Contemporary Thinking: Three Days in a Festival of Amphibious and Transformative Ideas

If anything characterizes amphibious beings, besides that they can live in water and on land, it is that they are transformed. Therefore, a way of thinking about the event "Contemporary Thinking, An Amphibious Festival" is in terms of transformations. C & # 39; is to say, a festival that was transformed while it was happeningbut also that it transformed the people who exhibited, those who coordinated the lectures and performances, to the public and even the journalists who covered the event.

Because we are not the same today as we were on Thursday the 16th at 6 pm when it all started.

If not, how to explain that the poet Arturo Carrera will dance on stage or that the poet Gabby De Cicco discovered that he was able to improvise a get up and make more than five hundred people laugh. That, to name just two examples. Perhaps, the amphibian appearing liquid and unrepresentable, it is better to go in order and see if this hypothesis, that of transformation, is finally justified.

First of all, the concrete data: the event that took place from 14 to 18 May at the Cultural Center of the Spanish Park, in Sarmiento and on the river, in the city of Rosario, it was an Ibero-American meeting organized by the government. of Santa Fe – with the sponsorship of the Federal Investment Council – together with the Amphibious Magazine (who is seven years old), the National University of San Martín (UNSAM), the University of Rosario and the Cultural Center Parque España itself.

The initiative arose from the dialogue between the director, director of strategic communication of the Santa Fe government, Lila Siegrist and the director of Amphibious, Cristian Alarcón, after a series of interviews conducted at the theater El Círculo in 2018. The festival, the first of its kind, focused for three days on some forty references from the world of art, literature, theater, poetry, activism, music, art, show and journalism, and even from a physicist, Carlos Stia., which deals with difficult things such as multiple ionization and fragmentation of molecules of biological interest in gas and liquid phase. Something as difficult as an amphibian, by the way.

According to the organization, 3,000 people attended the debates they had thematic axes (body, love, screens, landscapes, time and work) at the Prince of Asturias Theater of the Parque España Cultural Center. At the same time, a series of performances took place under the title "Big Data Symphony". And a group of 16 journalists learned to "tell the city" in a workshop led by the Spanish writer and journalist Cristina Fallarás.

The amphibious transformation process began on Thursday, January 16th at 6 pm A highlight highlighting the highlights of the various conversations where there was no coordinator, but coordinators but talkers and interlocutors. A common dynamic at all the tables was a scripted participation of those who provoked (position of the writer and chronicler Julian Gorodischer) and the projection of photos, images or sentences as triggers.

Body The provocateur was the journalist and writer Tamara Tenenbaum. And the first projected photo showed Fresh Topazresident in Spain, trans-rosarina, gallerist in contemporary art, before the transformation, dressed as a girl in a manger. "I left with a body and came back with another body," he said. When it was the turn of the philosopher Diana Maffia, the picture chosen was familiar and the story goes back to childhood, when a little Diana had to cover her torso at the request of the father to play the ball, while his brother, no. "There, I discovered with astonishment that there was something in my body that should be hidden," Maffía said. The second picture chosen showed it with Lohana Berkins, trans activist deceased in 2016. "Lohana Berkins enlightened me by saying that the body is the place where are given the conditions that make us diverse and that all that is diverse is abject". And the 500 people in the audience applauded.

"The question about the body has accompanied me intuitively from a very young age," he said. Nicolás Cuello when it was his turn and he talked about his struggle for the "depathologization of fat".

While the visual artist Nicola Costantino She talked about concepts such as "fascism of beauty" or the body as a "consumer item" and recounted the outrageous experience that led her to extract body fat through From a liposuction to make soaps that she was selling as luxury items and that had caused a scandal In the '90s, sitting next to her in an armchair, Topacio Fresh discovers her cleavage and poses for photographers who have captured the moment, squatting under the stage.

Journalist Paula Rodríguez He showed pictures of his experience in football. "I come from a job with footballers who wrote their stories and decided to play games, to test the masculine and the difference of my body," he said.

The writer and columnist María Moreno He read a very amphibious text in which he claimed to be a "nun" and claimed the importance of the face, "The melee teaching because the transmission is not just made of words, but emotional fluids, combustible moods, even of which is not understood, but that will make sense in the future of thought ".

Sweetheart Later in the day and provoked by the bad feminist poetess Gabby De Cicco, five people spoke new ways to love, diversities, polyamourism and free or regulated baduality. De Cicco provoked the audience by asking people who used dating apps such as Tinder or Grindr to raise their hands. Stories of the bad poet Alejandra Benz or the gay academic Santiago Venturini (who chose a photo of clothes strewn on the floor of two men), a curious fact appeared: in these places, the models bads and gays reproduced heteronormal models.

The writer and Peruvian writer living in Spain, Gabriela Wiener, who lives with a woman and a man and told in her self-chronicles, said: "I wear the polyamour shirt", while the transgender writer and actress Cordovan Camilla Sosa Villada gave a twofold twist to the question: "Physical diversity has nothing to do with what we like in a bed, I would say that I am a very heterobadual woman". And Margarita García Robayo, Colombian writer based in Buenos Aires, who acknowledged that being "the only heterobadual" in the conversation, recognized that love was "this place so filled with uncertainty ".

Screens Is there life behind the screens? With the provocation of Juan Manuel Fontana, the people convened during the first interview on Friday reflected on this subject which is a usual obsession. "Use" screens in their different versions and sizes, the notebook, the tablet, the mobile phone, where it is read, what is read on a screen, networks, what no longer calls the "new technologies ", the past of the blogosphere and the time that elapses without we examine the virtualities, the algorithms that manage our lives, our fears, the new that is superimposed on the old. A university expert participated, Eugenia Mitchelstein; a cook to inflict, Paulina Cuisine; writers Pablo Makovsky, Rafael Cipollini and Cristian Molina, who brought an Acorn doll (one of the overpowering girls) who asked: "What do you want to know?" The answers were not definitive, but the coexistence between the different formats was perhaps a possible clue.

Landscape They lined up and danced. The five participants sat in an armchair and two in the armrests. L & # 39; writer Cristian Alarcón, director of Amphibious Magazine and one of the organizers of the Festival, sometimes psychobadyst, sometimes provoked or challenged. And everything was about contrasts: clear and dark, inside and out, yesterday and today. The theatrical author Rosario Paula Marull I had chosen the picture of a charming landscape that, paradoxically, consisted of an absence of landscape: the family in a small pool surrounded by walls. At the Academician, also Rosario, Mónica Bernabé, He had to "read" an image of the conquest on the Columbus landing and choose a dark side, where a group of aboriginal people watched from a corner.

The poet Arturo Carrera He spoke of bright spots scribbling darkness as metaphors for the poem and his native Colonel Pringles as the desired landscape. The journalist and writer Hinde Pomeraniec, author of the chronicle Russians, remembers an image of her childhood: she and her sister hidden in the dark under the blanket to represent the landing on the moon, and choose a more current photo: herself in the frozen Baltic Sea, another lunar landscape, but this time cold and very white, which went back to his ancestors. Two contrasting and strangely familiar landscapes at a time. Y Roberto Jacoby, visual artist, poet and lyricist of the group Virus, recalled the family home in what had been the palace of an Austro-Hungarian family in the district of Plaza San Martín, in opposition to the cellars of the culture of the margins of the 70s of the 80s.

The weather Saturday 18, the journalist and writer Reynaldo Sietecase He did speak the poet and the writer Beatriz Vignoli, doctor of philosophy and poet Lucas Soares, physically Carlos Stia and the musician Litto Nebbia about this unattractive concept. Stia and Soares agreed on the impossibility of defining time ("In physics, we use time, but we do not define it," Stia said). Beatriz Vignoli discussed this in addressing her fictional characters and claimed the "dead times" in which the things of creation occur. Litto Nebbia saved the time of the artists who always produce. Sietecase gave them "a minute" to say what they wanted, as a graph in an hourglbad. They could not ignore the question of the past, the present and the future. They asked if the present exists. And everyone had to disarm one of the many phrases that contained this seemingly indefinable word, sometimes in the form of a warrant: taking advantage of time, killing time, the whole past was better.

Job Saturday evening It is 8 pm and the closing table of the conference deals with a subject almost contradictory with the day and the hour. The discussion is heated. The Spanish journalist and writer Cristina Fallarás is willing to discuss with all those who separate the artistic task or the writing of the rented work, or do not recognize the differences of clbad and gender in the workplace. He will do it with the artist and draftsman Florence Balestrawith the bookseller and the publisher Francisco Garamonawith the visual artist Gabriel Baggio or with the editor of Opinion of the Spanish version of The New York Times, the Venezuelan resident in the United States Boris Muñoz. The reporter pulled the questions Noelia Barral Grigera. Everyone chooses a certain amount of their experience in the workplace. You will fail, that was thrown out of the system during the European financial crisis, ten years ago, and lived on the street with their children for a year.

On Saturday, May 18th, at 9:30 pm, the first edition of the Amphibious Contemporary Thought Festival is coming to a close. Something has just opened in Rosario, this place on earth so close to the river.