Cultura

Encarnació Bosch is 91 years old and lucky to have kept the same friends since she was 12. Of this group of six women, she claims to be the most mentally agile and, aside from genetic factors, she is convinced it is because she is a very active woman. “I sign up for anything,” she tells La Vanguardia by phone, as she cannot meet in person because “soon I see a friend, and tomorrow we are also going out.” Neither her age nor having a disability prevents her from getting up at 7 to go to tai chi classes or carry out a whole series of activities, including going to a museum from time to time. The Picasso is one of her favorites, especially after having discovered it in depth thanks to ArtGran, a social program promoted by the Agència de Salut Pública de Barcelona whose goal is to reduce unwanted loneliness and improve the well-being of older people through art and culture.

The concept of European digital sovereignty has become popular. It is the democratic alternative to the technooligarchy of the USA and the dizzying and unsettling advance of China. The expression is beginning to infiltrate political speeches – at least, those of the leaders…

Josefina Molina (Córdoba, 1936), director of works such as Función de noche, Esquilache, or the series Teresa de Jesús, dedicated a good part of her life to demonstrating that the female perspective was not an exception in the history of cinema, but an essential part of it. A pioneer of Spanish audiovisual, the first woman to graduate in Directing from the Official Film School and the first filmmaker to receive the Honorary Goya, she turned each project into a claim for female freedom to tell their own stories. “To see the world in relief you have to have two eyes and Humanity has been one-eyed for too long,” Molina stated. The sentence ended up becoming the best summary of a life dedicated to broadening the perspective of cinema. The director passed away this Saturday in Madrid at the age of 89. The wake will take place at the Boadilla del Monte funeral home starting at 16:00 hours.

“How strange it is to be young when one is old,” confesses Edgar Morin, and it is very relevant now that he is somewhere in Eternity. A couple of book fairs ago, in Frankfurt, we discovered Seeds of Sagacity, a title we published in March of this year in…

France and Europe have lost one of their most distinguished intellectuals, a witness and keen observer of the 20th and 21st centuries, who helped to decipher them. The sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin, theorist of “complex thought,” a figure of the anti-Nazi resistance during World War II, died yesterday at the age of 104, his wife reported this Saturday. Morin remained active, publishing books, almost until the end.

An Extraordinary Plenary Session of the Algete City Council approved yesterday, Thursday, to remove the name of Joan Manuel Serrat from a municipal building, to rename it after a resident, who will be declared Favorite Son of the Town of Algete.

When her husband died two years ago, Siri Hustvedt (Minnesota, 1955) began writing Ghost Stories (Seix Barral/Edicions 62), a book that helped her face the abyss of “vanished time,” start the grieving process, and adjust to life alone after 43 years of marriage. If the one who left, a victim of cancer that the author describes with harshness but without losing her sense of humor, had not been Paul Auster, it would be the same, she admits, because this work is not a biography of the novelist, but a lost love song. “The most painful reality in this world is not loving someone and losing them to death, but the inability to love,” she argues.

In 1973, the advertiser Lluís Bassat was walking down Consell de Cent street when, at the height of the Sala Adrià, which was run by Francesc Mestre, an exhibition by Serra de Rivera caught his attention. Inside awaited Bañista, an enigmatic painting (the naked figure of a woman in a flooded room who sinks an arm into the water that reaches halfway up her leg) that not only stole his heart but changed his life. That afternoon he not only left with the canvas under his arm but also with 35% ownership of the gallery (he later convinced seven friends to acquire another 35%), and until 1980, when it closed its doors, they organized more than eighty exhibitions. “There I began to get to know the artists; and with my wife, Carmen, we bought one or two works from each of them. And so, almost unintentionally, we built a collection that today has more than 3,000 works.”

Felix Gonzalez-Torres -so, without accents and with a hyphen to join his two last names into one- was a child when, in 1971, he was in Madrid for the first time, where he arrived from Cuba, sent by his family to keep him away from the Castro regime. Twenty years later, in 1991, he returned and consummated a “sweet revenge,” it is not known against what or whom, which now, more than three decades later, is echoed by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

The workers of the Consorci de Biblioteques de Barcelona have started an indefinite strike this Tuesday to protest the lack of progress in the negotiation process with the City Council regarding their working conditions, and 37 of the 40 centers in the city have not opened; only the libraries of Collserola-Josep Miracle, Canyelles-M. Àngels Rivas, and Joan Miró have remained operational.