How is life going? Spring comes loaded with succulent news and it will be raining books in the coming days. Despite we are still going through a pandemic that when it seems to be about to subside, it hits us again, I think we should start to shake off the tedium after a year and a month of the corona monotheme. It seems to me, in fact, that it would be appropriate to start reading the tea leaves or the cava bubbles, to predict what life after the virus might be like. So I propose that we move forward to recover a little of that roaring twenties spirit, those of great dreams and freedoms, which in the last century also arrived after a pandemic, and which in this 21st century was ripped from our lips just at the beginning of the decade.
Here comes a slightly more sophisticated opportunity to collect works of art in the room. Drum roll for the TOP collectors subscription because for a fee of 99€ per month we offer personalised advice on the creation of art collections, with original works and luxury editions, adapted to different tastes (all good) and spaces, for the exact amount you spend. In addition, as not everybody is in the same situation, there is still the possibility of collecting at a more modest pace, graphic works and artist's editions, for €99 per year. In both cases, it will be in close contact with artists, with special discounts on every artwork and access to exclusive events.
We begin the TOP adventure with one of our most admired artists: Esther Ferrer, who has just published Ella estaba allí / Elle était là. Next week we also have a packed programme of activities around Sant Jordi's Day, that we celebrate again by taking our table out to the street and laying books and garden roses wrapped in poems. We will read aloud the letters of beautiful epistolary relationships, such as those of Alejandra Pizarnik and Julio Cortázar, Emily Dickinson and Susan Gilbert, Antonio Machado and Guiomar or Frida Kahlo and Chavela Vargas. And we will play the return match with La Escocesa in a bookjockey. Find below more details and other pearls.
My dear Eduard Escoffet came by for tea to propose presenting Esther Ferrer's latest edition in the room, because he knows that I love her. It is a folder created as a creative game consisting of five photographs printed on acetate belonging to different versions of the series Elle était là, and three different coloured backgrounds, together with a poem by Esther and a text by Eduard. The photographic works are printed on acetate to overlap them and thus generate different variations of the piece. By combining the different backgrounds, the variations multiply until hundreds of different works. More than the number of days in a year. And just as the origin of the work is random - Esther found in the street the two objects she is holding in her hand - the final form is also left to the chance of whoever wants to open the box.
This limited and signed edition of 150 copies is available for Chiquita Room collectors with a 20% discount, or as a welcome gift for TOP collectors. Available for the rest of mortals for 425€ here.
👉 You may know her, but if you don't, I would like to introduce you to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a woman, writer, feminist, Nigerian, black, storyteller. Here you will see her talk about the danger of the existence of a single story, a theme that goes back and forth. The one who tells it imposes it, and the one who receives it may believe that it is the only one. She knows it from her own experience, acquired in her childhood in a middle-class home where she spoke and read English and American literature very early, and also very early began to write stories in which her protagonists were blond, blue-eyed, lived in snowy landscapes and drank ginger beer, although neither ginger beer existed in her native Nigeria nor snow fell in Nsukka, the town where she grew up.
This is precisely the spirit of Jaro Varga's project The Yellow Book, now on view at the gallery: a comparative critical reading of library collections in Barcelona with his own personal archive, to question the transmission of hegemonic knowledge through books and libraries.
🪔 Today I say goodbye with a gift from heaven. Polish pianist, composer and singer Hania Rani performed a live repertoire for International Piano Day on 29 March at a wonderful venue. "At the beginning of February I was asked to record live as part of the Berlinale sessions and decided to rearrange some of my favourite songs, which I have played for years, to record in the iconic Studio S2, one of the recording studios of Polish Radio in Warsaw. The room is entirely clad in wood and there is a kind of intimacy when playing the small piano in this huge and also very tall venue." I hope you enjoy it.
