Isona Passola: “Language is the best thing we can offer the world”
02.10.2025
The Ateneu Barcelonès opens the academic year with a lecture by its president, Isona Passola, on bringing language and culture closer to newcomers through ateneisme
Yesterday, the president of the Ateneu Barcelonès inaugurated the academic year with the lecture “Language, Culture, and Ateneisme in Catalonia of Eight Million”. The speech encouraged reflection on Catalonia’s current situation regarding the arrival of people from all over the world and how to integrate them through language and ateneisme. “The foreign population in Catalonia today is around 1,500,000 people. Of this population, more than 560,000 live in the capital of Catalonia, representing a third of the total population. And half of them live in our neighborhood,” explained Passola, who emphasized the importance of ateneus as integrative agents, especially the Ateneu Barcelonès, due to its location.
The speech, introduced by actress Kathy Sey and delivered before a packed Oriol Bohigas Auditorium, highlighted language and culture as the vehicle for integrating all newcomers. “What we want is not multiculturalism, but interculturalism.” To support her argument, she drew on historical examples of behaviors now associated with Catalan culture but originally from elsewhere. "Culture is not a monolithic concept, nor, even less, a pure one. Would Modernism have existed without people coming from Valencia, Aragon, and Murcia at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, and without the indianos? Let’s ask ourselves if today’s Barça would be the same without having gone through Cruyff and so many players from the other side of the world! Would we eat cannelloni on St. Stephen’s Day if Rondissoni, originally from Italy, had not been the chef and teacher of 40,000 women at the Catalan Women’s Culture Institute between 1909 and 1937?” Passola reflected on culture as something “made of contributions and successive mixtures throughout history.”
She also emphasized the necessity of immigration, noting that “Since the 14th century, Catalonia has existed fully thanks to migrations, which have brought ideas and hands to a demographically small population.”
Part of the lecture focused on combating societal prejudices. “It is essential to free ourselves from the racism that we all, without exception, carry within us toward what is different from ourselves.” She believes this is the way to move away from extremist behavior. “We cannot tolerate the Catalan far-right, through populism and under the flag of Catalanism, insulting newcomers and basing their policies against them on a purity of Catalan identity that has never existed: not in the Pyrenees, not in the Ebre Delta, not in Barcelona, not in L’Hospitalet, not in Ripoll, nowhere.”
Regarding language, her position is firm: “Language is the best thing we can offer the world.” She explained the creation of El Club del Català. “We call it a Club because it must be a place where not only Catalan language and culture are learned, but where people actively engage with cultural and recreational activities we already run, together with our members. In this project, everyone must participate without prejudice: members, friends, and acquaintances, to involve newcomers in our discussions, sections, events, and meetings,” she said. She also announced that next year a congress will be held along the lines of her lecture, focusing on how to promote integration through language and culture.
As she argued, integration is a task in which everyone plays a fundamental role, and the Ateneu is a fantastic space to achieve it. “As men and women of the Ateneu, we have an obligation to reflect on the role Catalan language and culture must play in the demographic and migratory context we are experiencing. We will all be protagonists, and this will be our contribution, from the Ateneu, to become part of the cultured and cohesive nations that make peoples happy.”
