Sports rivalry has no parallel in culture, since in creativity there are usually no winners or losers and the boundaries are increasingly blurred in a culturally global world. However, today’s match between the football teams of Spain and Argentina serves as a pretext to compare, without aiming for exhaustiveness, the current situation of both nations in the literary, artistic, cinematic, theatrical, or philosophical fields.
Gaudí took Montjuïc as a reference to build the Sagrada Família: it should not exceed the height of the divine work that is the mountain, so its tallest tower, that of Jesus, measures half a meter less than the place where, among other things, the Teatre Grec is located. Two perspectives, the divine and the classical humanistic past, that this Friday converged in a sacred and profane performance, between the sacred mountain of Montserrat and the spirit of the Grec festival, combining the Baroque music of Joan Cererols, composed in the 17th century, with the present voices of Lídia Pujol and Maria Arnal.
No one would have said, a priori, that the tenor Benjamin Bernheim – pure technique, exquisite phrasing, and perfect diction – and the soprano Ermonela Yaho – all passion and vibrato – would form a colossal operatic duo. But this was proven on Friday at the opening night of the 40th edition of the Peralada Festival, an event that makes real the popular saying that 40 is the new 30, as it maintains its essence with youthful dynamism and improves with age.
The Rolling Stones have reached their fifteenth number 1 on the official UK albums chart with their new album, Foreign Tongues, thus matching an old record held by the Beatles.
I am in Ithaca! It seems absurd, but here I am. I think of the friends with whom I believe the Odyssey is the most beautiful book in the world.” In September 1927, Carles Riba writes euphorically to Josep Maria de Sagarra while visiting Greece. The patronage of the Fundació Bernat Metge by Francesc Cambó allows the Hellenist to travel through the landscapes of the authors he has translated. Like this last month, when La Casa dels Clàssics of the foundation presented Odissea, the recent translation into Catalan by Pau Sabaté.
For almost three thousand years, the Odyssey has been understood as the great tale of return. A hero who, after playing a decisive role in the Greek victory over Troy —thanks to his cunning and the deception of the horse that allowed the city to be conquered— sets out on the journey back to Ithaca and crosses impossible seas to reclaim his kingdom and reunite with Penelope. But Christopher Nolan proposes a different reading of Homer’s poem: one in which Odysseus’s true journey does not end when he sets foot in his homeland, but when he understands the human cost of the war he won and the debt he owes to those who could not return.
The new Sant Jordi Club already has a face and shape, that of an immense multipurpose box 65 meters wide and 27 high – twice the current size – with an aesthetic similar to the Palau Sant Jordi and an outdoor space redesigned to facilitate access and invite people to approach the Montjuïc mountain. These are the main coordinates of the winning project of the competition for the renovation of the old facility, which will be carried out by the architecture firms Jorge Vidal and the Parisian Bruther with a budget of 70 million euros funded by BSM, manager of the Anella Olímpica, and 2029 as the planned inauguration date.
Among the amalgam of festivals and digital centers such as Sónar+D, Mira, Offf, or Ideal, Barcelona is advancing towards becoming the capital of digital art. It is practically already so in Europe, but the ambition is to become a benchmark by crossing even more borders in the medium term. To achieve this latter goal, the Biennal d’Arts Digitals has been launched, with the essential support of public administrations: the City Council and the Generalitat Government, together with the Barcelona Creativity & Design Foundation and the collaboration of the Ministry of Culture. The platform aims to serve as an umbrella for all digital initiatives to, in addition to that primary goal, promote co-production between local and international agents and bring digital arts closer to the public.
“You told me I exaggerate / Because I cry in the coffee / That my doubts are a drama / That I tire you, that I annoyed you / You hid my notebooks / So that you stop writing / You cut off every story / You called me childish…”. The song is titled No Me Vas A Romper and in just a few verses…
Laura Autonell (Taradell, 1963) had been writing all her life, like many people, without many pretensions. But six years ago her husband passed away and her priorities changed: “The hours I would have spent with him I have dedicated to writing, I have filled his absence with stories. It’s as if I had remarried, but to literature,” she says, because from that loss first came a self-published novel, Un polsim de sal, and recently a novel that in a few weeks has established itself among the bestsellers thanks to word of mouth, La Llibreria de les Hores Mortes (Columna), alongside authors like Regina Rodríguez Sirvent, Gil Pratsobrerroca, Siri Hustvedt or even Homer himself with the new Catalan translation of his Odyssey.