If a decade ago they had asked me about the level of Cultural actions focused on plastic and visual arts on the island, I would have stated that the programming was deficient. Today everything has changed. In this first decade of the 21st century, the Cultural sector has evolved in a brilliant way and this is all due to a community of passionate, restless and awake people who seek to satisfy their need for reflection through the visualization of different types of content. The most significant advance in this field has been transparency. If you go to the C.I.C. the Warehouse belonging to the Cabildo de Lanzarote, (Cultural Innovation Center the Warehouse) you will see at the entrance of each exhibition or project that is carried out a sheet where you can find the budget of the same. This dear reader, although it seems like something trivial, is an advance towards the transparency so necessary so that corruption and abuse do not arise. Since this exercise has been done, all the people who are involved in a project receive their proportional part and I remind you, the people who dedicate themselves to artistic or cultural production do not live on air or love of art, they live on their work. Even so, and although there are reasons for hope, what happens in "the Warehouse" is an oasis among the volcano, a practice that all the municipalities of the island should apply but that unfortunately is not implemented.
Let's draw a mental map from Órzola to Playa Blanca, the professional centers dedicated to plastic arts or cultural production are a mirage, there is no public infrastructure, let me explain. Until now, exhibition and professional dissemination places have been activated correctly, only in Arrecife and some private centers, but without a basic structure that in this case are public creation workshops or artistic residences, it is impossible to advance. It should be noted that there are starting to be some private initiatives, but insufficient to boost and activate a healthy and productive artistic scene.
"In Lanzarote, public creation workshops are almost non-existent, as well as artistic residences beyond some modest initiatives that are unable to boost the island's artistic sector on their own."
There are a large number of disused public buildings, infrastructures that in my opinion, some could become spaces not only at the service of Culture but also of the community, drawing up projects of use and reconversion that end up generating:
Artistic residences and citizen laboratories. Places where different people dedicated to art or the professional sector of cultural management stay for a period of time to produce projects. The population could use this network of spaces to generate knowledge banks, workshops, as well as spaces for debate.
Public creation and manufacturing workshops. Locations dedicated to providing people with a space where they have the tools and infrastructure necessary to formalize a project, whether artistic or collective manufacturing.
We must be ambitious, have a vision of the world to come. Lanzarote is a tourist island, but also a territory that has been shaped based on creativity. If we as a society want to continue progressing, we need new approaches that allow us to solve problems not in a standard way, but in our own and innovative way. For this, it is necessary to open up to evolution and currently it can only be done if public entities do their part to ensure that culture and innovation are not only exhibited and disseminated, but also produced in the highest standards of accessibility and quality.
There is a brilliant quarry, a youth full of ideas, we are facing the best trained generations in the island's history. Do not fall into the mirage. We cannot allow as a society that all this talent escapes, that it remains in a perpetual diaspora. It is inadmissible to allow our airport to become only an exit door and not an entrance or return. We must make creativity those oases that will allow the island to continue innovating, growing and developing.
