A weekend of tweets. Dozens of messages that could be summed up in 140 or 280 characters and invade the network of wisdom, devastating phrases, broken glass, the Ten Commandments 2.0. The Hay Festival that is being held to this day in Segovia brings together an enormous amount of intelligence and critical mass, with simultaneous talks in various parts of the city where art, literature, economics or politics are discussed.
The star, yesterday, was the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who appeared via videoconference (his transfer involved a significant logistical and security deployment) to explain his life. He has just published his memoir, 1000 Years of Joy and Sorrow (Editorial Debate), and yesterday he summarized it in a talk with The Economist journalist Anne McElvoy. He traced the life of his father, Ai Qing, a poet, arrested in 1958, and his own, who suffered the same fate. “I asked myself if he was afraid of going to jail, and I was told that he was mature enough. I went back to China and went to jail. I had no illusions about the communists, just as I have no illusions about any authoritarian society. They have no moral compass, they just want to perpetuate themselves. They have no intention of communicating with you. But I wanted to be in China because I had my language, which is my privilege, the language is the way we have to fully express ourselves”.
Because –he added- “to be mentally healthy we must listen to all the voices, only in this way can we identify ourselves. Not wanting to listen to the voices of others reminds me of what China does.”
In this vital context, McElvoy asked Ai Weiwei about his artistic career: “Art is the natural product of an aesthetic judgment, an individual vocabulary must be found, and it depends on individual experiences. It is a gift that I have, I do not have to make an effort. It is a product that comes out of my own life,” she explained, from what looked like a dining room. At one point, the famous oriental artist took out his cell phone and photographed what he saw on the screen. Some 200 people in the main hall of IE University, one of the venues for the Hay Festival in Spain.
“If I write -he continued- it is to try to change the political conditions, to influence the young generations”, so that they do not have to suffer an incarceration like the one he suffered when he was arrested in 2011 upon landing in his country. They took him hooded from the airport to jail, without even being able to notify his family or a lawyer. He had to be “reeducated”. “They thought I was a dangerous person.” In spite of everything, for this world icon of freedom “it can never be said that the price of demanding social justice is too high. You can lose your life, you can be imprisoned, but no price is too high to get everyone’s freedom.
FROM ATHENS. That idea of ??Ai Weiwei is 2,500 years old. On the same stage, a couple of hours later, it was formulated by the humanist and best-selling author Emilio del Río, when he recalled a speech by Pericles, collected by Thucydides, in which the Athenian leader argued that democracy was worth even losing one’s life. He did it after defeating Sparta, which was an autocracy. Does it ring a bell? 25 centuries have passed and it is a word still applicable to many countries. Del Río debated – the former mayor of Madrid Manuela Carmena ruled at the last minute – with Ivan Krastev, political scientist and president of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia (Bulgaria); Gayle Allard, professor at IE Business School; and Pilita Clark, from the Financial Times, under the title Remix of the 70s. Del Río did not quote Churchill, but Chesterton, who asked himself, thinking of humanity, why would he repeat the mistakes of the past if he could make others new ones, and also recalled that, after Augustus, Europe took 17 centuries to recover democracy. With which he urged to protect her, care for her and encourage her, because she may be imperfect, but she is unique.
This debate oscillated between the health of democracy and the energy and climate crises. Clark recalled that in the crisis of the 1970s “Nixon reduced the speed of cars to 55 km/h, but when the crisis ended the measures ended, and I fear that the same thing will happen here.” For Krastev, who as a Bulgarian proclaimed himself “optimistic” despite everything, he estimated that “people are worried about the end of the month, not the end of the world.” Del Río also quoted Octavio Paz, the Mexican writer who in 1983 had a devastating phrase for Europe: “What unites Europe is its passivity in the face of destiny.” Krastev, a sly guy, ended with a joke: “Two fortune tellers meet and one says to the other: “I see the future and it will be fine for you, what about me?”.
THE PIZZAS, WITHOUT HAM. The climate crisis was also debated – rather, they chatted the day before – the farmer and disseminator Joaquín Araújo and the professor of Ecology and Nature Conservation at the Technical University of Munich Josef H. Reichholf, who has just published The Disappearance of the butterflies (Editorial Crítica). From his home in Munich, Reichholf explained that Germans love spending the summer in Spain but not only because of the sun, “also because of the variety of its nature, which generates an experiential milestone, it is an essential part, and that is at risk” .
“But we cannot wait for politics or democracy to lead the changes, it must be the citizenry,” warned the expert, who gave a concrete example of what citizens can do from home in favor of climate change: “The ham in a pizza should be an extra, not the usual”, because we cannot allow “agriculture to waste such a large amount of water to also send its products thousands of kilometers”. It is not sustainable. Elaborating on this, Araújo stressed that “a meat diet consumes 1,500 times more energy than a vegetarian one, which is also healthier. Eating a little less meat makes a lot of sense.” He also pointed out that “in Spain there are 200 million elevator trips… downhill”, and that is also something that anyone, in their day-to-day life, can avoid without much effort.
PUTIN IN THE CORNER. The writer Antonio Muñoz Molina was in charge of presenting last night, in one of the last acts of the day, the British historian Antony Beevor, who has just published Russia (Editorial Crítica), in which he analyzes the struggle between 1917 and 1921 between the alliance of moderate socialists and reactionary monarchists against Trotsky’s red army, and the subsequent dictatorship of Lenin. “It was a fight that scared the whole world,” he said. Muñoz described Beevor as a great historian as well as a great storyteller, which contrasts with the discipline in Spain, where the historian who writes well is a suspicious type.
Beevor described the current moment as “a cold war between autocracy and democracy”, in a context in which Vladimir Putin has the idea -he expressed it before Ukraine’s investment in this country- that he should purify corruption and ideologically West, impregnating it with a new air. “Words kill,” he said. And now, he added, “Putin is staying in a dangerous corner right now.” “We live in scary times,” said the Briton.
SYMBOLIC BRIDGES. Building cultural bridges reflected on the need to stimulate the interrelation between Barcelona and Madrid, damaged in recent years, and also between both cities and the rest of the country’s cities, where things also happen: the Hay Festival, without going any further , is celebrated in Segovia, in the middle of empty Spain. The talk was presented by the editor of Edhasa, Daniel Fernández, who recalled with an anecdote why culture is important. When British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was presented with a budget in the middle of the war in which culture had been eliminated, he asked: “So why are we at war?” Churchill won the war, and also the Nobel Prize for literature.
Evelio Acevedo, manager of the Thyssen museum, said that “Spain is ceasing to be bipolar in cultural terms”; Sònia Mulero, from the Fundació Banc Sabadell, explained how countless cultural initiatives – musical festivals – have shared venues that are not capitals; and Miquel Molina, deputy director of this newspaper, how cities are configuring alternative axes to that of the nation-state, the state, the nation or the territory. Washington-Phildelphia-New York-Boston are Boswash and San Francisco-San Diego is SanSan and Barcelona and Madrid share synergies that could turn them into an axis, thanks to their complementarity and good communications. Fernández took the name, “which would have great international acceptance: Mad-Bar, the crazy bar.”
