Every day I work with a team of people
that make the impossible happen.
To make the tail of a blue whale
stick out of the window of one of the most iconic buildings
in Buenos Aires.
To make the girls in my country want to be like Juana Azurduy,
a heroine of the Latin American independence.
To make snow fall inside a huge theater
over boys and girls who had never seen snowing.
To make whole families come together in front of a screen
to learn about the number pi,
about Plato's Myth of the Cave,
or about the history of state-sponsored terrorism
with the same interest they used to watch an entertainment show before.
Things that seemed impossible yesterday are transformations today.
In my office at the Centro Cultural Kirchner,
a space dedicated to art and culture, I have a window.
From there, I invite those who visit me to look out with me.
That window, for the sky, reminds me of my childhood.
I'm from San Luis.
There you can see the most pristine skies and the most beautiful clouds.
The first time I looked I was not aware of that.
I grew up in a house that was school as well.
A "school home" run by my mom.
When I was a girl, from my window I'd look at the yard and see a slide.
That yard, as well, was the school's playground.
And the slide wasn't just mine,
it was the slide of a lot of boys and girls.
If I went out into the yard and looked inside I'd see my house.
But there were also chalks, games, desks.
What for others was just a blackboard,
for me, it meant the afternoon when we had hung it.
All the time I witnessed a set of actions
supported mostly by women: mothers, grandmothers, janitors,
the best managers of getting things done.
For me, learning, playing, doing, was always in community.
Although at a time of the day my house-school ran out of people,
in that empty space I knew that everything was going to happen again
and that the next day my house would become something else
thanks to the work of all the people that made the school possible.
I didn't know this at the time,
but as a child, I learned to look at reality in a different way.
I understood it many years later when I was called to think about
creating Canal Encuentro, as part of an educational project.
A public television channel.
Many of us who started with the channel
weren't from the capital of the country.
We were coming from different provinces:
San Luis, Cordoba, Salta, Misiones.
And our vision came with us.
What we achieved with the team of Encuentro, mostly women,
was to transform educational television through those visions.
We created a screen in which each region could display their own story.
We were used to watching boring documentaries,
that were zero engaging,
with hosts who didn't talk like Argentineans,
with images from other countries.
In Canal Encuentro we started to show the face of the teachers
and the kids who were attending a school in Santiago del Estero,
or a rural school in Barranqueras, Chaco.
Or a kindergarten in Alumine, Neuquen.
In half-hour episodes we help dignify crafts and trades.
We teach how to lay tiles,
work on a Criollo loom,
install thermal switches, and design trousers.
We teach philosophy through music.
And music with Encuentro in the studio.
And science with closeness.
A new way to do and watch TV was being born.
New content, new ways.
The channel won prestige and the recognition of the audience.
Soon afterward, Encuentro managed to turn public audiovisual production
into a tool for raising appreciation and inclusion.
Showing another possible image of this that we are as a nation.
Something had changed in Argentina
in the conception of public policy
and that transformation was also happening on TV.
They were years of huge energy, of great learning,
of a great work synergy and collective creation
that allowed us to produce quality content.
Thanks to Encuentro we could create another channel.
This time for children: PakaPaka.
PakaPaka, the power of imagination,
was the result of the work of many, highly talented people.
Producers, educators, screenwriters, performers,
cartoonists, editors, animators, public workers.
In this project,
we focused on three privileged areas for transformation:
childhood, education and culture.
We put the kids at the center.
The secret was that, from the public space, from the state,
and from an educational project,
we worked every day producing for inclusion,
educating for equality,
and providing access to quality content.
A few years later, I was able to take to San Luis all that experience.
That's how Juan and Pascual were born, two animated characters, twins,
who talked like me, eat watermelon like me,
have siesta,
and are friends with a squirting wind that blows very hard.
From this cross-platform project Juan and Pascual
made our boys and girls from San Luis
learn from their own experience,
with the landscapes, the history, and the skies that surround them.
All this seemed impossible.
Creation through art and culture can lead to collective transformation.
It's not about personal talent.
What I learned at my home-school when I was a child, marked my way.
I would look at the empty space
and I knew that this space could be transformed again.
Thanks to that community of women
I learned that when a team of people
works with conviction and commitment
the impossible becomes possible.
Since the pandemic arrived to Argentina,
I go to work every day to the Centro Cultural Kirchner.
Today, where the whale came out through the window, is empty.
It lacks their culture workers,
the visitors, the artists, the community.
I look through that window and I see a city in pause.
In pause, I go back to my life.
I repeat all the time the same action for as long as I can remember
as if I were a camera myself.
I see those who surrounded me in that house, in that yard,
those who had to have a place in TV productions
that were until then denied.
Those who teamed up with me and made it possible.
My job is to look at others see their potential,
that spark that turns them on, the one we get together
and from where we build together.
This empty space presents us a new opportunity,
a unique challenge to make, to create.
Once again we can make the impossible possible.
Let's build a future full of encounters
with new stories told in our voices,
let's transform reality again,
being freer, closer, more humane.