18:30 – Change Is Changing. Timothy Morton
With the collaboration of: Literary Europe Live, Literature Across Frontiers and Creative Europe
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 is another person’s benefit (Arctic Russians and Norwegians looking forward to sunbathing, perhaps). And much, much more than this, we are seeing how the scale of human change is only one scale among a bewildering variety of them. Geological time is about how rocks change – they don’t just sit there reliably. All these profound shifts are changing our very ideas about what change itself could be – whether political, artistic, psychological or physical. Change itself is changing. How do we cope in a world where not only are our physical environments melting, but also our ideas about what those environments are?
19:15 – MAPA10. Literary Cartography of Barcelona. Xavier Theros and Marina Espasa
With the collaboration of: Barcelona Ciutat de la Literatura
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. MAPA10 defines and delimits ten areas in the city that have been worked on, visited or inhabited by writers, who have converted them into literary material.
19:45 – The Scandal of Ageing. Lynne Segal. Presents: Laura Huerga
With the collaboration of: British Council
As Segal illustrates copiously in Out of Time: The Pleasure & Perils of Ageing, across times and places older women, although usually devoid of power, have been feared and mocked as troublemakers if not, in harsher times, condemned as witches. It is the ageing female body that everyone, including women themselves, has found so hard not to fear or disdain, and this is seen especially in representations of ageing female flesh. Culturally, the pressure is on all of us, but especially women, to remain forever young, with endless false promises for keeping us that way. Even with the best of intentions, those wanting to overcome the disparaging ways we are aged by culture have thought in terms of agelessness, suggesting the old are little different from the young. Yet such age-blindness is itself a subtle expression of age prejudice, stripping old people of their history, and leaving the obsession with youth unchallenged. Perhaps old women need to begin ageing scandalously, to beat back the scandals of ageing.
20:30 – Opening party. DJ: Anna Lanau