In a society where haste and immediacy have taken over almost all social and cultural spheres, the Pamplona 2024 Meetings / Iruñeko Topaketak 2024 have managed to create the space and time in which to enjoy debate, knowledge and art. What was born as a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Pamplona 72-22 Iruñeko Topaketak Meetings, which turned the Navarrese capital into the epicenter of the avant-garde of the moment, has been consolidated as an international biennial of culture, thought and art, with a programming open to all citizens.
“The Pamplona Meetings are a call to knowledge, enjoyment and harmony in a time when it seems to be denied to us. That is why we have developed a program outside of ideologies and slogans and with some of the most brilliant personalities of our time,” describes the essayist Ramón Andrés, curator and director of the Meetings, which take place between the 3rd and the 13th. October, under the motto A call to knowledge, enjoyment and harmony.
Promoted by the Government of Navarra and organized by the Baluarte Foundation, with the collaboration of the La Caixa Foundation and the Pamplona City Council / Iruñeko Udala, the biennial includes free activities (by invitation which must be collected in person at the Palacio de Conferences and Baluarte Auditorium or request on the website, with a maximum of four tickets per person) and shows at reduced prices.
Itineraries for enjoyment and harmony
Gatherings and debates on ecofeminism, nature, new technologies, philosophy, critical thinking or the relationship between art and science are some of the subjects that will be covered through nine itineraries that cover topics for all audiences: 21st century: Philosophy to locate oneself; In the beginning were the hands (Reflections on technology); Literature without turning a new leaf; The trees we have left (Ideas about ecology); We all come from very far away; The feminist mirror; Live from art; Cinema inside y Music in all directions.
“The Meetings are a call to knowledge in capital letters, a knowledge that is not written, but must be enlightened by ourselves,” reflects María Chivite Navascués, president of Navarra. “They are a call to long-term enjoyment, to experiment and be generators of our own satisfaction. In this way, knowledge and enjoyment can combine to generate harmony, something especially important in a society as polarized as ours.”
Some of the great national and international thinkers participating in the biennial in this 2024 edition are the neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso; activists Sara Ahmed, Yayo Herrero and Asli Erdogan; cult filmmakers like Béla Tarr and Apichatpong Weerasethakul; visual creator and DJ Daito Manabe; the artist Eva Lootz, the film director and photographer of the Magnum agency, Antoine d’Agata; philosophers such as Susan Neiman, Gilles Lipovetsky and Borys Groys, internationally successful writers such as Herta Müller, Pascal Quignard and Cristina Rivera Garza or great contemporary composers such as Mauricio Sotelo, Liza Lim and Georg Friedrich Haas.
From the Amazon jungle to the ancient East
“We have fostered a relationship of exchange and collaboration with artists, groups and institutions, to give more play not only to creation but also to reflection based on the arts, whether with dialogues and conferences or with visual, scenic and exhibition proposals , interventions in the city’s public space and also in some of its most emblematic buildings,” highlights Berta Ares, deputy director of the event.
In this way, the art and culture of the Pamplona Meetings will not only propose a space for debate, thought and reflection with gatherings and workshops, but will also take over the streets and public spaces of the city with dance, art, cinema shows. , photography and circus. In the Baluarte Wall Room, for example, you will find the exhibition Continuous voltage, which brings together 20 works by renowned international artists, belonging to the Contemporary Art Collection of the “laCaixa” Foundation, while the Baluarte lobby will host the installation by Patxi Araujo entitled The distribution of chaos.
For its part, the exhibition hall of the Polvorín de la Ciudadela will exhibit the artistic work titled The official saidwith autobiographical poems and clippings in the shape of collage of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, Herta Müller, while the Sala de Armas of the Citadel will host the exhibition Giving is meltingby Katixa Goldarazena, Lorea Alfaro and Ada Garrués. And it will be on the walls of the Mirador of the Museum of Navarra where the installation will be projected Bring wheat to the bakerby the artist and National Fine Arts Prize Winner Eva Lootz, every day from October 3 to 13, between 8:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m.
On the other hand, dual channel video installation For Brucewhich can be viewed at the Civivox Palacio del Condestable, is filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s tribute to his old friend and also experimental filmmaker Bruce Baillie, who died in 2020. The video montage travels along paths in the Amazon jungle of Peru, between creaking wood, sounds of animals and the flow of the river, filtered by an intermittent light among the lush landscape, as a symbol and memory of their friendship. If there is something that worries the filmmaker Apichatpong, it is the permanence of memory, and this can be seen in his video installation titled Fictionin the Citadel (Poterna), where a projection on glass reflects a hand writing in a blank book, trying to record a dream, interrupted by insects. A dreamlike environment between reality and fiction, which will envelop the viewer for 14 minutes.
The audiovisual proposal of the Pamplona Meetings is completed with the talk between Apichatpong Weerasethakul himself and the cult filmmaker Béla Tarr, the participation of the pioneer in videoperformance Joan Jonas, the photographer Antoine d’Agata or the avant-garde proposal of the visual artist Daito Manabe (Latent Body), who will explain the new video expression techniques to convert dance into video through Diffusion Model (Diffusion Model), which uses algorithms and other techniques such as fluid simulation, image analysis and artificial simulation.
Precisely, dance lovers have several unmissable events in this great biennial of culture. The Main Hall of Baluarte will present the show The Treefrom the company of Carolyn Carlson, a global icon of contemporary dance, who will dance against the backdrop composed of abstract paintings in Chinese ink by the visual artist Gao Xingjian, Nobel Prize winner in Literature in 2000. Laida Aldaz and Marta Coronado, directors of The Faktoria Choreographic Center will turn the street into a dance space, with its show Routeswhich will be performed live, from the Baluarte lobby to the Plaza del Castillo, on Saturday, October 5 at 8:30 p.m.
For his part, Rifat Varol, Turkish musician and master craftsman of ney (Sufi reed flute), will perform Sounds of the ancient East (on October 6 at 1 p.m. in the Patio of the Navarro Institute of Public Administration), accompanied by musicians and whirling dervishes, with exotic classical pieces from the Sufi ceremony of the semawhich means “listen” in Arabic. A nod to the message of harmony and enjoyment, the protagonist of this new and long-awaited edition of the Pamplona Meetings.