If there is something that cannot die in this quarantine, it is Culture. The confinement in the respective places of residence of all Spaniards has also forced the closure of all cultural institutions in the country. A measure that the sector has wanted to save through what will be our best ally in the coming days:
This week, the Ministry of Culture and Sports has launched a campaign to disseminate cultural resources on the Internet, with the hashtag #laculturaentucasa, aimed at informing citizens of leisure and cultural enrichment alternatives. Thus, under this hashtag-motto, it is encouraged everyone to enjoy Culture, fostering a habit that the Department hopes will last, even when the health alarm phase is over.
Visit libraries from home
One of these proposals is eBiblio, the free service for lending electronic books, audiobooks and periodicals over the Internet, offered through Spanish public libraries. This service, coordinated and promoted by the Ministry of Culture and Sports in collaboration with the library departments of the autonomous communities, is accessible 24 hours a day and allows the reading of all kinds of works, using mobile phones, tablets, computers or digital books.
For its part, the National Library of Spain (BNE) will keep open, through its website, the digital services available to it: the Catalogue, the Hispanic Digital Library and the Digital Newspaper Library, among others. It provides free and open access to thousands of digitized documents, including books printed between the 15th and 20th centuries, manuscripts, drawings, prints, brochures, posters, photographs, maps, atlases, sheet music, historical press, and sound recordings.
Meet contemporary artists
For photography lovers, on the La Voz de la Imagen website you can meet various protagonists in the history of Spanish photography through the testimony of a generation of great photographers who reveal the intra-history of their work. A documentary space articulated about each of the photographers interviewed by José Luis López Linares and Publio López Mondéjar, illustrated with a selection of their images and the opinions and memories of people close to them professionally, with family and affection.
If what you prefer is to approach the creators of contemporary art, through Oral Memories you can meet emerging and mid-career artists, through interviews in audiovisual format where they expose their aesthetic-conceptual approaches in first person, images of its most outstanding projects and complementary information. This online platform already has a hundred artists and published interviews.
Exhibitions and national museums at a click
Virtual visits to the exhibitions of national museums are a growing demand and an interesting offer when you cannot leave home. In this sense, the large cultural institutions dependent on the State have launched initiatives, among which the virtual visit to the recently inaugurated Rembrandt exhibition and the permanent collection of the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum stand out; the Museo Nacional del Prado and his videos on social networks, with special attention to young audiences, in which he comments on the paintings in his collection; the 170 videos of the historical exhibition of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía; the Rethinking Guernica microsite with images of the work imperceptible to the naked eye thanks to ‘gigapixel’ photography technology, unpublished documents, comparison of photographic techniques and an interactive chronology; the virtual visit to the National Sculpture Museum of Valladolid; or to exhibitions of the state archives through its website.
The National Archaeological Museum also allows a virtual visit, a tour of the permanent exhibition in which you can access all the museum information (audiovisuals, explanatory posters, illustrations, etc.) and which also offers different thematic tours and visits virtual to temporary exhibitions, among which stands out The power of the past. 150 years of archeology in Spain. And one can be surprised with the virtual visit that the National Museum of Decorative Arts offers to outstanding sets of the collection, or a virtual restoration of outstanding pieces of the collection (a Neapolitan casket from the 16th century).
In relation to contemporary art and creation, the Ministry in turn offers a virtual tour of the exhibitions that have been scheduled in Tabacalera since 2015, while through its YouTube channel you can access 8 distribution lists that include reports, seminars , master class, documentaries of the exhibitions and a large amount of audiovisual material generated, which enriches the content of the activities organized in this cultural space located in Madrid.
Classics restored by Filmoteca Española, on Vimeo
Filmoteca Española and EGEDA (Entity for the Management of Rights of Audiovisual Producers) have come together to offer free online titles recently recovered or restored by Filmoteca Española, as well as other Spanish film classics.
On the channel Doré at home, through its Vimeo account, Filmoteca Española will offer a film that will be accessible to viewers for three days, until the next title is scheduled. It is not, therefore, an on-demand online cinema platform, but rather turning the homes of viewers into a new Cine Doré screen that, due to current circumstances, make it necessary to have the projection rooms closed. In the coming days, the Filmin platform will also launch the ‘Filmoteca Española’ collection, with classic titles from its catalogue, based on a collaboration between both entities.
Theatre, dance and music at home
Although the National Institute of Performing Arts and Music (INAEM) has had to close its stage spaces due to the coronavirus, theatre, dance and music are at the click of a mouse from your home screen thanks to the resources available online at its Performing Arts and Music Documentation Center. On the organization’s website (cdaem.mcu.es) you can access hundreds of thousands of data and documents (written information, photos, videos, programs, posters) on performing arts and music in Spain in the 20th century.
The Teatroteca is the platform with the most cultural offer at INAEM for those who want to continue enjoying the theater, yes, through a screen. It has 1,595 theater, circus and dance titles, a figure that will increase in May with 30 new works, many of them belonging to the last season of the INAEM artistic units: National Dramatic Center (CDN), National Classic Theater Company ( CNTC) and Teatro de la Zarzuela, among others. All you have to do is register to enjoy this free service.
And to enjoy zarzuela as a family, the Teatro de la Zarzuela YouTube channel provides access to recordings of works such as ‘Tres sombreros de copa’, and projects to bring the genre closer to young people such as the Zarza project.
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