“This is the time of hype and bombs. Of automatism versus intelligence, of standardization versus differentiation, of advertising values, of serial thinking, of quantity versus quality. And half of humanity continues to devote itself to the exploitation of the other half. Everything is dehumanized. We live surrounded by countless madmen set up as heroes.”
Anyone would say these devastating words of disappointment describe the world today, but they were written decades ago by Ana Maria Martinez Sagi (Barcelona, 1907-2000). the memory of journalist, poet, athlete and feministunjustly forgotten by history, it has recently been recovered thanks to various projects of the Santander Bank Foundation. Now it resurfaces in a new season of the project Living lettersa collaboration between the foundation and the University of Exeter, UK.
The project aims recover the memory of thinkers and writers of the twentieth century through their epistolary testimonies, mostly from the important archive of the Carmen Conde-Antonio Oliver Board of Trustees. Born from conscientious academic research led by Professor Nuria Capdevila-Argüelles, but builds bridges with the general public (especially young people) through audiovisual pieces in which the actresses dramatize the contents of the letters.
The words quoted at the beginning, taken from a letter written by Sagi, come to life (and double their drama) in the mouth of the actress Teresa del Olmo, who looks at us from the screen with penetrating eyes. “It was hard for me to understand her infinite sadness, her disappointment,” the actress confesses. “It hurts me because I’m the opposite, I’m an optimist and I love life. Not her, at least not in the letters I held in my hands. However, she also acknowledges having had a more complete view of Ana María Martínez Sagi after reading the book also published by the Banco Santander Foundation, the voice alonein which the writer Juan Manuel de Prada compiled and preceded the author’s journalistic and poetic work.
The three new videos with dramatized readings of Martínez Sagi’s letters join three others with those of shell mendez (played by Adela Leiro) e Sweet Maria Loynaz (played by Leila Arias). They are the new additions to a website where you can also see and hear the testimonials of Carmen Laforet, Federica Montseny, Carmen Conde, Hildegart Rodríguez, Mercedes Pinto, Teresa Wilms Montt and Eunice Odio.
Furthermore, this year a new stage of the Living Letters project has emerged: the theatrical show, thanks to the collaboration with the Cervantes Theater in London, founded in 2016. It is the only theater in the UK dedicated to the performance of Spanish and Latin American works, classical and contemporary, in both Spanish and English. Thus was born a work that brings the letters between Carmen Laforet and Elena Fortúnremained unpublished until their publication in 2017 in the fundamental collection Cuadernos de obra of the Fundación Banco Santander with the title of the heart and soul and that they had “an absolutely huge impact,” the researcher points out.
[Carmen Laforet y Elena Fortún: correspondencia inédita]
This production, with dramaturgy and direction by Paula Paz, artistic director of the Cervantes Theater, had already been exhibited in London last May and will soon be exhibited at the Teatro de la Abadía in Madrid, from 26 January to 5 February, with actresses Elena Sanz and Paula Rodríguez. It is a project that fits perfectly with the work of internationalization of Spanish culture, a work they carry out “in an almost institutional way” even though the Cervantes Theater is a private initiative of the Spanish Theater Company. For her part, Nuria Capdevila-Argüelles believes that “the UK loves Spain” and that “Hispanic studies is an ever-growing field” on British soil.
For Paz, write the playwriting and direct this play, entitled Living letters. Carmen Laforet and Elena Fortúnit was “an honor” and believes that the work “pays a debt we owe to these intellectuals, to whom we must give voice and visibility so that they do not fall into oblivion”.
The Living Letters project also has a educational aspect which brings this knowledge closer to secondary school students, proposing activities in which they themselves become content creators, capable of preparing their own Living Letters as a team, from the search for the selected writer or intellectual to the filming of the audiovisual piece. Podcasts, subtitles, filming techniques, scriptwriting, historiographical research and film editing, acting are some of the skills developed in the Aula CartasVivas laboratories, through which three generations of students of the University of Exeter have already passed, and of which they are users of educational institutions in the USA, Spain, the UK and other European countries.
“We have discovered a new way of take research off-campusbecause staying there is a lack of respect for society “, enthuses Nuria Capdevila-Argüelles. “We must go on stage, in the classrooms, to communicate this project in all possible ways”, because the question is not only “to bring the moderns, but how to make them stay.” In this sense, he considers the theater an ideal tool.
For the researcher, what she and her team do is nothing more than a translation task: “from past to present, from absence to presence, from silence to voice”. All this with the main objective of “representing a generation of feminists who had a group consciousness and suffered a neglect that spanned an entire generation”.
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