Santi Balmes opened the day with a talk in which he discussed his personal journey, his long career as a musician and his relationship with literature. “When you write, whether it’s music or literature, you look for that unique and personal voice, that voice that expands your worlds and makes you discover neighborhoods in your psyche that you didn’t know existed,” said Santi Balmes, who also spoke about creativity and its influence on music, literature and sex. “That feeling of having lost track of time is found in art and in sex,” said the composer and writer, who wanted to highlight the importance of emotion in writing. “I started composing because my skin would curl when I played guitar.”
Finally, Santi Balmes stressed that As an artist, you’re always afraid of losing “the honesty, the freshness, the magic. Today, it is very difficult to transcend because the voracity of the industry is so great that there will come a time when there will be more content than eyes.
After Santi Balmes’ intervention, the participants were able to listen to Najat El Hachmi. The author and winner of the Nadal Prize shared her experience as a young girl who arrived in Vic at the age of eight. “I remember that I had a childhood full of people, family, and when we arrived in Spain, I felt like I was in a gray and cold city. In addition, I come from an oral culture and here there was silence. I I filled this silence with the stories I found in books and then I started writing because I had nothing left to read,” the organization summarizes in a press release.
The author did not want to leave aside the importance of reaching the world through literature. “Writing connects you to the common, not the special. “It is able to connect you with what all humans have in common, to break down all the walls and connect you with the other.”
Najat El Hachmi has also embarked on the path of sex and literature. “The representation of desire is very important because in books written by men, there is always something that does not suit me. Female sexuality is traditionally represented from the male point of view and the perspective is different. There is a very powerful imaginary that is built on the male fantasy and we are not there, we are an object at the service of men. This happens to me with male authors that I like, but they lack this perspective when they tell the story of sex. “I think we imagine men’s sexuality better.”
