Interview with Marta Reus, cultural manager: “If culture doesn’t mobilize, it’s not culture”
Marta Reus sees culture as a living, collective, and committed practice. Her career has moved between cultural management, activism, and cooperativism—three paths that, according to her, converge on the same horizon: putting life at the center and turning culture into a space for real social transformation. She is currently researching class and contemporary culture. She also works at Talaia Agency, a transformative communication and responsible journalism agency.
We spoke with her about hegemonies, precarity, institutions—but above all, about resistance. Her reflections open the door to other ways of understanding culture and exploring paths toward social transformation, both within and beyond institutions.
- Culture that demobilizes
- There is life on the margins
- Rethinking institutions
- A culture to live, not to consume
Culture that demobilizes
For Reus, mainstream culture has been absorbed by neoliberalism since the mid-20th century, when it began to be turned into a product. “It’s a culture transmitted through mass media and designed as a consumer good, oriented toward capital accumulation,” she argues. In this context, the arts and cultural practices are trapped in a logic that marginalizes the symbolic, political, and community value of culture.
Following thinkers like Mark Fisher or Remedios Zafra, she warns of a present in which overstimulation, precarity, and a lack of hope paralyze any emancipatory horizon. “We’ve been convinced that culture is entertainment. But culture that doesn’t mobilize toward social justice, that doesn’t defend collective rights, isn’t culture—it’s leisure.”
There is life on the margins
Despite this adverse landscape, Marta reclaims the margins as spaces of resistance. Especially those where culture is lived through collective action and commitment. Places that challenge the established order and escape (as much as possible) the logic of commodification.
“Cooperativism and the social and solidarity economy are examples of this other model,” she explains. “Small but powerful spaces, where resources and knowledge are shared, and where community organization allows for bottom-up responses. They’re not perfect, but they are sites of real struggle.”
These cultural practices not only put people first, but also connect with territories, with memory, and with identities excluded from official narratives.
Rethinking institutions
What about institutional spaces? Reus is critical of their rigidity and bureaucratization. As Valentín Roma once said, “Sometimes we think we’re pushing from the inside, but it’s the system using us to anesthetize the conflict.”
Still, she defends the need to rethink them: “There are people who aren’t willing to give up. We need strong, open, free cultural institutions that represent the people, not just the elites. Spaces with fair working conditions, where disciplines intersect and experimentation is possible.”
For Marta Reus, the key lies in a collective re-identification—of culture and of class. And that can only happen if the debate moves to the streets, to the bodies, to the real conflicts of real people.
A culture to live, not to consume
When we ask how she envisions cultural spaces, she’s clear: “Open, community-based, inclusive. Spaces where tradition meets the present, where culture is a tool for social transformation—not neutralization.”
Our interviewee speaks from experience and from the conviction that there is another way to do culture. A culture that isn’t bought, but built. A culture that isn’t delegated, but organized collectively.