This Friday, while walking through Buenos Aires, the journalist, professor, cultural activist and businessman Mario Tascón died suddenly due to a stroke. He was sixty years old. He was in Argentina’s capital to give a talk to journalists about artificial intelligence, one of his many intellectual passions. The only, minimal consolation of his unexpected farewell is that he surprised him while he was doing what gave him the most pleasure, disseminating knowledge, and he did it in the city with the most bookstores in the world.
Born in Ponferrada in 1962, teacher at the Gabo Foundation, former president of the Fundación del Español Urgente, Internet 2022 award for personal career, Mario’s most visible professional resume marks him as one of the pioneers of digital journalism and informative infographics in Spain. He was an entrepreneur in the noblest sense of the word: he founded several projects that marked the path of the transformation of traditional media into 21st century platforms.
After graduating in teaching, at the age of twenty-two he created the weekly Bierzo 7, the first publication in Spain to use a Macintosh for layout. Later, following the lives of so many other brilliant Galicians of the last century, he made the leap to Madrid to, during the 90s, direct the infographics area of ??El Mundo and found its digital editorial office. Between 2000 and 2008 he directed the content of the digital area of ??the Prisa group. And in 2010, with María Moya, he founded Prodigioso Volcán, one of the best Ibero-American communication and strategic advisory agencies, which has won various international awards in design, infographics or digital events.
But Mario has been more than a pioneer and an entrepreneur. His less visible resume is as important as the audience. He has dedicated an enormous amount of energy to cultural mediation, to the translation of worlds. Not only in large media outlets and as an advisor to large companies and government organizations; also for all citizens, in the neighborhoods and on the screens. At Fundéu he promoted the manual Writing on the Internet. And with Prodigioso Volcán he managed to ensure that the web pages and the graphic and textual language of many public institutions followed the principle of clear communication. Because words and their messages are level 0 of democracy. And they must be designed intelligently so that they radiate simplicity.
The corporate and institutional world was for him, above all, a space of opportunities to feed the cultural machine in which he believed. He generated and supported projects for the pleasure of contributing to the dissemination of good ideas. He put his team to work on initiatives that did not always entail economic benefit, but that enriched lovers of books, good exhibitions or new narratives on the internet.
Perhaps his last personal project was the Fake news exhibition. The Factory of Lies, which he curated for the Fundación Telefónica Space in Madrid. A journey through the falsification of news from Antiquity to today, with a daring, strictly contemporary design. It can be visited until November 19.
Classic and viral, lyrical and virtual, he was an extremely curious person who traveled through both dimensions of the present. The last time we saw each other was a few weeks ago at the Edita Forum in Barcelona, ??where he gave a talk about independent bookstores. Before the summer we met at Culture
One of the many promoted by Tascón, a key figure not only in the digital transformation of this country, but also in communication and translation in the broadest and noblest sense of both terms.
