Invisible Spaces of Resistance: Performing the Ordinary at Bilbao’s Aste Nagusia

Kettner, Le-Lina

Abstract

To promote economic attractiveness in experience-oriented societies, urban regeneration strategies often encourage local distinctiveness through community and culture. When these are rooted in political struggles, the upgrading of cultural festivals by today’s eventful cities often appears ambivalent, then diagnoses of de-politicisation are close at hand. As a reclaimed space that stimulates local cultural practice alongside their popular participation, the Big Week of Bilbao (Bilboko Aste Nagusia) is a participatory cultural festival that attracts millions of visitors, contributing to its own exploitation. In view of its highly political origin, this chapter discusses what kind of effects unfolds neoliberal embracement for political subjectification. Guided by praxiography, my ethnographic approach follows ordinary practices in an extraordinary setting. The everyday production of pleasure is apparently the main purpose of the festival experience. Political subjects performing as festival organisers normalises its resistant character, but also functions to produce community, to be physically present in space, and to recover from political activism. Especially, the ordinary appearance of the implementation practice contributes significantly to the political subjectification of the organising collectives, which I discuss with the concept of subversion. The invisibility of critique during the Aste Nagusia seems to be an end in itself that sustains resistive practice.