Prince of Asturias Awards 1981–2014. Speeches

8 O viedo | C ampoamor T heatre | Those who enter his monumental sculptures feel the embrace of their metal walls, grand both in size and simplicity. The roughness of the material harmonises with the smoothness of its curves, causing one to feel as if in a labyrinth, in a distinct, magical and marvellous place. Therein lies his mastery. To be a maestro is to be, like Richard Serra, a great artist, a creator of unmistakable, solemn, generous and honest works, rooted in truth, that invite us to form part of them, to experience them with our emotions. We turn our gaze now towards Eastern Asia, towards a civilization of great artistic splendour that spans thousands of years. The team of archaeologists working at the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, in the Chinese city of Xi’an, has received the Award for Social Sciences. We recognize in the endeavours of the team that has undertaken this great salvage and research work the traditionally meticulous tenacity of the Chinese people, their vigour and splendour, expressed in their progressive opening-up to the outside world, in their influence on it, and in their spectacular current economic development. With its thousands of terracotta warriors, sundry figures and objects, the tomb is a metaphor of eternity which, while not originally intending to, also establishes a magical dialogue with visitors. Since 1979, millions of people have been able to relive, in awe, the personal, age-old, mysterious history of an emperor who yearned for a refuge, a safe place for his eternal journey. The work of the Xi’an archaeologists is one that requires extreme finesse and perfection, the result of which is both exciting and revealing, providing us with precious historical and cultural information on the China of over 2,000 years ago, a fundamental age for human civilization. We know that specialists working on archaeological digs always do so with infinite patience, meticulousness and care; that a deep-felt emotion resides within each discovery. We admire and pay tribute to such commitment to that knowledge, which sometimes has its origins in a tiny shard of pottery, glass or metal, with which hypotheses are confirmed and which allows the history of mankind to be pieced back together, like an immense jigsaw puzzle. Alain Touraine and Zygmunt Bauman have received the Award for Communication and Humanities. We gratefully admire the rigour and depth of thought of these outstanding thinkers. Two wise men for uncertain times who have devoted their long-standing scientific careers to the noble cause of exploring the world and making it a better place for us humans to live in. Representatives −as the minutes of the Jury put it− of the most brilliant intellectual tradition of European thought, their research embraces the most diverse fields, analysing and explaining the extraordinary complexity of contemporary society, its major transformations, its errors, as well as the possibilities and ways of elevating and dignifying its social, economic and cultural structures. They warn us that many of the terms of the past no longer serve to understand the present. France’s Alain Touraine has studied post-industrial society and has reflected on the most important social and economic movements of the 20th century. He has likewise taken an interest in Latin America, denouncing dictatorships with the force of ideas. He has also focused his analysis on the processes of profound transformation generated by the economy and globalization in order to defend human rights, dignity and democracy in the world. On more than one occasion, he has addressed these topics alone, with a great degree of independence, although never in isolation, yet paying no heed to dominant trends, which gives added stature to his work. Poland’s Zygmunt Bauman, who survived persecution by Nazism first and Soviet Communism later, has coined the expression “liquid modernity”, which is one of the mainstays of his intellectual work, in order to unveil a totally unknown scenario, the passage of a predictable, reliable society to another that is indecipherable, in which power evaporates into global space. A time that obliges us to tread —as he has written— on thin ice. The natural habitat of human life —he hopefully declares— is uncertainty, but it is the wish to escape this uncertainty that constitutes the authentic driving force of our endeavours. “It is during difficult times when people must express the stature of their ideals, their lucidity and their great spirit most clearly.” 22 nd O ctober 2010