Ownership, decision-making, and cultural labour in Málaga. From the series initiated in 'Against Optimised Life'.
This text focuses on Málaga, yet it does not proceed from the assumption that Málaga is an anomaly. Over recent decades, many cities have integrated culture into strategies for urban regeneration, territorial competition, tourism attraction, and brand building. Literature has described this using the paradigm of the 'creative city' and, in its critical aspect, the neoliberal city. It is not that every urban cultural policy responds to the same intention, nor that a museum or public investment is neoliberal by definition. It signifies that a recognisable form of using culture as an economic and reputational infrastructure has spread, with recurring tensions between large-scale projects, local production networks, participation, and working conditions.
This pattern has been studied in various contexts. Roberta Comunian has questioned policies concentrated on flagship projects when they neglect networks among a city's cultural agents. Carl Grodach has demonstrated that large facilities do not produce local cultural development on their own and that their effects depend on the context. The analysis of the Barcelona model by María Victoria Sánchez Belando, Joaquim Rius Ulldemolins, and Matías I. Zarlenga documents the contradictions between the entrepreneurial turn in cultural policy, large facilities, and the participation of artistic and local communities.
Málaga may be read within this framework, but it cannot be deduced from it. That a pattern appears in other cities does not demonstrate that it operates the same way here. To verify this, one must examine local documents and observe how stability, decision-making, and labour are distributed.
In the first text of this series, I argued that the capacity of a cultural practice to resist the logic of optimisation does not depend solely on what the work says, but on the circuit in which it is produced and circulates: who owns the infrastructure, who decides what circulates, and who performs the labour. Criticism, as content, is easily incorporated. What is not absorbed in the same way is a different organisation of ownership, decision-making, and labour. Here, I apply these questions to Málaga, based on documents published by its own institutions: agreements, calls for applications, urban planning documents, files, and adjudications. Not to attribute intentions that these documents do not prove, but to verify which relationships receive continuity, what power those who produce culture retain, and who can remain when each call for applications concludes.
I dismiss the question of whether Málaga has a sufficiently strong cultural industry; questioning it seems natural but leads to an error. Measuring the health of culture by the number of companies, turnover, or market volume is equivalent to accepting that the value of a practice must be translated into economic language. Demanding a more competitive local creative economy also does not necessarily change who owns the infrastructures, who decides the programmes, who performs the labour, or who retains the value produced. The question is different: how stability, rights, and autonomy are distributed between established infrastructures and those who produce culture from within the city.
Who owns
To own here does not mean only to be listed as the legal titleholder of a building or a collection, but also to control a brand, to possess a stable infrastructure, and to retain the capacity to decide upon the cultural assets that circulate through it.
The renewed agreement with the Centre Pompidou offers a verifiable starting point. The contract spans from 28 March 2025 to 27 March 2035. The City Council will pay 2,694,900 euros annually between 2025 and 2029, broken down into 1,300,000 for the use of the brand and 1,394,900 for the collections, both amounts excluding taxes. Between 2030 and 2034, the annual payment will be 3,151,915 euros, the result of 1,500,000 for the brand and 1,651,915 for the collections, also excluding taxes.
This figure is the consideration for a contract that includes the brand, collections, and a cultural programme, not a grant for creation. Comparing it with a call for applications would be incorrect if one intended to demonstrate that one amount was deducted from the other. The documents reviewed do not prove such a causal relationship nor allow one to state that the payment to the Pompidou has reduced the resources allocated to local producers. The comparison allows one to observe something else: the forms of duration that cultural policy assigns to different relationships.
In March 2025, the City Council issued a competitive call for private companies within the cultural and creative sector, endowed with 40,000 euros. This formed part of a 62,500 euro package that included a separate 22,500 euro line for non-profit associations; these must not be conflated. The announcement stipulates that the subsidised activities could not be for-profit, that the participation fee had to be less than 25 euros, and that the entire project, or at least 75% of it, had to be executed before the end of the justification period.
What can be verified is the coexistence of a ten-year contractual commitment with the Centre Pompidou and a 40,000 euro call for cultural companies in 2025. These are distinct legal instruments and should not be treated as interchangeable line items. The relevant asymmetry is not merely one of amount: one relationship secures contractual predictability for a decade, whilst the other is structured as a competitive process to execute defined activities within a single financial year and submit them for justification. The call may fund valuable projects, but it does not in itself guarantee the continuity of the organisations that execute them, their teams, or their workspaces. The contrast demonstrates an unequal distribution of institutional duration, not that the museum has 'taken' resources from a specific beneficiary.
There is a counterexample. In 2024, the City Council allocated 175,000 euros, excluding VAT, to acquire twenty works for the future MUCAC. According to the announcement, the lot was composed primarily of pieces by artists from Málaga and Andalusia, sourced from galleries in Málaga, Seville, and Madrid. It would therefore be inaccurate to assert that municipal policy does not purchase artwork or that its acquisitions lack any local presence: the 2024 operation proves otherwise. However, the announcement does not break down the price of each work, the selling gallery for each piece, or the territorial distribution of the 175,000 euros, and thus does not allow for the calculation of how much effectively remained in Málaga, how much reached living artists, or whether the operation is part of a recurring policy. It is a verified counterexample with accredited local presence, the local economic return of which cannot be measured from what has been published.
Málaga is not a cultural desert either. The official report 'Tejido empresarial de la cultura en Andalucía. Año 2024' (Cultural Business Fabric in Andalusia. 2024) counts 8,608 cultural companies in the province of Málaga, out of an Andalusian total of 35,502; this equates to 24.25% of the total, based on a rounded internal calculation. The figure is provincial, not municipal, and employs a broad definition that includes heritage, books and press, visual arts, crafts, performing arts, audiovisual, architecture, advertising, and cultural education. It counts cultural companies according to the report's methodology and does not constitute a general census of institutions, organisations, workers, or cultural practices. It serves to refute the image of a territory devoid of cultural activity. It does not serve to measure the conditions of the visual arts in Málaga city or the economic autonomy of artists, foundations, galleries, or independent spaces.
What the documents allow one to maintain is that the City Council guarantees the continuity of an international cultural relationship through a ten-year contract, while the business line examined financed projects corresponding to 2025, not the permanence of their beneficiaries. The 2024 purchase demonstrates that there is also public intervention in artistic heritage with local presence. What does not exist in the analysed documents is sufficient information to compare, in a consolidated manner, how many municipal resources are converted each year into fees, acquisitions, spaces, rights or continuity for producers based in the city.
Who decides
The municipal programme for the Soho district allows one to observe for what purpose culture was institutionally mobilised. Its document presents as objectives the conversion of a neighbourhood considered degraded into a cultural benchmark, the promotion of economic reactivation based on cultural and creative industries, the involvement of residents, merchants, and the artistic community, and the attraction of a younger resident population. The plan incorporates a commercial orientation, business recruitment, a dossier for investors, and a property portfolio. In its promotional dimension, it adds branding, under the slogan 'In the heart of Málaga beats the SOHO', and the configuration of a tourism product.
It is unnecessary to attribute a hidden intention to the programme. Its own terms allow one to maintain that culture was incorporated into an operation of urban regeneration, economic reactivation, positioning, and residential transformation.
However, the same document compels one to state that the decision regarding the neighbourhood was shared with its agents. Municipal documentation places the origin of the project in citizen proposals and describes, between 2009 and 2010, a working process with the associative movement and various assemblies regarding economic promotion, urban planning, housing and cultural management. There was, therefore, a process presented institutionally as participatory. What the presentation does not allow one to determine is who effectively participated, how disagreements were resolved, which decisions were binding, what weight each actor held, nor whether the artistic community retained decision-making capacity during execution. Participation, consultation and shared power are not the same, and the document attests to the first two in its narrative, but not the third.
Neither is the causality often associated with the MAUS project proven. The localised literature documents an advanced process of gentrification in the Historic Centre of Málaga, but it does not isolate MAUS as a sufficient cause for the displacement of artists or workshops from the Soho. I have not located a longitudinal census of workshops and creators in the Soho that would allow for the measurement of entries, exits, rents, and displacements before and after MAUS; therefore, I shall not assert that the project itself caused the displacement of those who contributed to the neighbourhood's identity.
If culture was expressly used to produce identity, economic activity, and urban appeal, what rights of permanence accompanied that contribution? The programme consulted mentions aid for shops and business establishment, but it does not document in its pages an equivalent system of protected cultural workshops, affordable rents, long-term assignments, or rights of permanence for creators. This does not demonstrate that such measures did not exist in any department or at any time, but rather that they do not appear in the document outlining the Soho strategy, and that, in this investigation, no instruments of comparable scale and duration have been identified. Málaga documents with clarity how culture contributes to the regeneration, commercial activity, branding, and tourism of the neighbourhood, and with far less precision what material capacity cultural producers retained to remain and decide within the transformation they helped to make visible. The difference does not allow one to affirm a deliberate displacement, but it does allow one to ask whether cultural participation produced lasting rights or primarily urban and promotional value managed by others.
Who works
A portion of the visitor services functions for the three centres is organised through an external service contract.
In March 2025, the Local Government Board approved the award of a contract to a service company for visitor management at the Picasso Birthplace Museum, the Centre Pompidou Málaga, and the Russian Museum Collection. The contract amounts to 12,318,527.83 euros, including VAT, with a duration of four years. It includes ticket sales, reception, visitor services, audio guides, room monitoring and information, and event organisation, in addition to a service for audience research, surveys, and training. Revenue and sales summaries are submitted to the Agency, under its supervision and criteria.
In December 2024, the City Council separately approved the procurement file for mediation and education services for the three centres, for a maximum of 2,566,559.63 euros, including VAT, over four years with no possibility of extension. This is the approval of the file through an open procedure, not an award to a specific company. The service includes scheduled visits, family and holiday workshops, art therapy, projects with hospitals and correctional facilities, work with families at risk of exclusion, and assistance for groups with physical, cognitive, or emotional needs.
Visitor management is externally contracted. Mediation and education were configured by the City Council as a separate service contract, although in the documentation examined, I have not located its subsequent award or formalisation. These are central functions for access, interpretation, audience knowledge, and a portion of the social dimension that the institutions attribute to their activity.
These documents do not in themselves demonstrate salaries below the collective agreement, labour illegality, or systematic precariousness. To evaluate specific conditions, the complete tender specifications, potential subrogation annexes, identification of the applicable collective agreement, job categories, working hours, salaries actually paid, temporality, turnover, leave, and verified testimonies would be required.
The documented architecture separates, at least in visitor management, the Agency that contracts and supervises the service, the successful bidder, and the personnel who execute daily functions. Regarding mediation and education, the documents examined show the intention to organise these services through another external contract, but they do not allow for a determination of whether the file was ever awarded or how the service is currently being provided.
This necessitates asking how authority, daily organisation, produced knowledge, and public recognition are distributed between the institution, the company, and the professional teams. The question is not whether all outsourcing is illegitimate, but rather what capacity to participate in decisions is retained by those who produce the relationship with the public on a daily basis, what knowledge remains within the organisation when the contractor changes, and why functions described as fundamental to education and inclusion are projected through external contracting. Furthermore, the relationship between this model and the institution's permanent staff remains an open question.
Who is permitted to remain
The three paths converge in the distribution of duration. The Centre Pompidou contract ensures a relationship until 2035. The business call funds projects during 2025 and requires them to be executed and justified. The Soho programme articulates culture with a long-range urban transformation, but does not allow one to verify equivalent rights of permanence for its producers. Visitor attention depends on a multi-year contract whose expiry reopens the relationship between institution, company and staff. Mediation and education were proposed through another four-year file, although the examined documentation does not allow one to confirm their subsequent award nor establish how they are currently provided.
Not all these situations are legally comparable. Contracts, grants, urban planning, and outsourcing produce distinct classes of stability, responsibility, and power. Certain organisations must present themselves as projects, compete for limited credit, execute delimited activities, and periodically justify the use of resources, while other relationships benefit from multi-year commitments and an already stabilised infrastructure. This difference conditions who can plan, experiment, retain teams, and maintain processes whose results do not fit within a single budgetary year.
The requirement for scrutiny also extends to those who formulate criticism. I preside over the Kripties Foundation, whose objectives include promoting the use of art in areas such as mental health, neurodivergence, and social reintegration. What I set out here is a personal reflection, not an institutional statement from its board of trustees. The current activity of the foundation does not allow it to be presented as an example or to draw conclusions from its experience regarding the general state of the sector. As it develops these objectives, it must be subject to the same questions posed in this text: who decides the programmes, how are resources and recognition distributed, what rights are retained by the participants, and what information is made public. Criticism does not, in itself, grant a position of superiority. It only acquires coherence when it accepts for its own practice the obligations it demands of others.
The problem, therefore, is not that Málaga devotes too much effort to tourism, that it must replace some emblems with newer ones, or that it lacks innovation. Nor is it that cultural activity does not exist. The problem that the documents allow us to raise is which cultural relationships are granted duration, which producers retain decision-making capacity, and who can remain beyond each call for proposals or contract.
The documents do not describe a single plan to subordinate Málaga's culture. They describe a distribution. A brand and collections secured for a decade by contract. A call for companies that in 2025 funded non-profit projects subject to execution and justification. A public purchase that demonstrates local presence, but whose return cannot be measured. An urban programme that converts culture into an instrument of regeneration, economic activity and positioning, alongside a participatory process whose effective distribution of power is not documented. A portion of the functions of public attention organised through an external contract under the supervision of the institution, alongside another set of mediation and education functions that the City Council planned to contract, without the examined documentation allowing one to confirm their subsequent award. None of these elements proves an extractive intention in isolation; together they allow one to observe a circuit in which ownership, decision-making, labour and time do not necessarily reside with the same actors.
That distribution matters more than the critical content of an exhibition. It determines which practices can mature, which must periodically reappear as a project, and who retains the capacity to decide when resources, buildings, and recognition have already been allocated.
If this question is not also turned back upon those of us who formulate it, criticism will once again become mere content. And content can always be exhibited without altering the circuit that made it possible.
On the open conversation
This text continues the series initiated in 'Against the Optimised Life' and applies its criteria (ownership, decision-making and labour) to the cultural policy of Málaga, based on documents published by its own institutions. It does not attribute intentions that the documents do not substantiate, nor does it assert that one contract has diverted resources from another; it distinguishes at all times between verified data and inference, counter-example, documentary gaps and matters not established. It acknowledges that the same criteria must be applied to any future activity of the foundation I chair, because a critique of the circuit that exempts the author in advance would once again become mere content. If anyone wishes to intervene from the perspective of cultural management, the economics of culture or the experience of working within these institutions, this notebook remains open.
Sources
Creative and critical city: Robert G. Hollands, Beyond the Neoliberal Creative City (Bristol University Press, 2023); Chema Segovia and Julie Hervé, 'The creative city approach', City, Territory and Architecture 9, 29 (2022). Roberta Comunian, 'Rethinking the Creative City', Urban Studies 48(6), 2011 (DOI 10.1177/0042098010370626); Carl Grodach, 'Beyond Bilbao', Journal of Planning Education and Research 29(3), 2010 (DOI 10.1177/0739456X09354452); M.ª V. Sánchez Belando, J. Rius Ulldemolins and M. I. Zarlenga, '¿Ciudad creativa y ciudad sostenible?', Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais 99, 2012 (DOI 10.4000/rccs.5101).
Municipal and official documents (all figures cross-referenced against the primary source): Málaga City Council, Local Government Board, communiqué of 12 July 2024 (renewal of the agreement with the Centre Pompidou, 2025-2035; 2,694,900 euros/year 2025-2029 and 3,151,915 euros/year 2030-2034, amounts excluding taxes in their components); communiqué of 7 March 2025 (grants to the cultural sector: 40,000 euros to private companies and 22,500 euros to associations, 62,500 euros in total); Department of Culture, communiqué of 8 December 2024 (175,000 euros excluding VAT for twenty works for the MUCAC, without breakdown by work or gallery); communiqué of 14 March 2025 (award to EULEN, S.A. for visitor management, 12,318,527.83 euros VAT included, four years); communiqué of 13 December 2024 (approval of the procurement file for mediation and education, maximum 2,566,559.63 euros VAT included, four years without extension); institutional presentation 'SOHO. El Barrio de las Artes' and dossier 'SOHO, un proyecto de ciudad'.
Sectoral data: Regional Government of Andalusia, Ministry of Culture and Sport, Tejido empresarial de la cultura en Andalucía. Year 2024 (data as of 1 January; 8,608 cultural companies in the province of Málaga out of 35,502 in Andalusia; the cited percentage is a personal calculation).
Gentrification: Hugo Castro-Noblejas, Juan F. Sortino-Barrionuevo and Sergio Reyes-Corredera, 'Proceso de gentrificación de un espacio degradado convertido en escaparate cultural. El caso del Centro Histórico de Málaga', Revista de Estudios Andaluces 43, 2022 (DOI 10.12795/rea.2022.i43.01), which documents advanced gentrification in the Historic Centre without isolating MAUS as the cause.
Methodological note
The text employs five categories without converting them into permanent sections: verified data (supported by official documentation or identifiable literature), inference (reasoned reading not literal in the source), counter-example (evidence that necessitates limiting a thesis), documentary gap (necessary information not located) and data not established (plausible assertion without sufficient proof herein). All central figures have been cross-referenced against official primary sources. The TECA figure is provincial and only delimits the existence of a cultural fabric; it is not analysed as cultural policy, an analysis that would require its own corpus of calls, scales, concessions and territorial distribution.