Miquel Molina, Barcelona, 11/03/2020 13:18
The Fundació Miró is one of the institutions that benefited from the co-capital status program in its previous stage. In the image, the 40th anniversary celebration / ÀLEX GARCIA
Barcelona could see recognized on paper the role of cultural and scientific capital that in fact it already exercises. For this to happen, the State Budget project presented last week has to prosper. They expressly recognize that Barcelona has a co-capital status in these two areas, along with Madrid.
Specifically, the budget project foresees a contribution of 20 million euros for 2021 destined to the Barcelona City Council “for the agreement of the cultural and scientific co-capital status”. Fifteen million are listed as current transfer, and the remaining five as capital transfer.
If the budgets were approved and carried out in these terms, Barcelona would recover, almost a decade later, a condition that it had already exercised during Jordi Hereu’s term as mayor of Barcelona. In that period about 20 million were allocated to the city in concept of co-capital status. That agreement declined with the replacement of Hereu by Xavier Trias in the City Council and that of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero by Mariano Rajoy in La Moncloa.
In practice, the extraordinary contribution will serve to reinforce institutions and cultural and scientific events whose sphere of influence goes beyond the city itself. The Deputy Mayor for Culture, Joan Subirats, who has negotiated the issue with the Ministry of Culture, plans to provide more details this afternoon. In the past, institutions such as the Fundació Miró, the Museu Picasso or the Mercat de les Flors benefited from these funds.
The reactivation of the bi-capital or co-capital status agreement was started by the City Council in 2017 at the initiative of the then Deputy Mayor for Culture, Jaume Collboni. But then it ran into silence from the PP Ministry of Culture. It was Pedro Sánchez and Ada Colau who formalized the new agreement shortly before the declaration of the pandemic.
The idea of the City Council is to consolidate this aid in this budget – if it is approved – and that it can be maintained in the event that the following budgets are extended, something that cannot be ruled out in this climate of political instability. The idea is that the agreement serves as a framework for development of co-capital status proposals.
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