The author Brigitte Vasallo (Barcelona 1973) inaugurates this Tuesday, November 26, Her Feminist Festival with the workshop The Miracle, scheduled to take place at the TEA Art Library, Tenerife Espacio de las Artes from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Her exploration continues on Wednesday, November 27 with the lecture Queixa, also held at the TEA Art Library, Tenerife Espacio de las Artes from 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Vasallo has given an interview with the festival organisers.
Your life, represented through your history and family heritage, serves as your introduction. What insights from your work do you bring to HER 2024?
To Her, I present the stage lecture, which is part of my endeavour to create what I term “a literature for non-readers.” Queixa dissects the investigation into the disappearance of pre-capitalist rural existence, a project I refer to as the Naxos Trilogy, from which numerous works in varying formats relate, but only Queixa encapsulates the whole. I envisioned it as a sort of umbrella to revisit the narrative and return it to its rightful owners, namely the public, who are not necessarily those who read and engage with my work.
Queixa is also nourished by a workshop I conduct in the spaces where I operate, titled El Milagro, linked to the so-called Economic Miracle of the 1950s-70s, which was essentially the arrival of liberal capitalism as an ally of the post-autarchic Franco regime, that dreadful amalgamation.
In the workshop, we explore, through dynamic activities, the memories of daughters and granddaughters, sons and grandchildren of those rural individuals who were compelled to abandon their lifestyles to integrate into urban modernity. I aim to understand how we narrate our stories, whether we adopt urban perspectives, and how we articulate our experiences. Thus, I have been gathering these memories across southern Europe since I commenced these workshops in Italy, while simultaneously proposing a space, an activation of the archive, to share these narratives among peers and from open possibilities.
How has your writing developed, and what is its current state?
For many years, I claimed to be more of a reader than a writer, but that is no longer the case: I have merged both domains, and literature is, without question, a very significant refuge for me at this moment. In that regard, I continue to explore the boundaries of the narrative essay, guiding it towards a poetics that was severed from it in that Cartesian notion of separating thought from emotion. I aspire for my essays to embrace poetry and magic, occupying a space in deciphering events, allowing rigor and validation of the dreamlike to coexist within the text. Additionally, I wish to return to fiction: there exists a voraciousness within me, a joyful voracity in general, and writing and reading is intimately linked to that.
Her Feminist Festival opens avenues in society for discourses that are typically relegated to less mainstream areas. Do you believe there is a societal shift in this regard, with an increasing number of spaces for expressions that differ from the conventional?
I would love to provide a more optimistic response, but unfortunately, I cannot. I believe festivals like Her are genuinely exceptional. This is not solely because it is a festival labelled feminist, but due to the proposals it presents that incorporate a feminist perspective, even when gender is not the focus. This is where we tend to stumble: we have transformed emancipatory proposals into themes rather than methods for exploring those themes, viewing them as subjects rather than lenses.
Thus, we can manipulate the “feminist” label as long as it addresses feminism, even if it does so through distinctly sexist methods and approaches. I also contend, especially when considering dissidents, that we are encountering significant challenges in embracing divergence. I no longer refer to difference; we struggle to exist within it, and we also fail to accept divergence among equals. This concerns me greatly about the audacity of the extreme right that is surfacing globally: it is permeating our norms with its rigid and authoritarian perspectives, where only one viewpoint exists and its opposite, where disagreement equates to enmity, and where any shift in opinion is perceived as betrayal or an assault.
Hence, I believe that spaces are becoming increasingly scarce, while there exists an illusion of areas where dissidence is expressed; however, this dissidence is often repetitive and lacks creativity (can dissidence still be deemed as such if it merely replicates without innovating?) and adheres to a prescribed notion of “how dissidence should manifest.” Consider that we inhabit a world that is formulating grammars even for non-binary language, as we struggle to tolerate individuals expressing, living, or dreaming without oversight. We cannot bear it.
