Susana reinoso
07/27/2021 18:27
Clarín.com
Culture
Updated 07/27/2021 19:08
He will take the stage led by Mario Benedetti, a friend who "lived with modesty his great intelligence."
At the age of 79, Mario Pacho O'Donnell -ex Secretary of Culture of the City of Buenos Aires and the Nation, appointed by Raúl Alfonsín and Carlos Menem respectively- will put the body of the piece of which he is the author:
A la left of the oak
.
It is a tribute to
Mario Benedetti
, his life, his ideas, his humor and, above all, his unforgettable poetry.
O'Donnell will share the tables with Alejandra Darín, Marcelo Balsells and Sergio Vainikoff, directed by Daniel Marcove.
It will be at the Cultural Center of Cooperation (CCC), from August 6 and with only eight functions.
To the left of an oak
is the title of
a beautiful poem by Benedetti
about love and heartbreak that is shed in the Botanical Garden.
Pacho O'Donnell.
The author, together with Alejandra Darín in the work "A la Izquierda del Roble".
O'Donnell
has learned throughout his career as a Buenos Aires legislator and national senator the exercise of the measured declaration, especially when the interview is carried out by zoom and recorded.
So when it comes to the most political statements, he chooses moderation and when asked, silence.
-How did you decide to get on stage?
-I have had the unjustifiable audacity to get on stage, but I am surrounded by a great team.
With this work we remember
a friend of mine
, a Uruguayan, a great poet and person, very loved by Argentines, who had a lot to do with us because he
lived part of his exile in Buenos Aires
.
My friend
Tito Cossa
says that
we authors are cowardly actors
(laughs). All of
Benedetti's
poetry
is naturally very musical. Joan Manuel Serrat,
Daniel Viglietti
, Alberto Favero,
Pablo Milanés
, Numa Moraes, all have made beautiful songs about the poetry of
Mario Benedetti
.
But also
few poets have expressed something as difficult as love
.
It would not surprise me, Susana, if someone
tried to win her over with some lines by Benedetti
.
They are resources that we have all used at some time, even without saying the name of the author.
Writing and getting on stage responded to the challenge of
surviving in the best possible way
.
Because that is the feeling that confinement causes, like that of exile, and I decided
not to let
myself be
castrated
and not to lose my passion for life.
Politics Can Make Poverty Worse, But It Can't Solve It
Pacho O'Donnell
-What do you remember about Benedetti?
-He was a
very shy
man
.
He lived with modesty
his great intelligence
.
He was careful to show off, but when he was with friends or
with some wine on top he
was more expressive and had a sense of humor.
He was very committed to the Latin American reality of his time, he fought for freedom and democracy and was one of the founders of the Broad Front in Uruguay.
That is why he suffered persecution and exile.
-What does Benedetti evoke in you, a lost dream or a possible revolution?
-It connects me with a field that is not traveled by me:
poetry
.
I never wrote poetry and in a situation like the pandemic, where we have experienced extreme situations of anguish, loss, uncertainty, fear,
nothing better than poetry to explain everything
.
Benedetti
talks about very necessary topics such as love, justice, freedom ...
-How have you gone through this accumulation of uncertainties that the pandemic brought us?
-Psychoanalytically [the interviewee is a psychoanalyst doctor] there is a very serious issue and I think this will be one of the most difficult traumas to elaborate.
Above all, when it is not a question of an uncertainty but of several meetings.
We ask ourselves:
what country will be left after this?
Will my clients return?
Can we keep our job?
Will any of my loved ones get sick?
Can we open our trade?
To all this add the inevitable depression due to the losses we have suffered.
We have all lost something in this pandemic.
We have lost security, work, clients, savings, contracts.
Some,
even unbearable extremes
, like the humblest who live a dramatic situation.
I have had
moments of anguish,
stages of insomnia.
It has been a collective trauma.
This crisis will leave a lot of damage: people used to
consuming alcohol
or medicines, eating too much, falling into depression, suffering from anxiety neurosis.
State policies will have to be developed like those of the post-war era
.
A psychological vision has been lacking to take into account the consequences of this pandemic.
This crisis will leave a lot of damage: people used to consuming alcohol or drugs, eating too much, falling into depression, suffering from anxiety neurosis
Pacho O'Donnell
-You, who have been in exile, don't you think that this crisis is accentuated in Argentina by the lack of hope in the people?
-It is very possible, because there is something that afflicts us and it is
a deep economic crisis
.
We were just talking about uncertainty: what future awaits us?
Can we go out?
Some optimists thought
that the pandemic would improve the world
, but now we see that it has fueled the differences between the richest and the poorest.
We have seen
the extreme selfishness of powerful countries
.
And this reflection occurs to me: we cannot speak of a post-pandemic, because
I am not sure that the pandemic is going to happen at some point
.
I think we will have to get used to living in a pandemic world.
That is already happening in some countries.
We will have to adapt to becoming infected, this virus is not the smallpox virus, which has been eradicated.
I am
very little optimistic
.
But I am also a fighter and I thought about not letting myself be defeated.
Although I tried to keep my cultural life active, the whole situation took away
my creativity
.
I have been able to correct things, but my energy has not been the same as in other times.
-What worries you most about the outside?
-I am not different from the others.
I have lost three contracts with the exterior as well as important savings
, because I have not generated income as I generated before.
I feel like the rest who have had to work out losses.
What I regret the most is that they have accentuated the differences.
I would like to recall that the current fortune of Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, is
190 billion dollars
.
If we take into account that, according to the most optimistic, the Central Bank of Argentina has 40 billion dollars of reserves,
Mr. Bezos has five times more
.
With the growth of everything virtual, Bezos came
to earn 13 billion dollars in one day
.
This has a correlation: as the accumulation of wealth of some powerful increases, poverty also grows.
That has to be solved, but
I don't think politics can do it
.
As it currently stands, the policy is very weak.
Our policy is not at the level it should be
Pacho O'Donnell
-Well, there is no other way, don't you think?
- It is that the policy can worsen the subject of the
poverty
, but it cannot solve it.
It is very serious, because it is not clear what the solution is.
Politics can alleviate but not solve.
And this is also a serious problem in Argentine politics.
Some form of solution has to be tried.
That does not mean that, for this reason,
our policy
does not have the level it should have.
-How do you observe the world of culture?
-There have been efforts from the Ministry of Culture at the national level and also from provincial organizations, but the people of culture and art have suffered a lot.
Maybe it is inevitable.
Now we are going to work in the CCC with
a capacity of 40 people
.
There is no commercial project possible there, but rather a vocation and to feel that one is trying to live a full life.
The state and culture
O'Donnell
then covers his career as Secretary of Culture of the Nation, during the government of Carlos Menem, highlighting that his priority was to propose laws.
Thus, the sanction of the National Theater Institute (INT) and the National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts (Incaa) was obtained, with independent budgets.
And both the National Library and the National Cervantes Theater were decentralized.
And he concludes that the Ministry of Culture must also have genuine resources: “We must aim for Culture to
have its own resources,
which are substantive and not subsumed to other areas.
Otherwise, culture is at the mercy of contingencies ”.
History.
Pacho, at the presentation of his book on Artigas, in 2012. Photo Marcelo Genlote
-What law would you propose if today you were Minister of Culture of the Nation?
-First I would not accept the position, but if I follow the game today I was watching the opening of the Olympic Games in Tokyo and I saw something dazzling from the technological point of view.
Culture has lagged far behind in our country, because
it is not just a book or a concert
.
I would work a lot on the relationship between culture and technological progress, without neglecting the traditional.
In that we must put the emphasis.
-Do you feel that our country is far behind?
-Yes, we are in the back.
This should not depress us but stimulate us because we have the scientific capacity to carry it out.
The pandemic has shown us what we have and also what we don't have.
We must aim for Culture to have its own resources, not subsumed to other areas.
Otherwise culture is at the mercy of contingencies
Pacho O'Donnell
-Do you notice that Argentina is going through a kind of degradation of its civic and political culture?
-I can agree with you, especially in the mass media.
But I have been able to see
very interesting but marginal works
.
There are remarkable movies filmed with a cell phone.
I think there are searches that today do not go through where they always did and
what is marginal will become "official"
.
That is where the future will come.
-I was referring to political culture. The examples spill over the citizens and the panorama is a crack, confinement, pandemic, hatred, distancing from our affections. Can culture build bridges to reduce all this?
-As passionate about History, I tell you that
the crack is a constant
.
Both in Argentine and universal history.
The rift is a clash of conflicting interests, between a sector that dominates and a sector that pays the costs.
If we stick to
Marx
we would call it
class struggle
.
Then there are
more elegant and clumsier cracks
.
I find it very clumsy
that one part of the rift seems to be wrong with everything the other part does
, and vice versa.
That greatly impoverishes the political discourse.
Added to that politics can solve less and less real things and there is not a good quality of our policy.
It is very disappointing and threatening.
People are angry
and they don't have much patience.
The old crack
Asked about the origin of the deep division that exists today among Argentines,
O'Donnell
goes back to the stage of the National Organization and puts the accent on
Facundo or civilization and barbarism in the Argentine pampas
, the book by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento.
Although it only uses the reference
"civilization or barbarism"
.
-According to that project, Buenos Aires should be a Europe on this side of the ocean and barbarism was the gaucho, the Creole, the native peoples.
It is not bad to have wanted to incorporate the best of Europe.
The bad thing was denying our own, something that we have at the base of our country.
We lack a patriotic sense.
Psychologically and culturally, we have incorporated that what is foreign is better than what is ours.
This is not a banality, but it translates
as a lack of patriotism
.
It is not usually emphasized that our political leadership lacks love for the country and love for its compatriots.
That is why these indebted loans have been signed that harm our country, with the idea that God is dead and there is no hell.
Note that
the national dates pass without emotion
, nobody knows who Güemes or San Martín was.
-I remind you that in a presidential speech Macacha Güemes was mentioned as Martín Miguel's wife, when she was his sister. Knowing the history of the country that is governed is essential, don't you think?
-.....
-This degradation of culture does not come from citizens but from leadership.
-The leadership puts this in evidence, it is a problem.
We have had very bad leaders
, although also very good.
-Let's talk about your future.
-In September,
Un papel en el viento
, a work that
has to do with the confinement
with the excellent Juan Manuel Correa
, will be released, also directed by Daniel Marcove
.
And I am happy to tell you that Ricky Pashkus is organizing the musical adaptation of my book on Juana Azurduy.
File
When
: From August 6 at the Cultural Center of Cooperation (Av. Corrientes 1543).
Functions
: Fridays at 19.
Tickets
: $ 100.
Where to buy: http://www.centrocultural.coop or https://www.alternativateatral.com/obra59400-a-la-izquierda-del-roble.
