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Kosmopolis 2017

9th Amplified Literature Fest

At a time of such profound social, political, cultural and climate changes, Kosmopolis 2017 could not focus on any other subject than change. At this new edition, the festival for amplified literature understood that the new paradigm appearing before us requires a change of vision. For this reason, the main approaches took into account the female viewpoint and the view towards nature. The festival proposed eight themes that explore these (and other) questions from the sphere of literature.

Narrative immersion: the next challenge

Mireia Manjón

Increasingly more narrative formats are opting for immersion. At Kosmopolis 2017 we explored this tendency, which puts people’s experience at the centre of the experience and grants us decision-making power. The three Alpha Channel chats that we are offering investigated ...

Frédéric Pajak and Jorge Carrión

Anatomy of Conflicts and of the Memory

Following the presentation of Pajak works, the author and Jorge Carrión talk about the narrative and philosophical conflicts raised in his books and about how he has tackled the representation of major European traumatic events and warring conflicts in them. To what point is graphic ...

Kosmopolis 17. Female Characters and (Im)possible Worlds

Colloquium between Kirsty Logan, Sophie Divry and Marina Espasa

Marina Espasa, writer and literary critic, and since 2016, director of the UNESCO Barcelona City of Literature Office, conducts a conversation between two writers, Kirsty Logan from Scotland and Sophie Divry from France, on writing, feminisms, female characters, readers, and possible and impossible worlds.

Zeina Abirached and Paco Roca

Fertile Hybridisations of Reality and Fiction

Following the presentations of their respective works, the authors converse about who in their projects they take as a starting point real experiences or situations to construct, based on them, universal tales and stories, through visual designs that grow and become complex along with the stories that they aim to narrate.

Daniel Tammet and Màrius Serra

Change in an Extraordinary Mind

A conversation-game between writer and savant communicator Daniel Tammet and wordplay specialist Màrius Serra. Daniel Tammet is capable of learning any language in a week and can recite the decimals of the mathematical constant Pi for five hours, but his true gift ...

Carl Safina

Can We Know What Animals Think and Feel?

Consciousness, self-awareness, empathy, non-verbal communication, imitation, teaching, grief. Many animals think and feel a lot like people do; after all, people are animals. Carl Safina shows that in some surprising ways non-human minds aren’t really too different from ours. They know ...

Javier Celaya

The Book to Come

In a world of driverless cars and trains, smart vacuum cleaners and fridges, sensors that track sleep and exercise, can we suppose that the book will continue to be the same as ever? The boom in artificial intelligence and big data augur a radical transformation in the way in which we consume all types of cultural contents. At this moment of changes and uncertainties, we will be performing an exercise in foresight and venturing to predict the future of the book.

Jo Nesbø, Marc Pastor and Serielizados

Harry Hole, Occupied and Other Nordic Stories

Before becoming a writer Jo Nesbø was a footballer, had an industrial rock band and earned a living as a financial analyst. He was commissioned to write a book about his life on tour with the band Di Derre and when he started to type he heard the echoing words of Aksel Sandemose: the ...

Kim Stanley Robinson and Ian Watson

The New Reality: Climate Fiction

‘Climate Fiction’, set in the near future, is the realistic fiction of our time, and Kim Stanley Robinson is its leading practitioner. Veteran SF author Ian Watson will discuss with Kim Stanley Robinson his career committed constructively to surveying how our human race may survive ...

Kosmopolis 17. From the Book to the Screen and Beyond

Round table with Ana Mar López Contreras, Jordi Solà, Carlos Coronado, Eva Domínguez and Iñaki Díaz. Moderator: Marisol López

The digital support has broken with traditionally separate formats to allow the unlimited expansion of the literary universe: video games, interactive comic books, literary apps… We present innovative home-grown cases to analyse the role of the narrative, whether that story can be told in another format, what the digital brings to paper and what is lost, what the business model is, and what public reception is like.

Kosmopolis 17. Kingdom

Performance by Agrupación Señor Serrano

The causes of global warning are everywhere and they are largely associated with human activity. Climate change is the principal consequence. Global change of biblical proportions is occurring; we’ve created a monster, and there’s no stopping it.

Kosmopolis 17. NaNoWriMo: Socialisation of the Processes of Writing and Reading

Round table with Albert Altimira, Víktor Valles, Meritxell Terrón. Moderator: Mariana Eguara

Just as reading marathons exist, so do writing marathons: a new method is NaNoWriMo. At this round table, authors who are taking part in NaNoWriMo will explain what it consists of and what their experience is with this platform for stimulating writing.

Kosmopolis 17. New Voices of Europe

The first public presentation of the “New Voices of Europe”

Which are the most interesting new voices in Europe? What kind of literature are emerging writers producing? At Kosmopolis we will be getting to know the “10 New Voices of Europe” of 2017, a group of writers, poets and playwrights originating from Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, France, Iceland, Latvia, Luxembourg, Poland, Romania, Spain and Wales, selected by experts from the Literature Across Frontiers festivals, who will be revealing the new literary tendencies in Europe to us.

Evelio Cabrejo

The Reading Before the Readers

Colombian psychoanalyst and linguist Evelio Cabrejo affirms that a prior reading exists to the reading of written texts. He is referring to the reading of oral texts. He also defends that this act of reading is inherent to the starting up of thinking.

Kosmopolis 17. The Walk by Robert Walser

Colloquium between Esteban Feune de Colombi, Marc Caellas, Marta Sanz and Alicia Kopf

The first edition of the short novel The Walk, by Robert Walser, was published in April 1917, nearly 100 years ago. In it Walser updated the figure of the flâneur, a pensive stroller who as walks analyses the impressions that the surroundings cause him. Novelist ...

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Green Slam: International Poetry Slam Competition

Clotilde de Brito, Dani Orviz, Laura Sam, Raquel Lima, Toby Campion, Salva Soler, Simone Savogin, Crisal, Jose Luis Cabeza and Dive Dibosso

Poetry Slam Barcelona is celebrating the third edition of Grand Slam Barcelona at Kosmopolis 2017, an international oral poetry contest that welcomes the world’s leading poetry slam exponents back to the city to compete alongside regular slammers at the CCCB’s monthly championship. Three minutes, no props, no music—voice, poetry and interpretation are all the means participants have to convince the jury that their performance is the best. ...

John Banville and Pierre Lemaitre

Crime novel

John Banville and Pierre Lemaitre established a dialogue on genre literature, which the two of them believe is not highly considered. “Nobody casts doubt on the fact that Simenon is a great author”, said Lemaitre, “but the crime novel continues to be regarded as a sub-genre.” ...

Stefano Mancuso

The Roots of the Intelligence of Plants

Plants behave in curiously intelligent ways: they fight against predators, maximise opportunities for food, and have more senses than we can imagine. How should our ideas about the plant world and its function in the fabric of life change? Italian neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso presents some ...

Kosmopolis 17. New Ways of Producing and Consuming Contents

Dan Franklin talk

In the new Internet environment of the 21st century, does copyright make any sense? How is disintermediation and self-publishing affecting the publishing industry? Is it possible to filter the enormous quantity of data? Will that of publisher be a feasible profile for developing the selection of contents? What is the role of contents curation and which are its keys? Aiming to offer an answer to al these questions will be Dan Franklin, a digital strategist who has worked at Canongate Books and Penguin Random House.

Kosmopolis 17. Return to the Spoken Word

Round table with Irene Fortes, Benjamín Figueres, Paulina Wardęga, Juliana Rueda. Moderator: Javier Celaya

The resurgence of podcasts, the success of WhatsApp voice messages and the possibility of talking to the machines that surround us highlight the relevance being acquired by the voice. In a world of communications where writing and audiovisual formats predominate, the voice and sound are taking ...

Kosmopolis 17. Crisis and Change in the Literary Ecosystem. The Voice of the Writers

Colloquium between Jean Echenoz and Sophie Divry. Moderator: Albert Lladó

Jean Echenoz and Sophie Divry are two of the most prominent novelists in French literature today. The two talk with writer and journalist Albert Lladó, about the changes that the crisis may have caused to the literary ecosystem; to the choice of themes with which to construct fiction, ...

Orna Donath, María Llopis, Brigitte Vasallo and Bel Olid

The Family Is Dead. Long Live the Family

Access to cheap and effective contraception has been one of the driving forces of feminism: released from the obligation of reproducing women could, finally, decide what they wanted to do with their lives. However, how do those of them who have decided to have children actually live motherhood? ...

Kosmopolis 17. Give Me VR and Call Me Stupid: Virtual Reality as a Generator of New Themes

Colloquium between José Luis Farias, Francisco Asensi and Flavio Escribano

Virtual reality has existed since someone thought about it, and that was a long time before Oculus or Samsung Gear. In all this time, just as Verne did in his day, imagining inventions yet to come, authors have fantasised about virtual realities in other fields such as literature, film or video ...

Kosmopolis 17. Appearances / Reappearances

Dialogue between Jean Echenoz and Jean-Yves Jouannais. Moderator: Jordi Corominas

The work of Jean Echenoz and Jean-Yves Jouannais feature a series of elective affinities that go beyond the language. At some point in their career both have transited through an archaeology of disappearance in order to resuscitate men, works and remains that the present had caused to disappear. ...

Kosmopolis 17. Immersion in Virtual Worlds

Lecture by Jose Valenzuela

The worlds created using virtual reality technologies induce an illusion of reality that can be really powerful, as they play with various cognitive mechanisms associated with human perception and emotion. It is relatively easy to deceive our senses and feel ourselves in another place or in ...

Kosmopolis 17. Women-Led Innovation

Round-table with: Lauren Romeo (Tekstum Solutions), Anna Ascolies (The Spanish Bookstage), Mireia Lite (Ara Llibres) and Maribel Riaza (Innovation in the book sector). Moderator: Joana Sánchez (Incipy)

Is the publishing environment a woman-friendly environment? We analyse whether projects and start-ups led by women offer added value or have a different focus to projects led by men. In general, the mission of male-led projects tends towards selling to a third party, scaling it, making it bigger ...

Sílvia Bel and Jordi Blesa Montoliu

Blind Readings

Does any female poetry exist beyond that written by women? Or is it just good or bad literature that exists? Is it necessary to continue treating women as a collective to whom visibility may be given in thematic cycles? Does a female canon exist? Or has it been imposed upon us by cultural and ideological questions? Blind Readings is a poetic game that aims to raise the visibility of gender prejudices in literature, a recital that challenges the audience to guess whether the text has been written by a man or a woman.

Hope Jahren

Be as a Tree Planted by the Waters: The Magic of Roots, Leaves, and Everything in Between

Trees are the oldest, biggest, and most successful creatures in the world. Using energy from the sun, and carbon from the air, they have thrived on land for more than four hundred million years. Hear about the amazing and unique methods that plants around us use to establish, grow, flourish, ...

Kosmopolis 17. MAPA10: Literary Cartography of Barcelona

Project presentation with Xavier Theros and Marina Espasa

The Barcelona City of Literature UNESCO Office presents the project MAPA10, a literary cartography of the city of Barcelona produced by architect Itziar González and literary critic Jordi Galves, and presented by writer Xavier Theros, winner of the Josep Pla prize for narrative and highly knowledgeable about the history and literature of the streets of Barcelona.

Timothy Morton

Change Is Changing

The ecological crisis we are facing is also a crisis of our sense of what things are. Not only are we witnessing colossal, disturbing change to parts of our world that we treated for too long as a static, neutral background; but also we are seeing how one person’s change for the worse ...

Lynne Segal

The Scandal of Ageing

Perhaps old women need to begin ageing scandalously, to beat back the scandals of ageing. As Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies Lynne Segal illustrates in her book Out of Time: The Pleasure & Perils of Ageing, across times and places older women, although usually devoid of ...

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Ian Watson presents Kim Stanley Robinson

Ian Watson, one of Britain’s leading science-fiction writers, presents Kim Stanley Robinson, one of the main exponents of climate fiction. They will be at Kosmopolis on Saturday March 25. This interview was shot last November at the Eurocon. The convention, Europe’s biggest devoted ...