HOLDUP AT THE BIACS 3 - SEVILLE - SPAIN

And so year after year, with the awful and tricky pretext of attracting tourism and hypothetical and mortgaged investments, they pretend to put Seville on the world map, as if she were to be discovered for the first time, insulting her history and her continuous transformation into the avant-garde of creativity, mimicking the beaten paths of all the cities that pretend to be the only ones in the media world and using the word “culture” to empower their speculative projects therefore falling with them into a black hole that makes them invisible because of their non-reflective and homogeneous proposals blended into a corrosive magma where the individual wealth of each one disappears.

The “private” BIACS, managed by a troop of entrepreneurs, receive three million euros of public money, in addition to the use of public installations, and then wish to expand, without giving account and while playing their commercial tricks, convert themselves into false patrons that apply a whiplash with institutional acquiescence against the cultural, social and technological networks created by citizens who are committed to constructing the city.

The appropriation of public funds by the entrepreneurs of the BIACS who, oblivious to the crisis, celebrate their atomic VIP parties between fresh ones and Francescas Thyssen (who will impose upon us her latest museum) in between the silly bits of the Teuton Weibel, who plays with Seville and the culture of Al-Andalus like the soccer player who finishes his career in Qatar where he goes to get what he does not get paid in his own country. The culture, that culture that extends throughout the social fiber, that culture that has been working in a slow and prolonged way, that culture that connects itself with international networks working together to fight against all the madness, wiles, tricks and traps created by predatory capitalism, is emptied and stifled through their plundering.

The tragic show “BIACS Three” brings to Seville an immoral proposal of a series of de-contextualized technological gadgets that pretend to belong to Second Life, this non-prestigious place in virtual space where ghosts roam. In the hands of the cruel BIACS, Second Life is converted into a costly and mummified “Devil´s Walk” that appears in front of spectator-believers and non-believing artists, who are taken in by a codified buffoonery that spins around the cultural events, some are seen as consumer-tourist and others, with their boring monsters, fill empty spaces at the stands of the fair.

Meanwhile, at the CAAC esplanade, surrounded by the” jet set”, the in-baroness will jump amongst the shouts of entrepreneurs and the distinguished persons who sing “Francesca with the tracatrá”, over champagne and hors d’oeuvres prepared to eat the city. “¡Mal bocao la lleve!” (Would that a bad bite take her away!).
It does not matter that there is organizational disaster, or that from one day to the next Cordoba was removed from the list of the three cities selected for the celebrations, or the nonsense of notifying an important number of artists one month before the inauguration, or that the web page for the technological event is in a state of informative chaos…

Year after year they spend money on fireworks, assaulting the public budget and leaving behind an empty burned trail, except for a new order that arises from a culture that is each time more superficial.

This is the perverse universe that they want to stage at the monastery, La Cartuja of Seville, and in the palace, Carlos V of Granada.

Stamps of power for your “Desacoged’or Youperverse”. Just more smoke screens!
PLATFORM FOR REFLECTION ON CULTURAL POLITICS (PRPC)
October 1, 2008