Thursday 5 February 2015
Sport as Culture and Ideology in Barcelona, 1979-1992
Speaker: Mari Paz Balibrea (Birkbeck, University of London)
Chair: Paul Preston
Time: 18 h.
Place: LSE, Portugal Street, Cowdray House, 1st floor, Seminar Room 1.11
Barcelona has undergone dramatic socio-economic change in the post-Francoist period, a change which has in important instances revolved around culture and sport, as seen not least in the organisation of the 1992 Olympic Games. At the same time, concepts of culture and sport have also played a significant political role, as democratic local governments have sought to devise new and inclusive forms of citizen participation.
When the socialists came to municipal power in 1979, one of the main tasks was to democratise the city, and the area of culture became a crucial component of this agenda. The new political leadership saw culture as a means to forge a critical and transformative citizenry, but cultural reform also responded to a widespread grassroots perception of culture as a civil right and thus something that the government had a duty to make accessible. In this sense, the cultural ideas and principles that the Catalan socialists and communists acted on were a direct extension of the ones used during the years of struggle against Francoism which, in turn, were deeply connected to the understanding of culture that came from the years of the Second Republic. Yet these ideas were also given new inflections in the post-Francoist period, which became particularly clear after Barcelona was chosen in 1986 as the host of the 1992 Olympic Games.
In her paper, Mari Paz Balibrea traced these changes and looked at how concepts of culture and sport implied a particular idea of the relation between government and citizen. In her opinion, the organisation of the 1992 Olympic Games represented a key moment in Barcelona’s recent history, an event which gave rise to a new notion of citizen participation, based on mass-volunteering as a means to realise a cultural agenda elaborated by ruling political powers.
In a stimulating debate after the seminar, the speaker as well as members of the audience highlighted the very important tradition of sport in Catalonia and the organisation of macro-events of this kind in Barcelona before 1992 (1936 People’s Olympiad, etc.). The propagandistic use of sport during the Franco dictatorship was also discussed, demonstrating that this practice can have very different – sometimes controversial – applications.
Dr. Mari Paz Balibrea is a Senior Lecturer of Modern Spanish Literature and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. Her major publications include En la tierra baldía: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán y la izquierda española en la postmodernidad and Tiempo de exilio: una mirada crítica a la modernidad española desde el pensamiento republicano en el exilio. The paper delivered at the Catalan Observatory is part of a book Mari Paz Balibrea is currently working on: The Cultural Capital in You: Addressing the Citizen and Transforming the City in Barcelona, 1979-2010, forthcoming by Palgrave MacMillan in 2016., forthcoming by Palgrave MacMillan in 2016.