GOYA IN MAASTRICHT
[EDIT: Maastricht, March 25] Mayor Leers started his introduction to the performance by pointing to the European context and recommending a bottom-up approach. To paraphrase him, one could say he was recommending that people should not be preoccupied by abstractions and red tape; but, in the European context, people should concentrate on the reality of cross-border cooperation. Examples of this are not difficult to find in Meuse-Rhine, where housing associations in Maastricht build apartments in Liège and where specialists from Liège work in call centers in Maastricht and where many people commute to work and cross borders. It is also a location where colleagues from various industrial sectors like the life-sciences, logistics and automotive industries regularly get together to explore the opportunities of cooperation. This has become possible because of the way in which the EU both facilitates and funds cross-border activities. None of these activities require the participants to think in terms of the abstractions so beloved of politicians, like the word Euroregion, which nobody gets right anyway. The European Union provides a context which facilitates cooperation and it derives from a conscious movement to reject the -isms that had so often plunged Europe into internecine warfare in the past. The film “Goya’s Ghosts” took images from Goya’s portrayal of scenes and individuals from the Peninsula War and from the pitiless violation of the innocent by the Spanish inquisition. Surely the epitome of the truly vile! It also showed the consequences of Napoleon’s brutal wars and of France’s institutionalization of revolution. Mayor Leers spoke also of the need for the Euroregions to take their own decisions on local issues. He spoke of Green Cards for immigrant nurses who might be needed in an aging society. Minister Timmermans reflected with pride on his origins in Maastricht and spoke of it as the birth place and home of Europe. Stellan Skarsgård, one of the leading players, was asked what it was like to act with people from a range of different cultures. English provided one solution, he said, and in view of another article in this section perhaps this is a point that should be reflected upon.
To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, the City of Maastricht held a film festival, details of which can be found at the link below. The premier, a film called Goya’s Ghosts, by Milos Forman, was introduced by Maastricht’s Mayor Gerd Leers, one of South-Limburg’s four national government ministers Frans Timmermans and the Swedish actor who played one of the starring roles in the film called Stellan Skarsgård.
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