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Joan Manuel Serrat and Kevin Spacey.

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Woody Allen.

“The important thing is life,” Oscar Niemeyer remarked. “Solidarity, people … life, more than architecture, that’s the important thing.” And this is what the great Brazilian architect has done to the right bank of the Aviles inlet: endow it with the vital dynamism and energy already flowing over the sinuous curves of a dome or the curly meanders of a runway.

“We have built some equipment out of soul, based on the people’s friendship and generosity,” Mayor of the city Pilar Varela said. A common idea around a piece of work, the Oscar Niemeyer International Cultural Center, which announces, from Asturias, an artistic, cultural and above all supportive feast, which makes distances shorter and saves borders. A place for all. A possible dream.

The “Niemeyer Era” in Asturias

To celebrate it, more than 100,000 people came to the three-day party with which the center marked the official beginning of the Niemeyer era. It managed to bring together, in a city with less than 90,000 inhabitants and a community that has barely more than one million people, such outstanding personalities as Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Yo Yo Ma, Sam Mendes, Hachim El Gerrouj, Paco de Lucía, Brad Pitt… And many more are to come. Because although the Iberian American general secretary Enrique Iglesias believes that “a new bridge between Spain and the Iberian American culture,” has just been built, that bridge will unite Asturias with the rest of the world.

Its creator was inspired by the desire to conceive a space to enable concebir “a beautiful dialogue between different manners of artistic communication and the interaction among diverse cultures,” as said by his grandson Carlos Oscar Niemeyer, and so it will be for the next few months when more than 30 worldwide renowned figures will come to Aviles: Wole Soyinka, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jessica Lange, Julian Schnabel, Pelé, Ferrán Adrià…

From the movies to the theater, literature and music This ambitious and exclusive program featured director, actor and musician Woody Allen, who inaugurated the Film Center and gave a concert with his New Orleans Jazz Band; and film director Tom Fernandez from Asturias, who attended the preview of his latest movie “What are bears good for?” (¿Para qué sirve un oso?) Within the upcoming months the artist Hugo Fontela, also from Asturia, will also come around for a picture exhibition about Oscar Niemeyer; actress Jessica Lange will unveil her first photographic display in the world; Carlos Saura will bring an exhibition about light and another film director, Julian Schnabel, will come to Aviles for a showcase of his snapshots.

Dramatic art will be also a highlight with the world premiere of Richard the Third (Ricardo III) by Sam Mendes starring Kevin Spacey the current director of Old Vic Theater, London. There will also be a space for Literature with two Nobel Prize laureates, Mario Vargas Llosa and Wole Soyinka attending.

Regarding music, concerts by Chano Dominguez, Jason Moran, Paquito d’Rivera, Gilberto Gil, Vetusta Morla, Concha Buika, Luis Eduardo Aute, Willie Neli and Dayna Kurtz have been scheduled. Didactical activities for the children including a concert by Jamie Bernstein, and the staging of Bereshit by Pep Bou and Jorge Wagensberg are also part of the program.

This door open to every artistic and cultural expressions welcomes the speech as well with several series of lectures. Within the framework of the so-called Prisma, a meeting place for international personalities, athlete Sebastian Coe and architect Norman Foster will be among those taking the floor.

Within a series dedicated to the United Nations, with which Niemeyer penned a collaboration agreement for the development of joint activities, singer and actor Harry Belafonte, UN Ambassador of Goodwill, will come to Aviles for the Global Creativity Summit.

Asturias gastronomy, also included In addition, in a land like Asturias where gastronomy is carefully taken care over, the cultural center included it in the program considering it as importance as the rest of the arts. From this desire three spaces will emerge: gastro-bar, cocktail bar and cuisine, through which visitors will be able to follow the whole process from getting the food to its preparation. By the stoves will be world-famous cooks, among them Ferran Adriá, Juan Mari Arzak and Jose Andres.

In a demonstration of the gastronomic passion and interest of this land, a candy named niemeyita has been born inspired in the curves of Niemeyer’s designs with its round shape imitating the dome, and the filling resembling the water and the Innovation Island. Different varieties of chocolate combined with raspberry, lime, violet, coffee and tangerine make it up to the exquisiteness and creativity emanated by the center on which such delicacy was inspired. Like the revolution the centenary Brazilian architect speaks out for in his belief that such is the only road to follow “when life falls apart and hope runs away from men’s hearts,” Asturias and Aviles enjoy a cultural and aesthetic revolution that has dragged them into the eye of a hurricane that, instead of changing the landscape on its way through, it steers the place towards the future.

The setting in which the Niemeyer Center is built has gone through a deep change. The same “somber, filthy and residual” site where the inlet used to crouch, as singer songwriter Joan Manuel Serrat said, has undergone “a visual mutation” where white domes are now rising up, with yellow waves and red waves coming out from the combustion of ideas and talent making the cities a hive of activity again.

Culture as a driving force for economic and human development. Culture as “a pressing need in our lives, as a nation and as people,” Kevin Spacey remarked at the inauguration of the center; as a way of salvation, because “art and creativity allow us to get away from political persecution, intolerance, mockery, blindness and stupidity.”

The Niemeyer Cultural Center, as a bridge between Spain and the rest of the world, starts to walk down a road that is just emerging and which many have committed to collaborate with, among them English scientist Stephen Hawking and American Vinton Cerf, considered one of the forefathers of Internet.

The center’s activity endows it with credibility and universal recognition. It is a modern, seducing space of international reference, a place for artistic pilgrimages endorsed by a spectacular list of world personalities in the fields of culture, society and economy. That’s why, in addition to its authentic desire to become the landmark winning Aviles and Asturias a position in the world’s cultural map, the Niemeyer Center will be an international art referent.

The Oscar Niemeyer International Cultural Center announces, from Asturias, an artistic, cultural, and above all, supportive feast, making distances shorter and saving borders. A place for all. A possible dream.