Translator: Alexandra Gheorghe Reviewer: Denise RQ
Good afternoon.
First for the people at home so don't worry about it.
I was born more that half century ago,
not long ago, in a suburb in Tarragona called Serrallo.
My father, grandfather, greatgrandfather, and great-greatgrandfather were fishermen;
I'm the one ending the saga as sea makes me dizzy.
and I cannot step foot in a boat
from a distance less than 10 meters.
Given all this, I had to find another way to make a living.
When I was little, my grandfather had the image of Serrallo from the 60s.
When I was little, the suburb was magnific for a little boy,
as it was way better than Port Aventura.
We made games out of everything:
the water, the boats, the rains, the river.
We had so many resources we could use,
basically because our games were invented by us.
We developed such a great imagination and creativity,
as back then there were no afterschool activities,
or we could not afford them.
School days were horrible,
I mean, I have great memories from back then.
As Ramon Muntaner's song goes, "Schools of bad teachers."
Inappropriate teachers who didn't instill in us
any desire to know anything, therefore, we had to do everything.
Fortunately, we had something very important
close to Tarragona
and sometimes, we are not aware enough: it is the harbor.
Back then, our suburb was right in the middle of the harbor,
and we saw how ships sailed away.
Surprisingly, in that time, they were mostly Greek.
Although now Greece has its own economic and social problems;
back then, most of the ships in the Mediteranian merchant navy
were Greek: Onasis, and so on.
Do you remember?
When I was little, I used to watch
the stern of the ships that docked in our harbor,
and many had Greek names:
Odysseus, Piraeus, Athens, Patras, Thessaloniki.
I was finding it so amazing,
and as our school didn't have a library,
I used to get away to Gasòmetre street.
I don't know if you remember that seriously deteriorated, shabby,
run by someone with the appearance of a Dickens's horror story character.
Despite all that, I used to go there almost every afternoon
to search and find the origin
of the names marked on the sterns of the ships.
Odysseus, for instance.
This was the reason to read the Odyssey, the Iliad,
get in touch with Alexander the Great and my imagination,
that of only a child, started to discover history.
When I got older, my teachers thought that I was worth something,
that I could go to the university, and so I did.
And I told my mum, "I want to study History."
It couldn't be different
as I had soaked myself into history and histories for so many years.
When I said this, the women in the neighborhood were saying,
"Poor Pepita, a son who goes
to the university to study history and won't make a dime."
As you can see, it wasn't like that. The prophecy hasn't come true.
I studied History which I absolutely loved,
and after that, I did something different.
I did the military service.
When I finished it I enrolled to theater.
And for many years, five, six, maybe seven,
I have been writing scripts for plays.
Some terrible scripts, it's better if you don't know them.
I loved theater, and I got keen on performing arts and theater.
Once I got passed that phase,
I started into culture management.
I was passionate about it and, finally,
Tarragona City Council made me responsible of communication
at History Museum in Tarragona.
And it was then when I realized
that the two great passions in my life finally convereged:
my passion for history and my passion for performing arts.
And I wouldn't say performing arts, I would say stories, narrative.
In 1993, during that moment of my life,
these two great passions of mine become one,
the passion for narrative, for writing and telling stories.
This is why I called my presentation "History with stories".
Here you can see the image in a typical museum.
The museums in our country and in our town, and generally,
in the entire South-Europe, are having a rough time now
as they are facing an alarming crisis: there are no funds.
If we used to have few funds, now they are even fewer.
Therefore, everybody is very worried.
And everyone tends to think the solution is to incorporate
loads of equipment, technology, everything to be digital.
And that's OK.
But the essence, the thing that appeals to us is the storytelling,
are the stories about the things we have.
Paul Auster, a great American writer says,
"We are getting old, but we do not change.
We'll remain young forever, children that want to hear a story,
and another one, and another one."
The Danish writer Isak Dinsen says that living means having a story to tell.
The essence in every human being is to be told stories.
Therefore, me for some time now, and my team, obviously,
and more people, are determined to change a bit the management
of cultural heritage of our country and of our town.
It's not the information what make people come to the museum.
When I hear, "Let's turn this museum into a real museum,
or this archeological site,
I start trembling because it usually means
exhibiting informative panels and more panels.
Information and more information. This comes later.
What matters isn't this, it's grabbling people's attention,
make them be attracted by knowledge, by the history of archaeology.
The museums should make an effort to create stories.
Less panels, less technology, and more stories.
Everything started 16 years ago, with something that has been accomplished
which is the Festival of Historic Dissemination of the Roman World.
What did we do?
We did something which was back then very unusual.
All the important European festivals,
in Europe or in the United States,
are based on performing acts, or plastic arts, or music.
Salzburg, the Cinema Festival in Venice, the Theater Festival in Avignon.
everything is performing arts, plastic arts, or music.
Our idea was to make it a festival about history.
Not a celebration but a festival. A cultural festival about history.
As this is Tarragona, it couldn't be anyway different
than to be dedicated to the Roman world.
And we started this cycle with the first festival in 1999.
It has 16 representations, and we'll celebrate the 17th this year.
At first we were reluctant of its success because it is very serious.
We exhibit a real story.
There are no cheese, and cold cuts stalls,
no parades, no photography, or drawing competitions.
We don't have any of this. What did we have in mind?
We thought of a model based in a historical event,
of explaining human lives.
When you start digging a bit into history,
you don't find rock, you find actual people living into a society,
people with same problems as ours
and how they solved them or how they tried to solved them.
Here you have some photos from the Festival.
The Festival always takes place at the location of the heritage.
It is very much connected with the transfer of the cultural heritage.
The dissemination has no sense
if it doesn't go hand in hand with the research and preservation.
I think dissemination
is the biggest ally of the heritage management.
Now that there are no funds,
the sole aspect of the heritage management
that can still have resources is dissemination.
The OIT expects, based on 2013 data,
more than 1,100 million international tourists.
And in the next decade, 2,000 million tourists per year.
Does does this mean? It means we have a great opportunity.
Most of these tourists travel to discover cultural heritages.
And we are a world heritage.
Therefore, we have a challenge and a huge opportunity.
But how do we attract them? Will they be attracted by screens?
By having better toilets? The toilets must be clean.
But we won't attract by improving them.
As much as we try, they will only be toilets.
How do we attract them? With new stories, live storytelling,
reconstructions, stories that will touch the pure essence of human history.
Here you are: Tàrraco Viva.
Live activities,
telling the story of people in a historical and social context.
How should these stories be? Should they only be performance?
Should they make you laugh? Should they amuse you?
No, this isn't what we do.
The stories should be touching,
should be deep revelations, important revelations.
They should not only amuse, but also make you think,
they should become a tool of knowledge in the daily life.
This is the story we are trying to tell.
We celebrated the bimillenary of Augustus's death.
We dedicated him the whole festival.
Augustus is a shady character, with bright and dark sides,
but he has achieve a great thing: he created the great urban civilization.
The most successful civilization in history.
Here you can see some photos from last year.
We also organize a special event in summer; Història Viva.
As you can see, we celebrate it at the monuments.
And finally, the future. What do we suggest for the future?
A permanent history dissemination center,
dedicated exclusively to disseminate the Roman urban world,
the Tàrraco Viva Colony.
A place to tell the great stories of the history of Rome.
To tell the story of how an urban civilization was,
to explain that to access
the city of the living ones you had to enter the city of dead;
to explain rituals,
to explain performance, beliefs, myths, policies,
the way they lived, and thought, and suffered,
how they organized themselves,
in family, in society, and at a political level.
Cicero told Atic, his friend, "Greeks are great thinkers,
great philosophers, great artists.
We, the Romans, have come into this world to govern.
To make things work."
What a great lesson.
The politics, the Forum.
And to finish with, an anecdote
which I find very descriptive for these difficult times.
There is a legend in Rome which is still familiar
and whose place of origin still exits.
It is the center of the Forum.
It is told that in that time, a hole appeared,
and they didn't know how to cover it.
A huge hole and that was very dangerous.
And it was getting bigger by day.
The Romans started to throw
rocks, wood, everything they got inside the hole.
By it was not enough.
The magistrate asked the prophets and the priests
how they could cover it.
And the priests told them that the only way to cover it
was if all Romans threw inside it the things they valued the most.
What did they throw?
Jewelries, furniture, paintings, sculptures but it didn't fill in the hole.
A young man, Marcus Curtius, dressed into his military outfit
jumped into the hole and said,
"The most valuable thing Rome has are its young warriors."
Lesson: the most important thing are the people we have.
This is our message that comes from the 2,000-year ancient Rome.
Finally, learning about history means knowing who we are.
It's a tool into knowledge.
Creating our own stories to know where we go.
It's not enough to have an idea.
All alone, the ideas are toxic.
Ideas acquire meaning when they are part of a global perspective.
This is why we have so many drawbacks.
We have separate ideas, and they don't work.
The ideas, the people work when integrated in a society.
When we put them together.
When we have a global vision, more ambitious about what we want.
What was my vision when I was little in Serrallo,
a boy smelling like fish?
For me, fish and culture always go together.
And I will die uniting culture and fish.
What is my vision, our mission? Tarragona, a town with history.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)