Barcelona, ​​city "Benvinguda" invited by the FIL, announces three intense weeks full of activities with a Catalan accent

From a literary city of Unesco to a city of bookstores. That Barcelona is the city invited to Buenos Aires FIL has an absolute logic, given the common history, the "crossed exiles" and the showcase of Latin American literature that was and continues to be Catalan publishing houses.

And it is the enthusiastic Iolanda Batallé, holder of the Ramon Llull Institute, dissemination of Catalan culture, the one that inaugurated, alongside Joan Subirats, Commissioner for Culture of the city, the Ada Colau center, the Barcelona space, guest host of this FIL.

She told us the criteria with which they chose more than seventy representatives of this culture. Of those who count contemporary authors, related to both countries, clbadic inesquivables and until the screenwriter and actor of the Merlí series, which had a particular impact on the Argentine public: Héctor Lozano and Carlos Cuevas, the blonde Pol of the cast of students in fiction, who will now be the protagonist of the spin-off. Several famous authors invited to travel have not done so for various reasons, but a few are here.

This first Saturday of the fair, with a free admission between 8:00 and 12:00, you will be able to listen to exquisite music. Silvia Perez Cruz, in open air recital. In addition, a small fair in Sant Jordi will be held in the street, imitating the fantastic and traditional Catalan celebration of International Book Day, the Book and Flower Day, which fills the streets of Barcelona with readers and writers.

But they are just two of more than 120 scheduled activities who was preparing for those three intense weeks, conscious and proud to arrive in Buenos Aires as the first guest city of the Book Fair in which more than one language is spoken. Including exhibitions that transcend the thousands of square meters of the FIL, in the rural, as the relevant Barcelona-Buenos Aires, a bridge of books, which opens in the museum Larreta de Belgrano.

In addition, with the opening of the 45th edition, the director of the Book Fair (first woman in history) and president of the El Libro Foundation, Teresa Carbano, expressed the expectations of the announce this will be "a political fair", in agreement with the election year.

The lamentable episode of the inaugural act against the Secretary of Culture, Pablo Avelluto, which has been repeated, seems to reaffirm that, more than politics, the protagonist was once again intolerance. Paradoxically, during the greatest celebration of Argentine culture and before the brilliant speech of the opening guest, the anthropologist Rita Segato, who celebrated the plurality and ability of the culture to not not be left in shape. We see that some, in addition to not talking or listening to those they do not like, have not paid him much attention.