Collective

Joaquín Díaz Fundation

[00:02:44] I would say that your career has made you one of the great references in the research, conservation and dissemination of Iberian popular music. And we are here to talk about several things that have to do not only with our cultural tradition, but also with this Foundation. So I’m going to start at the beginning of your biography. Let’s start when you were little and you discovered your first musical vocation. I heard in the documentary they made from Grifilm that there is a time when you remember thinking of yourself as a child already as a musician. Can you go back to that moment and remember what you thought?
[00:05:10] You are considered the renovator of folk music since the 70s in Spain. Do you recognize yourself in that statement? [00:05:58] But do you think that in the 60s there was a perspective that valued all this cultural tradition?
[00:06:28] I remember another interview in which you say that after singing a Bob Dylan song in English, someone close to you asked you why you didn’t sing the living tradition of your country.
[00:07:36] I propose that you return to the 70s because at that time in Spain there was an important political change that enabled the arrival of a superb modernity that projects a future of capitalist promises and absolute well-being. At that time you are already a singer-songwriter and traditional culture seems to have no value. How do you live this moment?
[00:09:23] Do you think it’s right to think that during the Franco dictatorship, rural culture was valued in certain traditional cultural sectors for nationalist purposes and that then that same culture experienced a decline due to the opposition to Franco’s regime?
[00:12:54] In other words, it is not only a communication campaign against life in the rural world, but also a discrediting of the rural world in favor of urban people.
[00:15:03] And thanks to people like you who began to collect all this tradition, because in 1975 you decided to leave the stage and dedicate yourself to researching all this, right?
[00:16:11] What leads you to decide that the stage is no longer your field and do you want to be a researcher of all this?
[00:19:25] But for you, research has been something else. Can you tell us about this whole research process?
[00:21:05] I have seen a video of you in which you are singing with the person who is singing, recording and speaking to you. It’s a very particular way of researching.
[00:24:28] So I always thought that your research guided a meaning of life. It is that current that links us to something that is bigger than us and us…
[00:25:15] Collect all this research and save it and treasure it or open it up to the common denominator and create a study center?
[00:28:15] I imagine that it also had to be a monumental work, because you were working with analog recordings, it’s not like transferring your entire research project to the digital world. It had to be a big project for the center.
[00:29:34] So since 1994, when the Foundation officially opened, have you been working on this digitalization project? He always speaks in the plural and I love to hear: “like us.” But how many people are part of the team?
[00:31:13] How is all this activity sustained in a foundation like this?
[00:34:48] There, who knows, dreams will come true too. Joaquín
[00:34:50] Also, of course, of course, but well, everyone has their dreams and we will see if there is someone who has similar dreams or needs to be instilled in some way.
[00:35:01] For those who don’t know, the Foundation is in the town of Urueña. Why come to Urueña to build the foundation?
[00:37:03] Do I forget any of the areas you’re working on? Is there anything else?
[00:40:03] Now thinking about this exhibition that you have above musical instruments, why is it important to keep the instrument? What does it tell us about the materiality of the collective?
[00:42:44] Of noises, for what? Why include that memory? Why is it important?
[00:44:56] How is this conservation work? How is that possible?
[00:46:20] What does society lose when, from this state of lack of memory in which we live, it no longer understands the importance of preserving these echoes?
[00:47:39] What are the values, would you say, that have been treasured within this tradition that we need to recover in order to become people again?
[00:49:44] All these traditional values that we are gradually losing in this quasi-apocalyptic world.
[00:51:25] Of course, because we are rings of the same tree. But someone has to take you to the tree. And there the profession, education, has a lot of work to do along these lines. Are you optimistic about the present?
[00:53:10] I think about the music scene and I wonder, what’s the point of music today when it becomes a playlist from which you select three seconds per song and that you download, many times, without paying attention to what you’re listening to. You’re a musician. What opinion does this digital musical context deserve for you?
[00:55:30] What would you like young people to discover when they visit this Foundation?
[00:57:32] After a lifetime dedicated to safeguarding collective memory, I ask you, what horizon do you reach to glimpse?
[01:00:19] And to close, from the Constellation of Commons, we ask everyone we talk to to to help us complete a horizon of good news by sharing some news. What would you like to share from this Foundation?

In this new contribution to the Constellation of the Commons, we turn our attention to the work of the Fundación Joaquín Díaz, an initiative dedicated to the preservation, research, and dissemination of popular culture, oral tradition, and collective memory.

Joaquín Díaz is a key figure in the study, research, and dissemination of Spain’s traditional culture. A musician, folklorist, and musicologist, since the 1960s he has devoted his career to documenting and preserving a rich legacy of oral tradition, traveling to villages and communities to collect songs, ballads, stories, legends, proverbs, festivals, dances, ceremonies, objects, and other expressions of popular culture. His fieldwork transformed the memories and knowledge preserved within communities—and, especially, by those who carried these traditions in their memory—into an essential source for understanding cultural heritage. This work has resulted in an extensive body of research, publications, recordings, and collections, as well as the creation of the Ethnographic Center of Urueña and the Fundación Joaquín Díaz, dedicated to preserving and making this extraordinary cultural heritage accessible.

In July 2026, we had the opportunity to speak with Joaquín Díaz about the work of the Foundation, its archives and collections, and the importance of preserving and sharing the knowledge, stories, and expressions that form part of our tangible and intangible cultural heritage and our shared memory.

We share this interview as an invitation to discover his work and to reflect on the ways in which culture and memory can become spaces for shared knowledge.

Source: Fundación Joaquín Díaz

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