Skip to main content

Kosmopolis 2008

IV International Literature Fest

Lucia Calvo

Kosmopolis 08. Everyone Gets Lighter

Performance by John Giorno

John Giorno, one of the most important contemporary American poets, is also a key figure in Spoken Word and performance poetry in New York. In his performance “Everyone Gets Lighter”, John Giorno uses neologisms taken from real life to transform a personal relationship with Andy ...

Kosmopolis 08. Donna Leon and Juan López de Uralde

Writers for Change: Ecologism

In this dialogue with Juan José López de Uralde (Director of Greenpeace in Spain), Donna Leon will explain her passion for ecological causes, which have gained an increasing presence in her novels. If in the first novels in the saga featuring Commissioner Brunetti, now almost ...

Robert S. Boynton, Amira Hass and Guillermo Altares

Kosmopolis 08. The New-New Journalism

Since Tom Wolfe published his manifesto "The New Journalism" thirty years ago, a large group of writers has continued to develop North American literary journalism based on investigative reporting. Today, a group of outstanding authors including the likes of Adrian Le-Blanc, Richard Preston ...

Lou Reed and Laurie Anderso

Poetry Reading "Made in Catalunya"

On October 24, 2008, performance artist Laurie Anderson (in Berkeley, California) joined musician/poet Lou Reed (in Barcelona) via the internet to perform the works of Catalan poets Brossa, Espriu, Carner and Vinyoli. A 45 minute live performance, in English, as experienced last year at the ...

Neosol, Sonia Pulido, Calpurnio and Max

Animated concert: "The last human alive". Live cartoons and music.

In this session, the electronic atmosphere generated by the band Neosol accompanies the cartoons drawn live on a large screen by the artists Sonia Pulido, Calpurnio and Max. This is, then, an unusual "animated concert" embracing a graphic and musical recreation of a well-known participatory ...

David Rieff and Rafael Vilasanjuan

Kosmopolis 08. Humanitarian Crisis

In the early 1990s, while the West was celebrating the fall of communism and of the Soviet empire, the security apparatus that helped to bring all this about began to collapse too. The resolve that avoided the disaster of a nuclear showdown between the two great power blocs was not sufficient ...

Gao Xingjian

After the Deluge

The Chinese writer Gao Xingjian, the Nobel Laureate in Literature in 2000, speaks on the raison-d'être of literature and the sacrifices involved in defending creative literature against abuses of political and mass-media power. These words sum up his speech to be given on the inauguration of Kosmopolis 2008: "When literature becomes a hymn of praise for a country, the flag of a nation, the voice of a political party or mouthpiece of a class or group, it can be used as a powerful and crushing instrument of propaganda, but it loses its intrinsic nature. ...

J.M. Coetzee

Diary of a bad year

The 2003 Nobel Laureate in Literature J. M. Coetzee read, exclusively for Kosmopolis, some fragments from his book Diary of a Bad Year.

Kosmopolis 08. Participants

Presentation video of the participants of Kosmopolis 2008, that will take place in CCCB from the 22nd to the 26th of October 2008.