 |
Victor Nubla is a Barcelona monument.
From his base in the “village”
that is Gràcia, he has been helping
to make the city move for decades.
Wearing his creative hats, he
is a writer, musician, artist, composer
and producer. Extending his talents
to the outside world, he is also the
driving force behind Gràcia Territori
Sonar and the long established and
highly successful LEM festival of experimental
music. I met up with him
in Plaça Reial, on the terrace of Sidecar,
before a show with one of his
groups, Dedo 3. Seeking solace from
the pouring rain, we talked puzzles,
publishing and threesomes.
SF: You’re involved in so many
things; it’s difficult to know where
to start. I know one of your projects,
Biblioteca para Misantropos, is a literary
one. What exactly is it, and
why is it so important to you?
VN:
I write frequently in press, magazines
and also books for different
publishers, but I created the Biblioteca
in 2003 especially to publish
my writings that are not necessarily
ordered to me from anybody else.
With this structure I can control absolutely
the product (what to publish,
how to do it, the quality of paper,
the cover, the number of pages,
the number of copies, the images,
the typography, how to sell it...) and
it gives me the kind of freedom that
I do not get from the publishers.
SF:
And do you feel that your writing
reaches people that maybe
your music can’t, or do the 2 things
generally go hand in hand?
VN:
As a director of the Biblioteca, I
can give my books for free to my
friends, and, in fact, I do that. However,
the books also sell well in the
book stores, evidently, to people
that I don’t know. So I suppose that
those people are my audience. I’m
not sure if is the same people who
are buying my records and my books,
but I suspect that they are not
exactly the same people. I think my
books are more popular than my
music.
SF:
So, you’ve got your literary fans
and your musical fans. How do you
manage the 2 things and all the
other stuff that you’re involved in?
VN:
If you are with 2 women, you
have 2 possibilities: 1, you don’t tell
one about the other, or, 2, you present
the girls to one another, and
you are 3. This is better. Maybe
when I was very young, I was under
pressure from family, from society,
to be a writer or a musician, but
now I’m an adult- I can do both
things. I can’t live if I don’t write or
make music. And I can’t live if I
don’t do the other things either. I
think this is a very good tool for me
to try and change the world with.
With music and writing I try to
change myself and with the other
things I try to change the world.
SF:
You’ve described yourself as a
“cultural dynamizer”. Is it under this
guise then that you’re trying to
change the world, and what exactly
does a “cultural dynamizer” do?
VN:
In Catalonia it is usual that the
civil associations take part in the
cultural and/or civic politics, especially
in the area of local politics.
The most visible cultural projects
in the last few years have been built
by collectives of artists and other
cultural specialists. This is the case
of our Gràcia Territori Sonor collective,
that organizes the LEM festival,
or Advanced Music, that created
the Sónar Festival, or the people
that run Hangar. I work in these
kind of networks; organizing, researching,
giving my opinion, collaborating
with the public and private
institutions with the objective
of making visible the "unofficial"
arts and cultures. This is what someone
calls “cultural dynamizing”.
It is more than a job, because this is
finally our life.
SF:
Is it working then, your world
changing scheme?
VN:
Yeah. When we started the LEM
festival we had about 2,500 people,
and now we have 50,000. Evidently,
that works. I don’t want to be presumptuous
but in Barcelona this
boom in experimental music is directly
linked to the work we have
been doing in Gràcia. And the position
of this in the international
panorama is very important. I think
most important is that our work
with the public institutions has
been very successful. They understand
that not only commercial music
and high culture music give personality
to the city. When we started
LEM the idea was very simple, there
is some kind of art that is only for
connoisseurs and for the elite, or for
professionals. And it is very expensive
to go to these special cycles of experimental music. We started
with the contrary idea; let’s do that
at weekends and in bars; cheaper
and for the normal people. That
means that normal people who live
in Gràcia know us and they understand
that there are other kinds of
music. This is great. This is anti-elitist.
SF: I read on your web page a thing
that I liked about your special jigsaw
puzzle. What it is and how did you
start it?
VN: I found my first piece in 1984,
on the sidewalk, walking on the
street. And I picked it up, because
it was pretty. It gave me a lot to think
about. I remember at home there
was always a big jigsaw I used to
solve as a child a couple of times per
year. That puzzle was missing one
piece that someone had replaced
by an adequate-shaped cardboard
piece. When I was child I wondered
many times how could that piece
have got lost, since the puzzle never
left the house? When I found my
‘84 piece, I figured it came from a
house where everyone must be
wondering the same.
SF: Is there a plan to ever try and put
it all together?
VN: For the moment they live in a
big box as the common jigsaw
puzzles. You open it and, yes, there
is a puzzle, but formed by pieces
that come from many others. It’s a
puzzle of puzzles. While the box is
closed, I think all the pieces have
been transformed and they fit together.
When I open it again, they present
again their original form, not
one fits with another. But I’m sure
that when the box is closed, they
maintain much closer relationships
than when scattered on the table.
More information at hronir.org.
|
|
