At the end of the 18th century, Immanuel Kant developed the theory of the sublime, which he defined as that sensation that is experienced when observing something and that is terrifying and, at the same time, beautiful. Kantian thought was soon transformed into art by the hand of Caspar David Friedrich, who painted The Wanderer on the Sea of ??Clouds at the beginning of the 19th century, a canvas that became a standard of Romanticism. Then the sublime spread to the rest of the artistic disciplines.
Beginning in the 20th century, in a novel by Arthur Conan Doyle, Dr. Watson presented Sherlock Holmes with a particularly complicated problem. Of course, the detective knew how to solve it, but the complexity of the matter led him to smoke not one, but three pipes.
Now that the 21st century has passed, Félix Riera and Llucià Homs, creators of the cultural magazine Hänsel* and Gretel*, have founded the Club de la tres pipas to claim Romanticism in the era of robotics and Artificial Intelligence.
“Contemporary art has been circumventing the language that promoted Romanticism, but that form of expression is still alive, artists are still linked to the sublime to explain their artistic adherence,” says Riera in a conversation with La Vanguardia.
Riera and Homs were very clear about it, but they wanted to share that thesis with artists from various areas and with the general public. So they put their Three Pipes Club at the service of cultural dissemination through the CaixaForum platform.
They did not doubt that the best strategy to delve deeper into the subject was to talk, talk and talk. So they called painters, writers, filmmakers, philosophers, historians, musicians, poets or dancers to comment on the move. They chatted and recorded the conversations. This is how Romantic Geography in the 21st Century emerged, a collection of podcasts that can be enjoyed on the CaixaForum website.
Romantic Geography in the 21st Century has just premiered its third season which, like the previous ones, will have 12 episodes, or in other words, with a dozen conversations with people of the stature of the recently deceased filmmaker Agustí Villaronga, whom Homs and Riera dedicate this third batch of their podcasts.
“This is a space where we reclaim the semantic universe of Romanticism to rescue terms such as…” from disuse. This is how each of the talks starts. “As soon as we begin, we put words on the table like sensitivity, courage, desperation, restlessness, beauty, brilliance…” explains Homs. The Hänsel* i Gretel* duo also has a series of no less interesting words to analyze with their guests at their farewells: “We have reached the end and we would like you to tell us about some terms that draw a romantic geography such as passion, ascent, journey… .”
Romantic words, words that are fully valid in the 21st century as contemporary artists such as César Antonio Molina, Ignasi Aballí, Frederic Amat, Albert Serra, Leonardo Padura, Nuria Labari, Marta Rebón, Ángeles Caso have confirmed through these talks. , Cesc Gelabert, Rafael Argullol, Santiago Auserón, Susana Rafart and Joan Fontcuberta, among others.
