The City Council of Malgrat de Mar (Maresme) will organize this coming March informative sessions on the figure of the explorer Félix Cardona y Puig, coinciding with the premiere of the documentary “Tras la pista del capitán Cardona” on March 16 on Canal 33.
This documentary is a PeMÓN Films production together with TV3 and the Malgrat de Mar City Council. It was shot in Catalonia and Venezuela in 2019 and follows Cardona’s trail to show how his footprint has survived in the territories where he explored. The conference, entitled “Descobrint Cardona”, will be held from March 5 to 19 and will include a preview of the documentary in Malgrat de Mar, conferences, a workshop and a new version of the play by actress Assumpta Mercader about the explorer.
The mayoress of Malgrat, Sònia Viñolas, and the Councilor for Culture, Lurdes Borrell, presented the informative days on Fèlix Cardona, which will begin on March 5. The objective of this initiative is to discover the figure of Cardona beyond some topics, providing knowledge about some of the many activities to which he dedicated himself, such as cartography, the collection of plants and birds for American museums or the preparation of dictionaries on languages. indigenous to Venezuela.
The first act of the conference will be a new edition of the play dedicated to the explorer by local actress Assumpta Mercader, entitled ‘La motxila de Fèlix Cardona’. It will take place at 12 noon in the Joaquín Garriga Room of the Municipal Archives and on this occasion, it will allow the discovery of new Cardona objects such as some of the notebooks and field notes from his explorations.
Saturday, March 11, will be the day of the preview of the documentary ‘On the trail of Captain Cardona’ in Malgrat de Mar. There will be two screenings in the Joaquim Garriga Assembly Hall of the Archive at 6:00 p.m., open to the public, and at 8:00 p.m. , with invitation. In this afternoon pass, the director of the documentary Melissa Franco and the screenwriter Laia Manresa will attend.
On March 12, the mathematicians, Anton Aubanell and Aniol Garcia, will offer a conference-discussion entitled ‘A view of Cardona’s scientific profile from a mathematical perspective’. Both will talk about the work that Fèlix Cardona did to locate and map the territories that he explored, using ideas and mathematical tools.
The workshop ‘The herbarium of Félix Cardona. We rediscover our environment’ that Mireia Córdoba will offer on March 18 from 10:30 a.m. in the Plaza de Félix Cardona will allow us to discover the profile of the explorer as a collector of plants and patches for various American museums such as the National Museum of Natural Sciences of NY.
The sessions will close on March 19 with the conference-discussion ‘Autochthonous languages ??in Venezuela: geographical, historical, social and linguistic synopsis’ by the researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris and collaborator of the linguistics department of the University of Barcelona, ??Francisco Queixalós.
The conference will feature the projection of a video by Jorge Rosés, a professor at the University of Alberta (Canada), on the Sapé language and the usefulness of some of the dictionaries of the different indigenous languages ??that Félix Cardona made for his own use.
‘On the trail of Captain Cardona’ can be seen on Channel 33 on March 16. It is directed by the journalist Melissa Silva Franco and it is a trip from Catalonia to Venezuela to tell the life of Félix Cardona, relating it to the indigenous people of the area who have preserved the caught Cardona.
The documentary travels to the same scene of the unknown adventures that Cardona carried out during the forty years that he lived in Orinoco. The documentary also features the testimony of one of Cardona’s sons, Heinz.
Coinciding with the conference, the Municipal Archive Service has also published a book with biographical notes on Félix Cardona, accompanied by the illustrations that can be seen in the square that bears his number, and which was remodeled two years ago.