This year I had the pleasure to assist the one
of the most important festival concerning the contemporary literature, the name
is “Kosmopolis. The Amplified Literature Festival”. It is a biennial
literary event that takes place at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de
Barcelona. The idea that prompted its creation was offer a place to meet art
and literature, inspired by the awareness that we are citizens of the cosmos,
citizens of the world.
Why Amplified?
It is “amplified” because it takes into consideration all the
manifestations of literature: spoken, written, printed and digital. It wants to
encourage the “contamination” between disciplines and interaction among
writers, artists, filmmakers, musicians, actors, architects, designers and
other figures on the culture scene. Such a way of presenting literature goes
beyond the division between genres and accepts the evolution of the literature
itself.
- The Program:
-
Dialogues and conferences: various Spanish and international
writers have held dialogues on different topic concerning literature, such as
the role of the contemporary narrator, what is making literature today, and
which topic should it covers.
-
Journalism 21: A series of conferences about new
styles of journalism, such as data journalism, investigative journalism and
participatory one. New technologies make chronicles and personal stories a challenge
for journalism;
the conferences try to explain how to how to cope with it.
-
Alice
-
Alpha Channel: It was a programme of documentaries,
shorts films, animations, videos and visual experiments inspired by literature.
It explored the relationship between literature and the audiovisual. Every
evening there was a film, while the whole Sunday was devoted to TV series
inspired by genres with an literary origin: Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dickens,
Poe, Carroll, Conan Doyle, Conrad, Borges, Hammett, Ballard
-
Wrinting Labs: Learning to write means learning to read and learning to think, but it
also it is important to know the techniques, strategies and tools. For these
reasons a series of workshop were proposed in order to discover the
ingredients, the medicines or the poisons present in the creation of a work.
-
Traslating Europe: It meant building permanent bridges to develop a cultural project that
goes beyond borders. It implied also discovering works and authors, understanding
how a language is adopted and cultivating diversity.
It is in the “Translating Europe” that the
Italian singer Vinicio Capossela decided to present his book: “Tefteri. El
libro de las cuentas pendientes (Minúscula, 2014).
The book starts with the idea of crisis “a concept related to rebetiko, a
form of music that recalls the idea of separation or division, an idea that is related
to Greece, from which Europe is trying to get separated”. Capossela was in the
streets of Greece in the year of the financial crash. He made a musical and
emotional journey around the taverns of Athens, Salonika and Crete where the Greeks
were rediscovering rebetiko, the music that recall the powerful link between
East and West, and touches themes like pain, absence and fury.
In Greece means what is tango or the Argentineans, what is blues for
Americans and what is Fado for Portuguese. It was born between XIX and XX
Century, in the slums of Greek cities from outcast people which wanted to tell
their sufferings and pain through music. Nowadays rebetiko has been rediscovered
by normal people and sang in the streets of Greece in economic crisis.
The singer and writer was accompanied by the
editor Valeria Bergalli and the Greek guitarist Dimitris Mistakidis. Caposssela
has talked about his book and what Greece as meant to him. He explained how the
country is still the source of universal questions and how now is bringing us
face to face with what is happening to normal people in such an European crisis.
Here a rebetiko song singed by Capossela:
No comments:
Post a Comment