Vox’s pressure on Huesca City Hall condemned the Periferias festival and from its ashes two cultural initiatives emerged: Spin and Extrarradios. Both took place in recent weeks, the first in the capital of Huesca and organized by the council that governs the PP and the second between the towns of Almudévar and Ayerbe with Luis Lles, ideologue of Periferias for 20 years, as soul father. After the first test edition, their respective promoters gave a positive assessment and said they were convinced that they would continue over time.
Far from engaging in a temporary battle to reclaim the legacy of Periferias, they developed at different dates. Spin took place between October 16 and 20 in Huesca and brought together 15,000 participants, according to city hall data. All events were free. The Extrarradios, with a nomenclature that clearly recalls the Periferias festival, took place in two stages and attracted 4,000 participants: from October 25 to 27 in Almudévar with more than 1,300 spectators and this last long weekend in Ayerbe. In their case, the price of tickets for each meeting was 20 euros and the whole price was 35 euros. Extrarradios has oriented its programming around ideas of cultural censorship and the limits of artistic creation.
Both cultural events were built with similar budgets. The spin cost 108,000 euros. The Huesca City Council contributed 78,000 euros, the Provincial Delegation of Huesca (DPH) contributed 20,000 euros and the Government of Aragon contributed 10,000 euros. The People’s Party leads the three institutions. The Extrarradios, with two additional days of programming, started with ten thousand euros less (98,000) and the Ministry of Culture and Sports contributed almost half, or 50,000 euros, to a festival organized by two municipalities, those of Almudevar and Ayerbe, in which the PSOE governs.
The Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, defined Extrarradios, whose first motto was dissidence, as “a great meeting for freedom” and to “fight censorship”. In a text which serves as a birth certificate, the festival is defined as a “response to the cancellation of the Periferias festival by the Huesca City Council, determined by a clearly political imposition”.
Periferias was launched in 2000 and in its 23 editions it has followed avant-garde paths. The last one, which had as its theme the artistic expressions of the gypsy people, lasted ten days, had a budget of 130,000 euros and was sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, the DPH and the Women’s Institute.
Cancellation motivated by Vox
Vox set as a condition for approving the 2024 municipal budgets the removal of a festival attacked by the far right, stressing that this only served to “flood progressive culture with hundreds of thousands of euros”. Until then, it had survived public assemblies of the PP and PSOE and was giving performances by emerging and established stars who, in some cases, were performing for the first time in Spain: Matthew Herbert, Lee Scratch Perry, Jeff Mills, Sun Ra Arkestra. , Sugarhill Gang, Pan Sonic, Tony Allen or a budding Rosalía in 2017.
Lles described Extrarradios’ first weekend in Almudévar as a “success”: “We wanted to provide cultural rights to everyone so that everyone, regardless of their environment, can enjoy high-quality contemporary culture, and we we achieved it,” celebrated . Furthermore, he underlined that “the reception from the public was magnificent, both in terms of the quality of the performances and the atmosphere created”. Moha Gerehou and his monologue ‘Infiltrated in Vox’, the North American trans artist Dorian Wood and Maria Rodés were other highlights of this first section of Extrarradios.
In Ayerbe, where the victims of DANA were commemorated with a minute of silence and where certain events were postponed, the presence of Christina Rosenvinge, Niño de Elche and Ignatius Farray completed a proposal that values the role of small towns in stimulating cultural activities. . Luis Lles recalls, to put the attendance data in context, that “Ayerbe has a thousand inhabitants and Almudévar, 2,000. The response was as good, if not better, than in a large city.
Lorena Orduna, mayor of Huesca, described the first edition of Spin as a “resounding success” in terms of participation and added that “we plan to repeat it next year.” To which he links the process of citizen participation promoted by the municipality in cultural material to “verify the concerns of the inhabitants of Huesca regarding the culture of our city”. During this month, the data will be cross-checked to analyze it and “act accordingly regarding the general budgets for culture for next year”.
The objective of Huesca City Hall was to “energize and bring about cultural change to serve all audiences, particularly young people and families”. The show ‘Drakanthux’, by K de Calle, brought together more than 4,500 people, the same number as ‘Le Labyrinthe du Coucou’, by the Itinerània company, during the five screenings which took place over two and a half days . Among the musical proposals, those of Rapsusklei, Flores & McEwen and Joe Crepúsculo stood out.
