Primera Persona 2021

Primera Persona, the “Scars” special is at once a digital publication and a farewell party. This last function of the festival, full of multifaceted, multigenerational, multigender local talent, brings together stand-up comedians, punk-rockers, illustrators and novelists around a single concept: scars, physical and symbolic. Each participant brings their personal vision and unique approach and experience, as has become traditional at this event. Primera Persona, the “Scars” special is the encore after the curtain call, the Christmas special of your favourite series that is also the last episode.

Open-air edition

Year nine of Primera Persona will be taking place in the Pati del Dones courtyard, where some of the authors who have contributed to the Scars publication will perform for almost three hours, along with other voices on the culture scene.

David Caño is an expert at opening up our wounds and his own with his black yet tender poetry, as he shows in his incendiary book of poems Un cos preciós per destruir; Anna Pacheco is a young unclassifiable working-class writer, author of Listas, guapas, limpias, as well as a cultural journalist specializing in feminism and a cyberspeaker, on this occasion accompanied live by Tirana; Lluís Cabot is the new galactic singer-songwriter, a salacious pop troubadour who spills his guts in a Majorcan accent with the spriteliest twists and turns, and Clara Viñals, of Renaldo & Clara, the leading voice and composer on the new Catalan pop scene, does something similar but with a take from further inland, from Lleida. People love it when Rocío Quillahuaman blows her top (in response to class, race, gender and everyday life injustices), because this triggers her satirical illustrations and animations run through by her great biting humorous talent, but it’s in her long, autobiographical texts that she surpasses herself; L’Hereu Escampa are a duo from Vic who started out as our local answer to Midwest emo, came across elementary psychedelia, and continue to crawl; Miquel Adam Rubiralta is one of the best Catalan writers with his black humour and hilarious resentment, as well as being an editor down in the trenches and a galloping tweeter; Esther García Llovet is a fine-honed short novelist (nothing over 120 pages), as well as one of the most iconoclastic voices and figures to have been produced by national literature; Stivijoes (real name: Raúl Rodríguez Orgaz) is a promising young trap and rap and pop artist from the ‘hood in the Baix Llobregat; Hijos del Trueno, former Tarántula, are the new Catalan rumba with direction, the beating heart of our city, a project with all the import of the summer-night marquees of popular music, humble and rich; Joe Crepúsculo is the techno-troubadour, the dance machine and the genie of a thousand songs, the druid of an unlikely mix of styles and, most of all, the composer, jointly with Manolo Vázquez, of the First Person anthem that has been played nonstop throughout every outing of the festival.

“Scars”, words and music close Primera Persona

The digital publication Scars will be available starting on the day of the event; download it free of charge from the CCCB’s website.

The book is a collection of articles and illustrations by Anna Pacheco, Maria Climent, Carlos Pardo, Aroha Travé, Rocio Quillahuaman, Silvia Cruz Lapeña, Juarma, Valentín Roma, Olga Merino, Esther Garcia Llovet, Miquel Adam Rubiralta, David Caño, Carlo Pavia, Miqui Otero and Kiko Amat; and a digital album with seven songs related to scars and the marks that life leaves, written and composed specially for the festival by Lluis Cabot and Clara Viñals, L'Hereu Escampa, Hijos del Trueno, Sr. Chinarro (Antonio Luque), Eduard Chirinos, Stivijoes and Aries.