Workshop in the Calchaqui Valley:

reconstruction of an cultural experience in the “High Valleys”

Abstract

The last civic-military dictatorship meant the closure and the silencing of many cultural activities that were taking place in the province of Tucumán (Argentina).  However, in a situation of  permanent censorship, there were spaces that passed through that period and continued in democracy. Such is the case of the Cultural Meetings of the Calchaquí Valley, organized by the Center for Regional Studies (CER) and the Cultural Center "El Cardón" between 1981 and 1999. This Center was founded by a group  of intellectuals from the region, standing out the philosopher and theologian Gaspar Risco Fernàndez. We will carry out a reconstruction  of this experience, taking into account the historical context, the presence of changes and continuities  in its development and its integration into CER's activities. Our hypothesis is that this institution  became the nucleus of a large number of activities that sought to know and understand the region. Among those activities, the Meetings  became a fertile space of projection of new proposals, with similar objectives, but incorporating  the change of the enunciative locus as a plus. All this is also a sample of the ideas that Risco Fernández himself had been developing from other cultural spaces.