Jordi Martí Grau served as municipal manager and culture delegate of Barcelona, Spain.
Photo: Bogotá International Book Fair
“Spain will take over Bogotá in 2025,” were the words of Mario Cajiao, vice president of Corporate Affairs at Corferias, to announce that the European country will be the guest of honor at the next edition of Filbo.
The news was announced at a press conference, in which representatives of the different organizations responsible for the event and of Spain were present. Among them was Jordi Martí Grau, Secretary of State for Culture of the Spanish nation, who with evident emotion received the news and offered a speech in which he celebrated that his country, the one he carries in his heart and on his shoulders, was the invited for the 37th edition of the fair, two decades after his last participation.
For the secretary, the presence of Spain in this and other events, such as the Panama Book Fair and the Guadalajara Book Fair, is the sign of a need to reinforce the cultural space through that voice that unites us: Spanish. “It is time to repeat that meeting that we held in the nineties and, above all, in these times in which we are facing cultural, environmental and technological challenges in which Spanish becomes a language of peace,” said Grau.
According to him, this will not only be a scenario in which there will be an exchange and exhibition of stories, authors and books, but it will also serve to tell the rest of the world about a voice that lives and belongs to millions of people. Citizens who face difficulties and problems with the conviction that the emancipatory and conciliatory elements will be culture and dialogue.
“One of the great challenges is to build a culture of peace. Many of the conflicts have a cultural background and an inability to dialogue and exchange. Colombia, which suffers and has suffered violence, is the appropriate place for that meeting. But you don’t just have to think about what is happening here, I come from a continent where we have two wars that cross our realities, and that shows that there is a feeling and an idea that we must incorporate belligerence, because it exists and will exist. That is why we have to think about how we can build cultural narratives that prevent this wave of war from expanding in the world,” Grau added.
Spain and its book ecosystem
Grau spoke about the book ecosystem in his country, in which publishing monopolies are located, such as Planeta or Alfaguara, but in which there are also independent bookstores, which join the effort to continue making written works a relevant cultural tool. on that side of the world. Therefore, the official asserted that since 2023, the year in which he took office, he has worked for a restructuring of cultural policy in which rights are the central axis.
“Every human being has the right not only to receive, but also to contribute and to have their voice heard to build the ecosystem where they live. Some have told us that the industry is going another way, but no, this is essential to guarantee rights and expand cultural expressions. A book without publishers represents an impossibility for there to be access to reading,” said the secretary, who explained that under this logic they have defended diversity.
“The fact that there are large publishers with a presence in many countries is positive, because it allows some authors to have the capacity to reach out. However, it would be dangerous if only those editors existed, because we would leave a huge melting pot of creativity unexpressed.” This is a cause for concern for Grau, who considers that it may be a possible scenario in the face of concentration and monopolization in said conglomerates, which is why he highlights that it is a government obligation to protect small and medium producers.
Likewise, the secretary was emphatic that the protection of these publishers is also the protection of the linguistic diversity of Spain, where six languages coexist: Spanish, Catalan, Valencian, Galician, Basque and Aranese.
“There is also concentration in languages. Those that have fewer speakers go through serious difficulties to be able to maintain themselves, when they are a treasure of our cultural diversity. I speak Catalan and I am Catalan, and although I am delighted to be able to express myself in Spanish and other languages, my way of reading and expressing the world is Catalan. Therefore, the protection of these languages must be an unavoidable commitment of any government entity,” he expressed.
Next, and without hesitation, he said that if he were asked for a book for the fair that was not originally written in Spanish, he would appeal to the value of the translation, but above all to the fact that these cultural expressions were an example of what he does. valuable to a territory. He even made it known that he would like to witness an exchange with indigenous groups and the languages spoken in Colombia.
“In the same way that climate change is threatening biodiversity, there are factors that affect the cultural aspect, which is equally important to the environmental aspect, since its protection consists of safeguarding the most threatened communities. The Ministry’s objective is never to go against the big ones, but rather to ensure that this ecosystem, which is rich and plural, is maintained or can grow in density and diversity. “That is what cultural policy is about, and that is what governments should do,” he asserted.
Reading and books in technology
Unlike other voices, Grau pointed out that he is against anyone who says that social networks and the digitalization of life are going to force there to be no place for reading and books. True to his job as a politician, he stuck to the figures and pointed out that the indicators show the opposite and that it was enough to look at what had happened in this edition of the Bogotá International Book Fair: in a single day, more than 100,000 people attended Corferias to participate in this event.
“The book has been given up for dead, but it resists and continues,” he said. However, he recognizes that these new technologies pose challenges and that now there are other “screens” that receive more attention. “The book has a beginning and an end. He has a point. On the other hand, on TikTok there is an infinite scroll that you stop seeing when you have to do another activity.” For this reason, he exalted the importance of the fixed price of books and library policy, which for him “has allowed what was once a privilege for a few to now be available to everyone in libraries, which in my case was where I discovered and got closer to reading. “Where my literary vocation took place.”
However, there is a technology that Grau does not completely trust: artificial intelligence, which means great challenges in the cultural field. “We have to think about copyright for generative intelligence algorithms. “If there is no financial compensation for that, we are talking about another form of contemporary piracy.” For this same reason, the Spanish Ministry of Culture, headed by Ernest Urtasun, published on February 19 a guide to good practices for this technology, with the aim of guaranteeing respect for the holders of intellectual property rights in the actions promoted. by the different ministerial units and entities. That same guide promotes the inclusion of a clause in the National Awards, so that works created “entirely and exclusively” by generative artificial intelligence do not win.
“I trust more in human intelligence for creation than in artificial intelligence. Will there be products of these? Well, but first they must pay the copyright, if there is a cover, an image or a drawing, they must pay, because that has been built on the basis of the work of many people,” concluded the secretary, who let it be known that the work by José Eustasio Rivera and Gabriel García Márquez has captivated him. He even said that he had an important role in the creation of the library in Barcelona that bears the name of the Colombian Nobel Prize winner in literature, who is a “great” for him.
