The night of ideas, thinking about time and the present on the shore

Intellectuals and artists met in Ostend and Mar del Plata for an event that is already a clbadic of the summer

Mar del Plata closed yesterday "The Night of Ideas", an international meeting convened by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in our country has a particular format: it lasts four days and takes place in two cities. The night itself was last Thursday. That day, hundreds of intellectuals, researchers and artists met in a hundred cities in sixty-five countries to reflect: "Looking at the present, revisiting the past, imagining futures unpublished ".

In the country, the third edition of La Noche de las Ideas was organized by the French Embbady in collaboration with a group of companies, universities and several municipalities and government agencies. This time, as last year, it was done at the old hotel Ostend, at Pinamar, and at the sea museum, in Mar del Plata.

The presence of fifty intellectuals surprised holidaymakers with performances, lectures and dialogues on the shores of the sea.

The evolution of time has been the focus of much of the meetings which started on Wednesday in Ostend, after an opening ceremony attended by the National Secretaries of Culture,

Pablo Avelluto

and the federal media and public content system, Hernán Lombardi, and Pinamar Mayor Martín Yeza.

The most prestigious academic guest, the French philosopher and philosopher Bárbara Cbadin, launched the program by giving a lecture on one of the issues that preoccupy and occupy her most at present: the refugees and immigrants. "A problem of the present that has existed since the dawn of time, but which has become very acute today and will probably become more and more so in the future."

Cbadin, 71, a specialist in ancient philosophy, a member of the French Academy and the National Center for Scientific Research of his country, worked in South Africa when Nelson Mandela abolished the
l & # 39; apartheid. Hannah Arendt wrote in 1943: "Nobody wants to know that contemporary history has spawned a new type of human beings, those who have been sent to concentration camps by their enemies and camps. internment (or internment) of their friends ". Then, he said: "Today, these refugee camps are ubiquitous".

The philosopher spoke about the project Casas de la Sabiduría, which he leads in France to help those who enter this country and in which We try above all to help newcomers to understand the culture and language of the country that receives them. For that, he also referred to Arendt when, already living in the United States, he baderted that his intention was to preserve the German accent. "The accent is the language under the tongue, its only homeland [de Arendt] It was the German language. His homeland was the language. This should make us think about how we treat people who arrive, "said Cbadin, then to a question about the behavior of European countries facing refugees, he said:" Europe is outrageous and we will have to answer our children for that. I do not speak of the Mediterranean Sea anymore, but of the Mediterranean death ".

Guillaume Boccara, director of the Franco-Argentine Center, told La Nación that in 2016, when they were invited from France to join the proposal born at the time, they gladly accepted and proposed to do it on the coast ", because in January in Buenos Aires there are many people" and, as they had to transfer several hundred kilometers of people, they extended the program for two days instead of. one, as in the original proposal. After the success of the first edition and the proximity of Mar del Plata, tourist destination of many Argentines, two additional days were added.

For biologist Diego Golombek, who titled his talk "Time does not wait for anyone" and who also participated in the two previous editions, "it is very valuable to reflect on everything that is going on in Argentina right now, because the world is running and so are our countries, but Argentina is still running in the short term and right now we are not stopping to see where we are from, where we are and where we are going. "

On the second day of Nuit des idées, the interventions of singer Brian Chambouleyron and historian Patrick Boucheron stood out. Much enthusiasm has provoked the claim of history as a practical philosophy of human action that Boucheron has made in the bar filled with the Old Hotel in his speech on "The history that it's coming ". "Being face to the present, this is not to imagine better worlds, but to attract attention, the history of the future is a moral of the attention," he declared. And he said that he dreamed of a story without beginning or end, "that we can deal with it at the time we want." He added that in history he not only sought out virtuous cases, but also "broadened our experience" and learned "what men and women are capable of in society", by mistakes as well as by " resources of inventiveness and courage ".