“My prose is not realistic; I write to create new images,” says Olga Tokarczuk

Madrid. The Polish Olga Tokarczuk, 2018 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, recognized that one of her literary references is Jorge Luis Borges, for his ability to merge imagination with erudition.

Hence he recognizes that he writes to create new imagesin order to Phrases can be conjugated in different ways, there is no established order. My prose is not realistic. Language is a tool to express imagesnoted the writer during her speech at a literary residency at the Prado Museum, the third of its kind after the participation of the South African Nobel Prize winner John Maxwell Coetzee and the Mexican writer Chloe Aridjis.

The Polish narrator relied on a Boticelli triptych to reflect on the function of art in the history of humanity and explain her way of understanding her work as a writer in an increasingly more chaotic and uncertain.

In the conversation he had with Miles, director of the magazine grant, He remembered a passage from his novel The books of Jacob (2015), in which he said: One winter night when I had trouble falling asleep I had the impression that nothing around me was true (…) As if everything around me were invented by the hand of a painter. From there, Tokarczuk responded to this concern about the origin of the literary images, of the plots that fertilize the story: “Boticelli’s triptych The story of Nastagio degli Onesti (1483) depicts a woman being chased by a man on horseback armed with a sword for not accepting the husband they had agreed for her. The work takes us back to mythology, to repeated time. Literature does the same: it repeats time and themes. Our mission is to renew them.

How important repetition is in culture! It is a bridge that unites people across time and space. In his triptych, I clearly see the telling of a story in images.

The novelist delved into this idea of ​​culture and repetition: “The basis of my writing is the premise that as an author I have to find a different point of view from that seen by others, to change the perspective to show the world in other ways.” shades. That is why I believe that literature is an art of knowing reality… At the beginning, when I thought about writing and how to live reality, the image was a primary element of communication and experiencing the world. Language in this vision of mine served to create images and that entire repertoire is the reflection of our memory as a species.

We do not have the images in our brains that previous generations had, but we have had to create a hard drive where all this is. A hard drive to which, for example, the Prado Museum belongs, and to which people come to see a painting that represents people who do not exist, landscapes that have disappeared and, in this way, we participate in this community of memory that allows us to maintain that continuity and create our interior. That is the wonder of art and culture, because without this we would not survive; This should be explained and told to politicians, since many of them do not understand.

New visit

The Madrid art gallery announced a new high-resolution virtual tour that will allow you to take a journey through the ground, first and second floors of the museum along 360-degree panoramic views that allow you to appreciate the works and their arrangement in the rooms, offering a selection of 89 pieces digitized in gigapixel, as well as five sculptures in three dimensions.

For the digitization, which will allow visitors to learn in detail about the artistic treasure housed in the facility for free, a robotic and computerized capture system was used, with techniques to assist shooting. Thus, the scanning of 475 360-degree panoramic views of the rooms was achieved, in super high resolution, for which more than 17 thousand high-resolution photographs were captured.

By digitizing the rooms and works in high resolution, thematic tours were achieved that explain the details of each work through a spoken introduction.

The days and times of the itineraries are defined on the gallery’s website: www.museodelprado.es.