Angélica Liddell: "For me tourism and fascism are the same"

BarcelonaAngélica Liddell does not want to be buried, but devoured: "If I die right now, throw me out so they can quarter me and eat me," she said this evening in the conversation that closed the first day of the Biennial of Thought. "I would like to be a victim of cannibalism. Deep down, eroticism has a lot of cannibalism in it. That there would be nothing left to bury, that it would remain in stomachs, that it would pass into the blood, into the cells," Liddell insisted, who spoke with writer Luna de Miguel to present her first novel, The Silk Road (Malas Tierras), and the poetry collection Pido el fin de la vida (La bella Varsovia). If not, she would like to end up in the Montparnasse cemetery, where she visits role models like Marguerite Duras, Samuel Beckett, Baudelaire and Cioran, "with a tombstone that says nothing." "Although it doesn't matter: even if my name is on it, no one will know who I am," she lets slip.

In the talk, titled Strangers in the city, Liddell said that cemeteries are "the only rose stem to hold onto, the only possibility of beauty" in cities where beauty "has been sucked away like a dog bone, because of tourist barbarism." That is why she experiences them through literature: "Cristina Morales said that sexism and fascism are the same. Well, for me, tourism and fascism are the same." In Mexico, Liddell went looking for the door where Burroughs accidentally shot his wife and walked through the Turin of Cesare Pavese to the hotel where he took his own life: "I was in the same process: the same process of mourning, the same process of death." She also praised Roberto Bolaño: "With Bolaño you arrive in Barcelona and you see it differently, you see it through Bolaño's eyes."

What captivates her are the "human cathedrals." "The old centers are nothing more than nests of emptiness and shells," but "if you know how to look" there are the people "who live on the absolute margins of society," an idea she relates to the The Thief's Journal, by Jean Genet, and with the protagonist of the novel, a gaijin. "It is of no use to me to see a beautiful cathedral with 500 idiots around me," she says. But she warns that the far right takes advantage of it: "Pasolini said that if the Nazis arrived right now, they would find all the theater already done. There is a fascism of the common man that has spread."

Based on The Last Lovers, by Can Xue, about those displaced by the Three Gorges Dam, she spoke of uprootedness and xenophobia. "I am a very integrated European citizen," she says. But she has received "the most ferocious and Nazi-like racism in Stockholm." "Experiencing racism is a huge opportunity. If you are always in the right place, you become a conformist."

The Silk Road is born from an "irrational and delirious passion" for Japan, which she experiences as "an unrequited love": "The Japanese have an absolutely racist culture that we would not tolerate. Our society is much more hypocritical."

To conclude, she argued that the two books are not contradictory: "The desire for death has accompanied me since I was born, it is my illness. This unbearable sensitivity brings me closer to the things that move the heart. I know that Bresson's films are beautiful. I do not want to suffer more than necessary, and I know that beauty makes me suffer. As Tracey Emin says, art has saved me. And now, in the end, it stirs like a strange scorpion."

The "heretical" gaze of Alessandro Baricco

The Italian Alessandro Baricco is considered one of the great authors and thinkers of the last decades, for novels and essays such as Ocean Sea, Silk, City, The Barbarians, The Game or What We Were Looking For. Although perhaps less popular, Baricco is also the author of several musical essays, the fruit of a passion that dates back to his adolescence and which reaches the present day with the book he presented this evening at the biennial, during a conversation with the composer Joan Magrané, A Brief Heretical History of Classical Music (Ara Llibres, Feltrinelli in Spanish). "The idea of classical music as we have it today was invented by German culture at the beginning of the 19th century. Before, it did not exist," states Baricco, who attributes his passion for music to destiny since he was a teenager.

One of the keys to the talk was how previous musicians did not have the idea of progress in mind. "Today what is very interesting is that this system of values, progress and man's dominance over all things, has entered a total crisis –says Baricco–. And classical music says exactly that: man's dominance over sounds. Now that we are ashamed of man's dominance over nature, how do we deal with classical music? How can you tell a young person: «Come to a concert where I will make you feel how man has devastated nature by caging it, tightening it, reducing it to scales, until turning it into his own language»? When, in reality, it was simply the radiance of a perfection".