martes, 23 de abril de 2019

IAFOR Asian Conference on Cultural Studies


"Reclaiming the Future"
May 24-26, 2019 | Toshi Center & Tokyo Garden Terrace Kioicho, Tokyo
Love as an Algorithm
Keynote Presentation: Gloria Montero

While cognitive scientist Steven Pinker keeps assuring us that prosperity, safety, peace and even happiness are on the rise worldwide, other scientists and philosophers as diverse as Stephen Hawking, Timothy Morton and Yuval Noah Harari warn us that the world as we have known it, and even ourselves, are on the verge of a devastating change. Climate catastrophe might well lead to global destruction, while artificial intelligence and biological engineering threaten to make human beings redundant. Extinction, we are told, is the norm, survival the exception. Living amidst the devastating possibilities which in this age of acceleration could prove remarkably close, have we humans already been subject to a mutation: a growing fear translated into a generalized disregard for the other, a refusal to pay attention and accept responsibility if it threatens our own comfort, even a developing propensity for hate? As conscious beings with the ability to distinguish between cause and effect, means and ends, we are witnesses to what goes on in our world. While many of the practical and ethical decisions vis a vis the immediate future need to be made with knowledge and power beyond that of the ordinary citizen, my personal conviction is that Love presents each and every one of us with a clear and vital algorithm for our endurance. Love in its most comprehensive connotation as a recognition of our profound interrelatedness – humans, animals, plants, the earth itself, the stars – every single element in the universe. True awareness of this extraordinary interconnection demands an attentiveness to what is going on, exacts not only an active concern for the other but an outright respect for our differences, along with the ineluctable conviction that only by sharing responsibility can we hope to survive. As we are thrust headlong into the pending Anthropocene, Love might well be our one viable path to a future.


Gloria Montero - Novelist, Playwright & Poet

Biography


Novelist, playwright and poet Gloria Montero grew up in a family of Spanish immigrants in Australia’s North Queensland. After studies in theatre and music, she began to work in radio and theatre, and then moved to Canada where she continued her career as an actress, singer, writer, broadcaster, scriptwriter and TV interviewer.
Co-founder of the Centre for Spanish-Speaking Peoples in Toronto (1972), she served as its Director until 1976. Following the success of her oral history The Immigrants (1973) she was invited to act as Consultant on Immigrant Women to the Multicultural Department of the Secretary of State, Government of Canada.
She organised the international conferences "Amnistia" (1970) and "Solidaridad" (1974) in Toronto to support and make known the democratic Spain that was developing in the last years of the Franco dictatorship, and in 1976 at Bethune College, York University, "Spain 1936-76: The Social and Cultural Aftermath of the Spanish Civil War".
With her husband, filmmaker David Fulton, she set up Montero-Fulton Productions to produce documentary films on social, cultural and ecological themes. Their film, Crisis in the Rain, on the effects of acid rain, won the Gold Camera Award American Film Festival 1982. Montero was consultant-interviewer on Dreams and Nightmares (A-O Productions, California) about Spain under Franco, a film that won international awards in Florence, Moscow, Leipzig and at the American Film Festival 1975.
Among her many radio documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation are: The Music of Spain – a series of 18 hours which presented Spanish music within a social and historical framework; Segovia: the man and his music — a 2-hour special (Signature); Women and the Law (Ideas); Foreign Aid: Hand-out or Rip-Off (Ideas).
Since 1978 Montero has been living in Barcelona, where she has continued to write and publish novels such as The Villa Marini, All Those Wars and Punto de Fuga. Her poem Les Cambres was printed with a portfolio of prints by artist Kouji Ochiai (Contratalla 1983). A cycle of prose poems, Letters to Janez Somewhere in Ex-Yugoslavia, provided the basis for collaboration with painter Pere Salinas in a highly successful exhibition at Barcelona's Galería Eude (1995).
She won the 2003 NH Premio de Relato for Ménage à Trois, the first time the Prize was awarded for a short story in English.
Well known among her theatre work is the award-winning Frida K., which has toured Canada, played New York and Mexico and has been mounted in productions in Spain, Cuba, the Czech Republic, Poland, Sweden and Latvia.
Photo by Pilar Aymerich.
Keynote Presentation (2019) | Love as an Algorithm



martes, 10 de julio de 2018

IAFOR Barcelona July 13-15, 2018

Guernica por Pablo Picasso (1937)



The IAFOR International Conference
on Global Studies 2018

"Fearful Futures: Cultural Studies and the Question of Agency in the Twenty-First Century"

We have reached a moment in international history that is one of potential paradigm shift. It is a moment when a problematic, but at least blandly progressivist, pro-multiculturalist movement toward “cosmopolitanism” (as Kwame Anthony Appiah might use the term) is being threatened by a far more destructive and potentially genocidal ethno-nationalism, the ferocity of which is fuelled by economic disparity, religious intolerance and retrograde ideologies regarding gender, race and sexuality. The possible global futures we face are fearful, indeed.
In this context, cultural studies has a unique role to play in tracing the genealogy of the present moment and charting different paths forward. As never before, cultural studies is called to return to its activist roots, to diagnose the ideologies driving hatred and intolerance, and to posit different models of social engagement and organisation. Looking to the past, what do we learn about the challenges of today? How does culture replicate itself (or critically engage itself) in the classroom, in literature, in social media, in film, in the visual and theatrical arts, in the family, and among peer groups? How do we rise to the challenge of articulating a notion of human rights that also respects cultural difference? How do cultural representations of the environment abet or challenge the forces driving climate change? What are the roles and responsibilities of the individual activist as teacher, writer, social scientist and community member?
This international and interdisciplinary conference will bring together a range of academics, independent researchers, artists and activists to explore the challenges that we face in the twenty-first century. While we have every right to fear the future, we also have agency in creating that future. Can we commit to a cosmopolitanism that celebrates difference and that challenges social inequity? On our ability to answer to that question affirmatively likely hangs our very survival. 

How can writers respond when the future looks fearful?
Featured Panel Presentation: Philip Ball, Gloria Montero and Professor Liz Byrski
As the writer Nancy Kress remarked, "Fiction is about stuff that’s screwed up". She’s probably right, in the sense that some of the best writing has arisen from historically turbulent times – whether its focus was on the past, present or the future. Turbulent times have tended to produce equally turbulent responses from writers, often obliging them to use the future as a metaphor for the present – think Orwell’s 1984 written in 1948 as a contemporary response to totalitarianism. How fearful did the future look back in 1948 to Orwell, and how fearful does it look to us now, in 2018?
The news that we are on the brink of apocalypse may indeed be fake, but there is undoubtedly a current sense of unease about the future, in sharp contrast to the post-conflict era of the 1960s and 1970s when everything seemed possible, we made love and not war, and technology appeared to be offering us infinite horizons.
Enter the writer, to try to make sense of it all, or to just reflect and even comfort us. Maybe in troubled times, more people look to both fiction and non-fiction as succour, as a way of testing out their own hypotheses. The success of Yuval Noah Harari’s recent Homo Deus would seem to be proof of this – offering us an individual interpretation of how a fearful future might look, but also of how it might be avoided. On a more modest scale, with our future allegedly so fearful, what can writers offer now?


domingo, 26 de noviembre de 2017

David Fulton (Toowoomba 26-11-1927-Barcelona 19-02-2017)

Today, November 26, documentary filmmaker David Fulton would have celebrated his 90th birthday. In loving memory, here is a transcript of the talk David gave at the PACIFIC SOLUTIONS International Congress, 12-15 December, 2011, under the auspices of the Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona, and the Centre for Peace and Social Justice, Southern Cross University, Australia.


Coolabah, No.10, 2013, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians, Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona

Pacific Solutions for the Environment: A Personal Journey


David Fulton

Copyright©2013 David Fulton. This text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged.

Abstract: This paper addresses David Fulton’s career as a documentary filmmaker. In his own words, Fulton explains how his sense of responsibility for the natural environment and its interplay with human presence was established. His is a story of personal involvement and an emotional journey into a pacific solution for the meeting of man and nature. 

Key words: documentary-filming; environmental protection; personal engagement.

Recently, I was given a small book on documentary film by Patricia Aufderheide entitled “Documentary Film - A very short introduction” and I would like to quote: “A shared convention of most documentaries is the narrative structure. They’re stories, they have beginnings, middles and ends…they take viewers on emotional journeys.”

 I was once contracted by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to make a film about alcoholism among elderly people. I soon recognized that I had a difficult story on my hands. My subjects were totally cut off from family and friends. They were completely and utterly alone. And that’s what I called my film: Alone. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with them because they were “impossible” people who had brought nothing but disappointment after disappointment. 

Filming these troubled people posed a lot of problems because I insisted on filming them exactly as they were. Often this meant we had to film among the squalor in which many of them dragged out their lives. I wanted to show how the society dealt with these lost elderly people. I was taking viewers on an emotional journey. 

It was in documentary film that I first became interested in the natural world and how essential it was for us all to play our part in preserving it. 

A number of our films have dealt with fresh water resources.

In one film involving the Great Lakes that divide Canada and the United States we looked at the accumulation of PCB’s and the effect of this on herring gulls nesting on some of the islands. Scientists studying the gulls had found alarmingly high levels of PCB (Polychlorinated Biphenyls) resulting in thin egg-shells. They also found that females were laying their eggs but often the chicks inside were dead. Even more alarming was the discovery that parent gulls were not taking normal care of their nests. 

Now, during my years as a filmmaker I have seen only a few examples of ordinary people becoming actively involved in the broad process of “taking care of the environment”. We have seen a lot of activity by a few large organizations in taking bold initiatives, often on an impressive scale, to draw public attention to specific situations – like saving the whales. All of this work has its positive side but it also has a negative aspect. It relieves the ordinary citizen of feeling any need to become personally involved. 

Today, the electrical companies, the banks and even the oil and gas companies seem to have become the guardians of “our” environment. They are doing the job so we do not have to think about things at all. Personally, I am in favour of more “people involvement”. The big question is how to develop this in today’s world where the polluters are so big and so powerful. 

One of my most memorable experiences of “people involvement” showed up in the city of Caceres in Extremadura when I was working with a British television group on a film about the white stork. According to legend, it is the white stork that brings the babies from France. These big birds are part of the urban scene in Caceres and scarcely a tall building is without its stork nest. 

The storks return from northern climes every February without fail and it is not uncommon for people to help things along by providing what we might call a “starter nest” to attract a new pair of storks to settle on top of a building. 

While we were filming there we heard that a class of schoolchildren was preparing to place a new “starter nest” on yet another building. We asked if we might film the event. The great day arrived and the class had everything arranged. They had ropes and pulleys to raise the starter nest and leave it ready for its new tenants. 

The children pulled mightily on the ropes and they soon had the new nest in place. This brought shouts of delight from one and all. We filmed the entire operation. 

On the other hand, my involvement with a film on Lake Baikal was by no means casual. I had met a Finnish producer, Erkki Kivi, and a filmmaker from St. Petersburg, Yuri Klimov, who had already created a fine series on Russian wildlife and this set me thinking. I had the idea of involving Klimov and Kivi in making a series of nature films on wildlife all the way from the Urals to Kamchatka. I would write the scripts and Klimov would do the filming right across Siberia. 

Our project got off to a good start and our first film looked at Lake Baikal, one of the world’s biggest reserves of fresh water. We anticipated Jacques Cousteau, who turned up while Kilmov was filming the lake in winter when it looks like the other side of the moon.

Klimov filmed the fresh-water seals that live in the lake and he went underwater to show whole regions of fresh-water sponges. Klimov brought back film of a wide range of wildlife and recorded many aspects of Lake Baikal totally unknown in the West. 

I had a large part in final editing of all this material. Our film editor was Mexican so the work took on a truly international feeling. 

Here I must note that, while our original plan was to make a seven-part series on Siberia and its wildlife, our Russian cinematographer had a fatal heart attack and left us and our project forever bereft. We decided to stop things right there and so what we ended up with was a fine one-hour film: Lake Baikal: the World’s Deepest Lake. The film was shown on television in various countries including Finland, Russia and Spain. 

I should like to mention a film made for the Ontario Ministry of the Environment by our production company, Montero-Fulton Productions, started up by my wife Gloria and myself. We were small but we had a lot of energy and ideas. That film was called Crisis in the Rain.(1) 

This was an informational film about the problem of acid rain. This problem had its origins in coal-fired power stations in the USA from which air-borne pollution moved across the border into Canada. The acidic pollution was finally deposited on many of the small lakes of great importance to Canada’s tourist industry. These lakes attracted boaters and fishing enthusiasts (many from the United States), and it was found that a lot of the lakes were becoming denuded of sports fish. This set off the alarms. 

In the United States we filmed big power plants belching forth loads of dark pollution. In Canada, we showed scientists studying some of the affected lakes. The film was widely shown and won us a first prize and a Gold Camera Award at the US Film Festivals in Chicago—in what we might dub “enemy territory”!

Of course, policies change depending on the level of government. Canada’s federal government has just announced it is withdrawing from the Kyoto Agreement. 

My interest in water quality shows up in another film I made for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation about mercury poisoning in a river in Northern Ontario on which the Native Indian communities of White Dog and Grassy Narrows depended for their living. 

I had been sent to look in on these communities, where a major paper mill had been dumping mercury into the river where they lived and there were fears of mercury poisoning such as had occurred at Minamata in Japan. What I found were two communities in a severe state of social disintegration. 

The government had banned commercial fishing and this had cut off the livelihood of both communities. The government sent out monthly support cheques but a lot of this money went into alcohol and the level of domestic violence was very high.

I went back to the CBC to report on what I had seen and I fully expected to be sent back with a film crew right away. The answer from the producer was simple: “No budget”. 

I was so moved by what I had seen at White Dog and Grassy Narrows that I blurted out that I would do the documentary even without getting my usual fee. Of course, that did not fit into the corporate scheme. I went home very troubled. 

Next day a miracle happened. I had a call from the CBC producer to say I would, in fact, have a film crew to tell the story of those communities and, what is more, I would be paid! 

Nor was this was an easy assignment. I called the crew together and we agreed to take up residence for a week in the teacher’s house, vacant for the summer holidays. We would take food and prepare our own meals right there. Everyone was in agreement so we loaded up and left for Grassy Narrows. 

Of course, the best laid plans…

We were made welcome by the Indian Chief of Grassy Narrows and settled into the absent teacher’s house. 

First problem: the water pump was not working so there was no running water to wash dishes or to make the toilet work! We had a meal but there was no way of cleaning up afterwards. We had got off to a bad start. 

I had to work out a plan so that evening I took a walk along the river-bank to think things over. Finally, I went back toward the teacher’s house. When I arrived there I found the crew sitting in their car so I stopped to talk. Imagine my surprise when one of the crew began to explain their view of the situation. 

According to this view, we should film what was happening at Grassy Narrows in one solid day’s work and get out as fast as we could. 

This was a point of view I did not share. I bid the crew “Goodnight” and retired to my room to work out a plan. I decided I would be ruthless. I would send home the lighting man who appeared to be the ring leader of the mutiny on the grounds of “unsafe health conditions”. Then we would continue to work according to my plan. 

We worked hard all the next day and things were rather strained but gradually I found that another miracle was taking place. Slowly the crew members, even the “mutiny leader”, had begun to see the terrible situation I was trying to show on film. The “mutiny” was over. There was no doubt in my mind that our film would take viewers on an emotional journey. 

One of the first things I did next day was to take the Chief back to the old village on a nearby island from which the community had been wrested some years earlier to “make access easier for the teacher”. The old wooden church building was still there, sitting in a sea of long grass which came up to our ears. We filmed the Chief walking through the tall grass looking at the old wooden church that was now falling down. This was the beginning of the emotional journey that made this film really work. 

Next day, back at the new community site, I sat the Chief down on a big rock close by the edge of the river and asked him to tell us what life was like at the old village. 

I was always getting comments about the way I conducted my interviews. The fact is I seldom asked people direct questions. I simply asked them to tell me their story. And everyone has a story to tell. 

In the case of the Grassy Narrows chief, I did not need to ask him anything more. His story just poured out. I remember a tribe of small children sitting on top of a nearby rock listening quietly to what their Chief had to say. 

This film told the stark truth about these Indian communities and how the effects of dumping mercury or other dangerous chemicals into rivers and lakes can have devastating effects on the lives and well-being of ordinary people. The film was shown on National Television and the children in the Grassy Narrows school were obliged to watch it and they were encouraged to write to me. Their letters were devastating. One was very short and I shall never forget how it ended: 

“What will happen to us? Who knows? God knows.”

To end up, I should like to say that, in the course my work in documentary filmmaking, I have seen only a few isolated examples of citizens or groups of citizens taking a personal stand on environmental issues. Does this mean that the ordinary citizen really has no voice? Have we allowed ourselves to believe that all is well? Are the new communications channels now opening up going to give ordinary people more of a say in what happens to their environment? I would like to think so. 

I will always remember the children in Caceres who prepared a starter nest to attract a new family of storks, and the children of Grassy Narrows who inherited their Chief’s concern for maintaining their way of life in spite of the actions of those who would thoughtlessly take away their livelihood and their sense of community. In my own work in documentary I’ve tried to use the medium to tell a story and to take viewers on emotional journeys. 

This has been part of my own personal search for pacific horizons in the environment we all share. 

David Fulton was born in Australia and lived many years in Canada before moving to Barcelona. He worked freelance as a documentary filmmaker, writing, directing and producing films on the natural world and environmental concerns, such as the effect of PCBs on herring gulls in the Great Lakes and the health and social effects of mercury pollution from a paper mill on the native community of Grassy Narrows. “To the beat of a different drummer” looked at the life and work of Henry David Thoreau and featured folk-singer Pete Seeger as narrator and performer. With Gloria Montero, he produced “Crisis in the Rain” showing the effects of acid rain from cross-border pollution produced by coal-burning power-plants in the United States.

This film won a Gold Camera Award from the US Film Festivals (Chicago). With Finnish and Russian partners, he coproduced “Baikal: The world’s deepest lake” filmed in Siberia and shown widely on televisión.


_________________________
(1) should like to mention that the film editor who worked with us on Crisis in the Rain—and many of our other films—was Ronald Sanders, editor of A Dangerous Method, a volume on Jung and Freud released only recently. Working on documentary films Sanders always would come up with editing alternatives that demanded creative decisions.  

viernes, 18 de agosto de 2017

BARCELONA



Thankyou all for the love, the calls and messages that have poured in from all over the world. As far as we know, everyone close to us is safe and well and our hearts go out to all those who suffered yesterday's attack directly.


No hay texto alternativo automático disponible.
Image: Frederic Amat

domingo, 9 de julio de 2017

"Cities of the World. World Cities."


Italo Calvino says that the delight you take in a city is not through the wonders it offers but in the answer it gives to a personal question. I remember the moment when I first said aloud “This is where I want to live.” Barcelona became an ultimate destination right from that first visit. Eventually, I was able to make my home here and have lived for years now in the Raval, Jean Genet's Barrio Chino, right in the heart of the old city, with its diverse and dense immigrant population. Only now, as I look back on my work as a writer, do I begin to glimpse the question Barcelona must have answered for me. A sociologist, an architect or urban planner, looking at the city from when the Romans settled it as Barcino, through its political and commercial development in the Middle Ages, to the rich texture left by Modernism, might analyse the city's magnetic attraction for tourists today. For me, Barcelona has become overlaid by memories of people and events so that certain corners now speak in my own voice. Gaudí, Picasso and Lorca have become personal experiences here but so has “the grandmother of Barcelona”, who for 6,000 years lay under three metres of soil until she was unearthed under the parking lot of the Boquería, the city's central market, right next to my home some 4 or 5 years ago. This Neolithic overtone to modern Barcelona has taken its place alongside the mad escapade of Columbus finally being able to show off his “New World treasures” to the Catholic Kings right here in the square outside the Tinell, the terrible consequence of the liquidation of the Jewish Call in the Gothic quarter, the ravages of Spain's Civil War, the long dictatorship and Barcelona's solidarity today with refugees. In this paper, I show how inadvertently through my work I have explored the question Barcelona put to me, answering a need to understand myself and all of us as part of an evolution that will continue even after we are no longer here to see it.

miércoles, 24 de febrero de 2016

Espacio escénico

A stage space has two rules: (1) Anything can happen and (2) Something must happen.”
― Peter Brook, The Empty Space
Un espacio escénico tiene dos reglas: (1) Cualquier cosa puede suceder, y (2) Algo debe suceder ".
--- Peter Brook, El espacio vacíio
Photo: (Aula de Especialización Fotográfica)
Arthur Leipzig: Jimmy Durante 1954

martes, 24 de noviembre de 2015

► Three writers on the Borders of Belonging: Brett Hetherington, Gloria Montero, Inez Baranay

Brett Hetherington speaks about rejecting the idea that a man needs to ‘be a (traditional) man’ in every situation; recognising that our own fathers were almost definitely deprived of learning from a model of a complete father; learning from women’s (typically) more honest expression of a greater range of emotions; taking heed of the fact that fathers are starting to become aware of their abilities to bring up children well; and watching out for ‘the happy game’ in ourselves and others we care about.
Gloria Montero asks how story-tellers are affected in this contemporary world where all manner of traditional borders have been broken down and where emigration has become a quintessential element. So many of us today--story-tellers and readers alike-- carry more than one culture, often two or three languages, and a background that transcends national barriers. Does this affect the stories that we are telling? Using examples from her work Gloria speaks of what this has meant to her as a writer.
Inez Baranay speaks about how her novels and stories can be seen as about people on the borders, and about the way she lives and writes on the borders, then interrogates what these borders are. She reads passages from her work as examples of writing on borders. The three writers question each other then invite questions from the audience.

Brett Hetherington is a parent and former foster-parent. He was a secondary school teacher for 15 years in Australia, Japan, England and Catalonia, northern Spain (where he has lived since 2006, teaching adults for the last three years.) Brett is a regular commentator for Australia’s ABC Radio where he reports on family and cultural life in Spain and his journalism has appeared in publications including The Guardian and Barcelona Metropolitan. He has also worked as a speechwriter and researcher for a Member of Parliament in Australia, specialising in education and social policies. Brett is currently a staff writer for Catalonia Today magazine. He lives with his partner Paula and teenage son Hugo.
Gloria Montero grew up in a family of Spanish immigrants in Australia’s North Queensland. After beginning to work in radio and theatre, she moved to Canada where she continued her career as writer, singer, actress, broadcaster, scriptwriter, TV-interviewer, producer of radio and film documentaries. Co-founder of the Centre for Spanish-Speaking Peoples in Toronto, she served as its Director until 1976. Following the success of her oral history The Immigrants she was invited to act as consultant on Immigrant Women to the Multicultural Department of the Secretary of State, Government of Canada. Since 1978 she has lived in Barcelona, writing and publishing in both English and Spanish. Her novels include titles such as The Villa Marini, Punto de Fuga, All Those Wars. Montero's theatre work, in particular the play Frida K., has been performed in countries around the world winning multiple awards.

Inez Baranay is a writer of Australian citizenship, immigrant background, transnational culture, cosmopolitan temperament. Her most recent books are the memoir Local Time a memoir of cities, friendships and the writing life, and a novel, Ghosts Like Us. In Australia, India, USA and Europe, Inez has lectured on writing issues and taught creative writing in universities, schools and community groups, given many readings and talks, been a guest at conferences, seminars and festivals, and been a resident at various international writers’ centres. She currently lives and teaches literature in Turkey.

martes, 3 de junio de 2014

lunes, 21 de abril de 2014

FRIDA. K nueva edición

Ya ha salido la nueva edición de FRIDA K. en castellano que incluye fotos de producciones internacionales... podeis encontrarla en Amazón.


domingo, 8 de diciembre de 2013

CONVERSATION: AN IMPERATIVE OF OUR TIMES




Gloria Montero
Novelist, poet, playwright

Baden Offord
Professor of Cultural Studies,
Director of Centre for Peace and Social Justice,
Southern Cross University, Australia

It could be argued that communication defines our age. Catalan sociologist Manuel Castells makes the point that the world is now an internationally networked society.  However, the essential challenge remains about how people get along in a complex world of difference. The British-born Ghanaian-American philosopher, cultural theorist and novelist, Anthony Appiah, makes the case for a cosmopolitan ethic as an answer.  This is one which focuses on key elements of what it means to be human while not ignoring the differences that need to be accommodated through negotiation.  Importantly, he argues that no culture is infallible, and we need to learn from each other. To borrow from Desmond Tutu’s use of the African term of ubuntu, we become human through our relationship with others.

In this panel, Gloria Montero and Baden Offord will approach these concerns through two reflective pieces of writing followed by a conversation of sorts. Drawing on their experience of being and belonging in between cultures, as migrants, as critical thinkers and authors – with a common connection to Australia – they will contend that conversations about who we are, how we belong, and importantly how to get along, are now more needed than ever before.

miércoles, 10 de julio de 2013

Wednesday, 17 July 2013


19.30 Dramatic Reading

Gloria Montero
Frida K. --A Dialogue for a Single Actress

Introduction: Jacqueline Hurtley, University of Barcelona, Spain


martes, 30 de octubre de 2012

viernes, 21 de septiembre de 2012

Looking Back to Look Forwards


Looking Back to Look Forwards
10 - 14 December 2012
Under the auspices of the
Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona
And the Centre for Peace and Social Justice, Southern Cross University

From There to Here
Gloria Montero, Jamal Mahjoub, Ron Pretty

Abstract
How did we get from there to here? Jamal Mahjoub, Gloria Montero and Ron
Pretty have all either grown up in one continent and now live in another,
or are descendants of people who did. Building on these experiences, these
papers will explore aspects of displacement and of the awareness of 'The
Other' as recorded in the authors' own works and in the works of other
writers from AustraliaSpain and elsewhere. What has been the impact of
displacement? Motifs of nostalgia, of incomprehension, of threat and
ambition will be explored. In this session, the ways in which these tropes
are embodied in the language and structure of contemporary prose and
poetry will be explored.

viernes, 22 de junio de 2012

Whatever you can imagine is real



When I am asked, and I very often am, if the stories that I write are true--based on something that really happened, I usually quote Picasso.  Whatever you can imagine is real.   

Nonetheless, I am not at all sure imagination plays much of a role for a writer of what we consider fiction. Memory, I am convinced, has a greater impact on the stories one tells. And for me, memory entails more than what any of us might remember about our personal experiences.  For me, there is a collective memory at large in the universe—emotions, sounds, shapes, colours—that is part of each one of us. It is what allows us to write, with integrity and acuity, about circumstances we have often never experienced ourselves.    

Consider a unicorn. From time immemorial, the unicorn has been deemed legendary and we might well regard stories about the magical single horn as metaphoric.  However, the Hubble space telescope picture of the Trifid Nebula, 9,000 light years away, suggests we don’t have to imagine anything… it is already there simply waiting to be acknowledged.    



lunes, 14 de mayo de 2012

INVITATION TO BEST OF BARCELONA INK


PACIFIC SOLUTIONS International Congress




“Are Pacific solutions pertinent for contemporary novelists?                                                              
Gloria Montero and Marianne Choquet



PACIFIC SOLUTIONS International Congress
12-15 December, 2011
under the auspices of the Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona, and the Centre for Peace and Social Justice, Southern Cross University