COMUNICATION

The European and Ibero-American Academy of Yuste Foundation opened the course “Iberian and Transatlantic Cultural Dialogues: The Spirit of Avant-Gardes, a Century Later” today, where the mark left by the avant-garde spirit throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries will be analysed and reviewed. The course runs until next Friday, 2 July, from 17:00 to 19.30 pm.

During the opening, the director of Yuste Foundation, Juan Carlos Moreno, cherished the memory of all those who, in some way, have been affected by the global pandemic. To this end, he referred to José Saramago, academic of Yuste, when he affirmed that ′′we are the memory we have and the responsibility we assume, without memory we do not exist and without responsibility we may not deserve to exist.

For the second year, and consecutively, Campus Yuste hosts a course on Iberian and transatlantic cultural dialogues. If it focused on ” identities in contact ” last year, this year the focus will be on the vestiges of the avant-garde a hundred years later. Thus, the director of the course, Antonio Sáez Delgado, professor at the University of Évora, said that the main objective is “to discover what survives today from those avant-gardes and those modernist movements that wanted to change the course of Western culture and society at the beginning of the 20th century”. To this end, relevant personalities from the world of Ibero-American culture will speak about literature, plastic arts, music, cinema and architecture.

This first Campus Yuste course has combined both the virtual and the face-to-face modalities, resulting in the registration of 151 people from 17 countries: Argentina, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, France, Germany, Italy, Nicaragua, Peru, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Ukraine, and the United States.

Moreno Piñero pointed out the need for this course to be a reality because Portugal and Spain are currently “two secondary actors in a disoriented and unbalanced world, two actors who need to support each other on equal footing”. In his opinion, both countries have experienced too many centuries of agreements and disagreements through alliances, treaties and wars. However, he said, “today, our two countries are the two least Eurosceptic countries in the European Union and must, therefore, leave the gloom zone to become more prominent”. “This, – he added – will strengthen a Europe linked to Ibero-America through a well-armed hinge called the Iberian Peninsula.”

In addition to Professor Sáez, the course is also directed by Professor José Luis Bernal Salgado, from the University of Extremadura. Some of the speakers are El País journalist Javier Rodríguez Marcos; film director Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón; writer and art critic Juan Manuel Bonet; writer María Kodama; and writers Mário Cláudio and Juan Bonilla, among others.

The course counts with the collaboration of the Office of Cross-Border Initiatives of the Regional Government of Extremadura and the Organization of Ibero-American States in Lisbon.