Primera Persona

Primera Persona is a festival of varieties, brought bang up to date with a literary and experiential twist. It is also a tribute to experience, memory and the word. And a celebration of how narrative, film and music can turn personal concerns and experiences into works that console people or change lives. It took place at the CCCB from 2012 until 2021.

The festival set out to present life stories, sometimes camouflaged, sometimes more literal, but always literary, atypical, tragicomic and antiepic, showing that anyone can be the hero (or antihero) of a novel, a film or a song, and that we are all the lead in a memorable story. And it set out to do so in the most entertaining way possible, using strategies borrowed from the performing arts or genres such as audiovisual documentary, with meticulous staging and scripts devised for the occasion, with the emphasis on biographical anecdote rather than abstract analysis, and intimate confession rather than academic theory.

Primera Persona was a project of the CCCB conceived and directed by Kiko Amat and Miqui Otero.

Nik Cohn with DJ Kosmos

The Irish writer Nik Cohn, father of the rock writing and epic chronicler of street culture over fifty years, wrote his first novel, Market, when he was eighteen. Four years later, he published Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom (1969), a definitive saga of rock ‘n roll, written ...

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Julieta Venegas

Recitals and live songs

The Mexican singer-songwriter Julieta Venegas, who has sold over twelve million records worldwide, but there’s nothing she likes better than holing up with a book under an angle poise in her bedroom. Her photographer parents didn’t let her turn on the television and signed her up ...

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