If the funded projects as well as those rejected are examined thoroughly, it is impossible not to ask thousands of questions about the competence, vision and strategy in the field of culture according to the activities. The question arises: does the state generally have a strategy for culture? What is our vision for building cultural policies and their sustainability? I think the answer to such questions is clear for all of us!
Author: Katerina Topallova
Culture and love are the two things that have the power to assimilate… They have the power to challenge us, to intoxicate us and to seduce us for complete physical and spiritual rebirth. Undoubtedly, those societies and states will survive in the world that have a solid, strong and “devilishly” attractive culture, which possesses the ability to lead and admire, fascinate and hypnotize, regardless of different ethnic or religious affiliation. Powerful cultures are operated by ecclesiological diversities and beliefs. Here lies the success in penetrating them. But where are we in this whole history of the creation of such a well-known and autochthonous culture, which will unite us and distinguish us from others?!
I think the revolt from the published results of the Annual Competition of the Ministry of Culture has not yet died down… On the contrary, the voice of the actors in this field is getting bigger and more massive. As if we are used to being part of a “carnival” of complaints every year, which are remembered and never die out, and knowing the participants, we are used to their noise and partly lucrative, as a replacement for the existential message. However, regardless of the choice, the general impression is that the culture in Macedonia for another year received a red card, positioning itself on the margins of society.
If the funded projects, as well as those rejected, are examined fundamentally, it is impossible not to ask thousands of questions about the competence, vision and strategy in the field of culture according to the activity. The question arises: does the state generally have a strategy for culture? What is our vision for building cultural policies and their sustainability? I think the answer to such questions is clear for all of us!
Prolegomena of cultural chaos! Taking into account the frequent changes in senior positions in the Ministry of Culture in the last five years, as well as the non-transparent selection of the first collaborators – the chosen ones who should be involved in such processes, the overview we have as a society and the state, year after year year, is defeatist to watch.
From the point of view of culture, Macedonia is unfortunately a disappearing country… Cracked at all ends, with torn clothes from the former cultural system, which even today is subjugated and crawls on its limbs, calling to a former glory. At the same time, giving us the appearance of stale nonsense that has long since been sniffed out and our ability is most evident in changing that outdated garb in which we parade in front of domestic and international audiences.
Any respect for exceptions… Values should be shared, displayed and celebrated!
It is legitimate to ask the question: What has Macedonian culture been reduced to? Cultural workers and critics – at odds with the times, seem like a fugitive “avant-garde” that parades with some European cultural policies or extremely primitive images and radical “cultural” ideas, guess what place they occupy in culture. A sick, metastasizing, incestuous culture that does not produce quality, and serves only as a hanger or breast for infantile “people of culture”, completely incapable of penetrating the real world of values… Unfortunately, this is a poor and clueless mask of the cultural environment?
In all this image of erosion, national institutions and their offerings are invisible and lost in space and time, without a clear idea and concept that should justify their existence. Instead of the focus and criticism falling squarely on the backs of what we all pay for as a culture, the Macedonian public behaves as if it has been put in a cage, deceived into its artistic capture – a picture of a village plow and a parade of turkeys, ready for combat.
The results of the selection brought to the surface all the dirt of the Macedonian culture, making it less cultural, national, progressive! Until we talk about this degrading and illiterate, invisible and unprofessional offer, served by anonymous people, it seems to exist only as a defocus from the real problems we are facing as a society and a state.
I pose the question, what is the culture of our existence? Is it more of a blame culture, prone to blame whenever things go wrong? Or is it more of a culture of failure, embracing failure as the fundamental way we need to learn and progress? In our country, it seems that both variants are in circulation…
That’s why it’s time to seriously work on the story we want to tell, the story we want to hear, and finally – to celebrate such a story! Otherwise, I don’t know about it seven times, we will sigh again: Ah! Political games… Arguably the best way to create an unproductive culture.