Women forgotten by exile

Fireman Guy Montag, the protagonist of Ray Bradbury's fable Fahrenheit 451 , from whom we borrowed the epigraph, spends the entire novel running. First, to burn books with a flamethrower, and then upriver to escape the bad guys who have banned reading. The week has passed more or less in that manner, in a swift and scorched chase, with the sudden outbreak of the heatwave, from conversation to conversation, sometimes simultaneously. Among the ferment of cultural events, we choose a couple of events dedicated to two women swallowed by the sinkhole of exile.

First up, Irene Polo (Barcelona, ​​1909–Buenos Aires, 1942). On Wednesday at seven in the evening, professors Francesc Salgado and Teresa Ferré Panisello will present, at the Documenta bookstore, An Intruder in the Press , the first installment of the Catalan reporter's chronicles. The Seville publishing house Renacimiento is currently republishing her complete works, starting with this volume, edited by Salgado, which brings together texts from her early days in the profession in the late 1920s, which she published in Spanish in publications such as El Día Gráfico .

Documenta hosts the presentation of "An Intruder in the Press," Irene Polo's first articles.

Fascinating, mysterious, republican, self-taught, and lesbian, Polo brings a fresh, new perspective to street reporting. She joins the line in front of the Casa de la Caritat to chat with those who come for a bowl of sopa boba (a soup). She interviews a chestnut seller. “She wanders around the city and reports on what happens during the Sant Joan festival,” explains Salgado. Or she hounds Francesc Cambó, then the leader of the Lliga (Spanish League), for over three hours, barely getting four words out of him and still nailing the chronicle of an impossible interview. She embarked for Argentina in 1936, following in the footsteps of actress Margarita Xirgu, and never returned. She took her own life at the age of 32. A meteoric rise.

At that same hour, interesting things are happening at Anagrama's headquarters, on the terrace, where the greenery of the plants contrasts with the boiler-colored walls. I'm incredibly late, but there's still some cold beer left, and the interview continues with four women— Clàudia Rius , Paula Carreras , Rita Roig , and Ofèlia Carbonell —who have given journalism an original twist in these murderous times. The four of them are part of a collective called Gent de Merda (People of the Shit), a podcast broadcast as part of Ràdio Primavera Sound's programming. Gent de Merda, because we're all muleteers; don't get too carried away by the cultured sentiment. Today they're interviewing Irene Jaume , a bookseller at La Ciutat Invisible in Sants, live, to find out how she manages to recommend books in different situations. For example, "What do you give to a friend's fife boyfriend?" (The term fife refers to a heterosexual man with a keen interest in football.) In these cases, says the prescriber, Bukowski, Kiko Amat, or Sergi Pons Codina usually work very well.

On Thursday, at the Museu Tàpies, a peculiar performance takes place around the artist Marta Palau (Albesa, Lleida, 1934–Mexico City, 2022) and her exhibition Mis caminos son terrestres (My Paths Are Terrestrial), curated by Imma Prieto . Another exile. For the painter and sculptor, art was “magic and freedom,” so a tarot reading is performed, interpellating her work. However, a classic deck, like the Marseille deck, is not used, but rather the deck of cards created by the artists of Equipo Jeleton, a collection of cards inspired by plant motifs. The audience chooses cards at random, then shuffles them, and time and again the arcane called tillandsia or air carnation, just like Palau, persists in coming out. An artist who lived in the open air, with no ground beneath her feet, but who ended up putting down roots in the Mexico of Lázaro Cárdenas, where she arrived in 1941 with her family, like so many others exiled by the Franco dictatorship.