With the tenth edition of the MOT festival almost upon us, the organization has launched the new website, with the program and all the fishing, but to emphasize the history of the contest, the interventions of all the previous editions have been highlighted. All 375, from that 2014 dedicated to fantastic literature – years before the current boom –, curated by David Roas and with names such as Albert Sánchez Piñol, Marc Pastor, Cristina Fernández Cubas or Anna Starobínets, until the from last year, on fear, curated by Àlex Martín and with names such as Dominique Manotti, Massimo Carlotto, Núria Cadenes or, once again, Marc Pastor.
This year’s festival will look to delve deeper into literature from the same perspective of the author with the motto “From the inside”, a specialty of its curator, the professor of literature at the University of Girona and critic Xavier Pla , author among others of The Baltimore Soldier. Essays on literature and reality in times of self-fiction (Lleonard Muntaner). Glòria Granell, co-director with Judit Badia, explained that after ten years of delving into literature, they felt that “it was time to speak from the writer’s point of view, including the game between reality and fiction”, a question, such as autofiction, “which is fashionable today but Pla has been studying for many years”. The festival, with a budget of 82,000 euros mostly borne by the two town councils, will take place over two consecutive weekends – the first, March 14, 15 and 16, in Olot; the second, March 21, 22 and 23, in Girona.
Pla explained this Monday that “many literary taboos have been broken in recent years” in literature based on grief, historical trauma or abuse, which can take very varied forms based on biographical expression: novel , diaries, chronicles or hybrid genres to delve deeper into issues that “thirty or forty years ago were buried, while today you can talk about everything”. The curator of the festival wanted to highlight the presence of authors such as Sergi Pàmies – who will be in the opening conversation with Jordi Cornudella -, Enrique Vila-Matas, Julià de Jòdar, Monika Zgustova, Marta Marín-Dòmine or Éric Vuillard – who will close it with Anna Guitart -, but also Anna Pazos or Júlia Bacardit – both, who participate in different sessions, are responsible for Les golfes, a podcast that Pla mentioned as one of the phenomena that today is a hybrid platform more of a narrative of ‘autofiction–.
Granell explained that in addition to the announced program and several reading clubs in libraries about participating authors, actions are carried out in schools and institutes, with 600 and 300 participants respectively, because the festival’s will is “to reach the maximum of people, let them breathe MOT” and have a “growing and slow evolution”. The mayor of Olot, Josep Berga Vayreda, has emphasized that the aim of the festival is as ambitious as it is simple: “Promote reading”, and that thanks to the videos of these 10 years “it is not ephemeral, it is a corpus of knowledge ”, although “curiously, we talk about lyrics and what remains is audiovisual”. The audiovisual will remain, yes, but also the experience lived in each of the conversations and the conversations that will in turn invite to develop.
