Zoom in

«The low and sandy coast of the Pacific reflecting ghost skyscrapers». During the People's Summit of 2015, the landscape of the city of Panama earned Silvio Rodríguez these words on a well-read Cuban news portal. He wrote ghosts because he did not see people watching from the balconies, neither open shutters nor even plants. If he had stayed longer than these two nights "of vertigo" - as he said in the same article - perhaps he would have written: “not even lights in the uninhabited apartments.”
Many would point out instead that the profuse, sometimes aggressive urban luminescence does not contradict the promotion of "social lights." The lack of a political will able to manage to take the abundance of "projects" out of the documents or the desks and turns them into realities is one of the most fundamental criticisms.
This situation has undergone a reversal in the last biennium, from the change of direction taken by the municipality of the capital, led by the director of culture, Alexandra Schjelderup, who has been generating concrete initiatives of a plural nature, focusing on the audience education, one of the main shortcomings of the country.
The city is on its way to the 500th anniversary of its foundation, and a major celebration is expected, in which culture plays the central role that it plays in other metropolises of the region. To this end, the municipality and the UNDP, in a joint action, launched the Panama 500 Fund, whose outgoing objectives are, according to the official call, "to stimulate and strengthen the cultural and creative sector of the country, and the consequent citizen participation»
Many of us fantasize about the possibility that the Isthmus of Panama will also become - as it was during prehistoric eras for animal species and human civilizations - a nodal point of encounter for artists from the Americas and, why not, the rest of the world. To paraphrase Silvio Rodríguez: I wish…