lengthy. Only 19 months: at first of 2020 he was dismissed to make method for José Manuel Rodríguez Uribes (it was mentioned that the federal government was on the lookout for somebody extra concerned with sports activities). “With the dismissal there was some astonishment,” remembers Alberdi, “people considered Pepe a good minister, with a notable capacity for dialogue.”

After ministry, Guirao returned to the Montemadrid Foundation, till sickness took him too quickly. “He was a discreet and reserved person, but brilliant; I don’t think there has been another cultural manager like him,” concludes Calzado. Now, along with being a supervisor, he’s already a author, though the phrase sounded large to him.