In December 2020, we, Gila Kolb and Aina Tur, were asked by the Institut Ramon Llull, in collaboration with the Goethe Institut Barcelona, to curate an online and transnational talk series. The series was to address the question of how cultural practitioners have been confronted with the global pandemic emergency and how this has changed the way cultural experiences are created and shared. Almost a year after this commissioning, we summarise in this article what we have learned and unlearned from ...

With the aim of kickstarting cinema production – a sector which has been heavily affected throughout this last year – the Institut Ramon Llull ran a feature-film scriptwriting residency. The initiative, which took place from 17 until 31 May at Faberllull Olot, was supported by the Academy of Catalan Cinema and the Associated Scriptwriters of Catalonia (GAC). Esteve Plantada had the chance to talk to those heading up five of the nine projects

Pacho Poch is a key figure to understand auteur and independent cinema during the last thirty years in our country. Being specially relevant within documentary filmmaking, Tolosa festival dedicated a retrospective series to his figure, edited in Gabriela Zea’s book 'Sobre el cinema documental'. An interview conducted by Esteve Plantada.

The small Catalan cultural and linguistic community in L’Alguer, a town in the north-west corner of Sardinia, as well as the poetry written there from the mid-twentieth century onwards, are perhaps two exceptional and surprising singularities. Poet and academic Joan-Elies Adell shines a light on the poetry in Catalan produced in this Sardinian town.

This year, 4 November marked 100 years since the birth of Jordi-Pere Cerdà (Sallagosa, 1920–Perpinyà, 11 September 2011), one of the most unique poetic voices in Catalan literature. And one of the most unknown, hidden under piles of clichés and reductive labels.

We interview Raquel García-Tomás, a young interdisciplinary creator and composer who has just won the National Music Prize for the opera 'Je suis narcissiste' and who has just premiered at the Liceu 'Per precaució', a piece composed during confinement.

In the crucial decades in which the internet has replaced television and books as the main educator and entertainer in all ‘normal’ languages and cultures, there were no influencers communicating in Catalan. What is the current status of the Catalan language on the internet? Joan Burdeus explains.

For the first time ever in Catalan cinema, ‘the chasm between the large proportion of female students on audiovisual studies courses and the lack of women in the industry is finally beginning to close’, explains film critic Eulàlia Iglesias. Names like Carla Simón – winner of the Catalan National Culture Prize – Elena Martín, Lucía Alemany, Neus Ballús and Belén Funes, among others, are proof of this.

Agustín Pérez Rubio (Valencia, 1972), co-curator of the 11th Berlin Biennale, interviews Mariokissme (Málaga, 1980) and R. Marcos Mota (Tarragona, 1988), creators of the installation Schreber is a Woman (2020), on display from 29 October until 1 November at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. They are El Palomar: an artistic collective founded in Barcelona in 2012 as a place for production, research, dialogue and political visibility. Their work process has been hybrid ...

Jesús Moncada is one of our most translated contemporary authors, with novels, short stories and articles rendered into some twenty languages since the nineties. His death at the age of 64 left his oeuvre in Catalan somewhat incomplete – with a final unpublished novel – and made it difficult to promote overseas. His publisher, Pilar Beltran, from Edicions 62, says they will have to keep their noses to the grindstone and, above all, ‘gather all the resources possible’ ...

In 2012, he won Your Film Fest, a competition organised by YouTube and supported by Ridley Scott. Not long after, he was working on an online series produced by Scott himself and the actor Michael Fassbender. Now, David Victori has consolidated his status as a filmmaker with Cross the Line (No matarás), his second feature film, which submerges the viewer in a Barcelona full of neon lights and unexpected twists and is being presented at the 53th edition of the Sitges International Fantastic ...

Interview with Cécile Le Vaguerèse-Marie and Vanessa Maestre, directors of the Théâtre Paul Éluard de Choisy-le-Roi, where this year the shows of two Catalan companies have been programmed: Lali Ayguadé and Agnès Mateus with Quim Tarrida