The value of an independent cultural stronghold

A girl with a skull tattooed on her leg (who vomits rose petals) is smoking a cigarette leaning on a car, in a patio of crushed stones. A boy appears, with a mohawk, a jean jacket and studs, with band appliqués on his back, he carries a giant glass of beer, he also leans on the hood of a car. She is a photographer and came to photograph the show, he is a guitarist and is about to debut with his band.

Where do these people live during the day? Where are they hiding?

It is 2009 and they are in “the patio” of the Teatro del Viento, in Neuquén capital, a stronghold that no longer exists, that has now become -like apparently all the historical strongholds for rock (like Cemento)- in a parking lot.

But tonight, December 29, are the Villancicos Vrutales, a series organized by the poet and journalist Alfredo Jaramillo, where a band plays and then some poets read, then another band and so on in an ad eternum of darkness.

Everything is dyed black and is deeply rock.

That night they read, among others, Macky Corbalán, Héctor Kalamicoy,

Verónica Padín, Gustavo Lupano and the organizer, and some of the bands of this Patagonian night are Volva, Atrás hay Truenos and Ruta del Desierto.

That night was the first time I went and discovered that in my city, where I was born and raised, there were people like me. People who found in the distortion of a guitar and the roar of a voice an explanation like the one I needed.

I didn’t know, but I sought to understand what it was that I felt, something aesthetic but also foundational, a density that only we Patagonians perceive as our own and is so difficult to explain to outsiders.

Yes, we have these landscapes and there is also something else that leaves a trace, it is what the persistent wind does to the psyche, the marks of the desert on the skin, and it is, above all, the danger to which those of us who live submit ourselves. isolated, those forgotten by the world.

That night I made friends for life, like the photographer and the guitarist, and a place to return to whenever there was darkness.

Inside, The Theater of the Wind was big, dusty, always half-finished, with walls – I think – Irish green or brick orange, there were heavy curtains on a low stage that was all along one of its sides, perpendicular was the long bar with a simple menu: fernet, coke, beer , empanadas, pizza.

The plastic chairs and tables were stacked to the side when the night got warm or prepared as café concert if it was just starting out.

Starting out, they opened the space like an accordion for perhaps 250 people or closed it for 50.

What makes an independent stronghold, supported by lungs, a little murky and very luminous in its will, a place that marks the life of a town, of a city?

In Neuquén the summer nights are longer than in Buenos Aires. Not in fact, but in practice. In January the sun sets around 9:30 p.m. and at 5:45 a.m. the sky is already clearing. And at that time, the night was still inside the Wind.

I asked some friends, do you remember why it was so special to us?

The anecdotes fall on my phone like photos: “The dirt that was in there! It destroyed me because of the allergy”; “I remember that every time I came in, El Torni told me that he had fixed the backpack in the bathroom and it was never fixed!”; “Once Roberto Pettinato dropped by around 3 in the morning to play with Chino Sanador, a Sumo tribute band, he didn’t know where he had performed, he found out about the show and went. I don’t know if it was his sax or if they lent it to him, but he played some songs”;

“I remember the Bulldog and Botafogo shows, epic”; “It used to be called La Curtiembre, it was home to the first dates of Los Truenos, that’s where the people from El Mató played the weekend that Carlos Fuentealba was killed”; “It was one of the few places where you could listen to a band and dance.”

The strangest thing is that he wasn’t always a rocker.

El Torni or El Tornillo, was Martín Garay, the director of the Teatro del Viento, which was later renamed Teatro El Viento, due to a conflict with one of a similar name in Viedma. He was interested in stage performances: clowning, puppets, dance, storytelling and various etcetera. If you weren’t careful, instead of going to a Venado Records show you ended up participating in a variety show.

“The magical thing about that place and that time is that everything was ready, the sound, the vibe, everything. People left the river at dusk, went home to eat something and change, and at 1 they were at El Viento, that’s where the shows started at 3, it was daylight and we kept playing. I remember a date where Dragonauta finished at 6:30 and El Topo was joking with ‘now let’s go to the river!’ when I was playing the last song,” Jorge Conde, one of the founders of the label, tells me.

Return walking through the empty streets on the first morning, greet the little stall on the corner, going to bed with the sun on your face and your mouth caked from so much beer.

There I also heard Eruca Sativa for the first time in 2011, in a show filled with people, kids who came down from the west and the walls to celebrate with us the seven years of our self-managed medium, Comahue Rock.

It was also there where I saw underground bands like Buffalo and Humo del Cairo. But above all, I went many times to listen to local bands from my generation and the next: Bicho Bolita, Qi, Amorfizz, San Lorenzo City, El viento en loquece a la gente, Julia Inés, Mitosis, Yamarada Mou, Puel Kona, among many others.

You could go to Al Viento any day, it didn’t matter what there was, there were always friends outside if what was inside wasn’t what was tough and vice versa.

In the theater there was always space to give rise to one’s own projects, from that very small city, in 2010 with barely 300 thousand inhabitants.s, before Vaca Muerta was a concept that was repeated in the newspapers and the gold mine was discovered for a few or the 20-story towers interrupted the landscape of the fence.

That building at Juan B. Justo 648, which closed its doors perhaps in 2017 (it was so slow and gradual that no one knows precisely when it happened) today has cars parked inside.

There we were able to be and experience the questions, the desires, the excesses, the distortions that we needed. We were able to learn who we were, what we carried forever.

That is the value of an independent cultural stronghold in a community. You have to value them.

Today, in Neuquén, Morrigan does it. May we never lack them.