Nuria Iceta Llorens, director of Adelanto, Salvador Sunyer i Bover, former director of the Temporada Alta Festival and Alexandra Lebret, producer, director of Together Fund and former director of the European Producers Club (EPC), all moderated by Lisis Andrés Palacios, head of communication at the Auditorium. A temple of the visual arts, a book person, a theatre person, a film person, and a music person: more European than a Beethoven symphony. Even in language there was an ode to the Old Continent: given the choice between English and French, Lebret opted for the language of De Gaulle, and it was one of those decisions that makes you realise how absurd it is to have accepted English for everything.

The discussion began with the most European question imaginable, that of how to reconcile unity and diversity, which would have made the romantic Friedrich Schiller, author of the lyrics of the Ninth in which, as we know, it ends with ‘all men are brothers again’, do somersaults. Sunyer, who not by chance comes from the theatre, pointed out that ‘we are living at a time when everything passes through the self’ and that, in the face of this focus on identity, which he finds terrible, he proposed a shift towards belonging to a territory: ‘It is not who I am that marks me, but the place where I move’. Iceta claimed a distinction made by Raül Garrigasait (not by chance, an author published by El Adelanto) between inheritance and tradition: inheritance is what is given to you in an inertial way, ‘which can become a problem’, while tradition is ‘how you incorporate this inheritance into your life, how you enculturate the legacy’. Lebret said that ‘there is always a tension between unity and difference’ and that the audiovisual had been one of the most successful means of creating an idea of Europe where this tension was happily resolved. In cinemas where there is European cinema, we hear languages and see landscapes far richer and more diverse than anything the American flattening machine can offer.

Speaking of America, Donald Trump came out little, which is to be welcomed in these weeks when he steals the limelight at all events. Lebret helped by reminding us that the National Front has been a thing in France for decades. And, precisely thanks to this differential of experience with the extreme right, the European audiovisual veteran spoke of a study that would become the protagonist of the conversation and one of the big hits of the campaign: it turns out that the places in France where there are more cinemas, the National Front gets worse results than where there are fewer. This hopeful correlation would become an empirical support for the central idea of the three speakers: that culture has a fundamental role to play in combating Europe's political challenges, such as war and immigration, and that, therefore, ‘culture should have an essential place in the Sustainable Development Goals’ (Iceta), or that, just as we have Primary Care Centres (JEFE), we should have Cultural Care Centres (CAC) that ‘beyond programming, act as centres of activity so that everyone has access to culture’ (Sunyer).

The conversation ended with a consensus that could be defined as ‘It's school, stupid’. Just as Trump's trade war has made us realise that we were dependent on the United States in strategic industries and that the European economy was too export-oriented, European culture can also be seen as a strategic sector that has a problem of internal demand, which Sunyer summed up by explaining that only 6% of citizens go to the theatre once a year.

Faced with this, the three put a very strong emphasis on education and universal access, calling for the creation of programmes that include culture in the school curriculum to create a new generation of educated and receptive audiences that naturally understand that reading a book or going to the theatre is not the same as spending two hours on TikTok.

Talking about family life and the changes in the levels of cultural consumption among the new generations that we see as a result of social networks, the conclusion emerged that cultural taste does not appear as a mushroom, but depends on the educational conditions that politics and the economy establish during childhood. In other words: that no decline is inevitable and that different designs lead to different results. ‘It's not easy, but it shouldn't be that hard either,’ Ledret remarked, and the audience agreed.