The Ventanas, the prizes where the rich are asked to pay more taxes
Barcelona"I love it! I want a shirt like yours!" This is what Eduard Escoffet, director of the Institution of Catalan Letters, told the pharmaceutical businessman Sergi Ferrer-Salat. They met at the end of the award ceremony. Windows Awards, which is organized by the bookstore of the same name, and of which Ferrer-Salat is founder and patron. The T-shirt in question could seem like a kind of joke, because it said "Tax the rich", and who the speaker was, certainly, a rich person. But Ferrer-Salat does not have irony, both, and the prova will be the speech that will give the act. After the welcome to the presenter, Ana Polo, will speak Estefania Rico, who directs the Ferrer Foundations. He will quote the economist Frenchman Thomas Piketty, who defends the creation of a progressive impost, which would tax the people with the most assets, which would allow the wealth to be redistributed, more concentrated, and would allow to increase resources to finance public services and social programs. quick x-ray of inequalities to the city of Barcelona, and recovered a fact that I do not stop repeating, but that still felt a reality: the culture budget of the Generalitat faces no more than 2%. It appears that 2024 will achieve a historical record, 1.7%, and Minister Sònia Hernández is working so that by 2025 the symbolic figure of 2% will be reached. I say symbolic because the figure has already become this, a kind of symbol, but also because, frankly, 2% for culture I don't think is throwing the house out of the window. But that debate, another day.
The precariousness of creation in the cultural sector became evident in the speech of Giulia Sagramola, winner of the Comic Windows award for her project Forwards. After five years, she will have the resources to devote herself to finishing it without suffering from paying the rent. I was delighted to see that the winner was Italian, and that the Galician Uxía Larrosa won the mention for young talent for the work The detachment. He made a direct allusion to his love for this language, which he began to learn in Barcelona when he arrived at the age of 18, and which made him celebrate the fact that comics written in Catalan were awarded prizes.
Coming across a bookstore, a stroke of luck
Ferran Grau, winner of the Catalan narrative award for Hyperrabies(Ángulo) said that he had considered starting his speech in a vindictive way. "You can say that you absolutely refuse to let your language, Catalan, die. Or you can say how terrifying, aberrant and disgusting you find any thought or action that comes even remotely close to the concepts of right, far right and capitalism." He ended by talking about the blockage he suffered during the pandemic, but his speech exuded the same passion for reading and writing as that of César Aira, winner of the Spanish narrative award for In thought (Random House). In a video from Buenos Aires, he explained that he has written a lot, but that he has always preferred to read, and he made a declaration of love in bookstores. "The existence of bookstores, for me, has always been something of a miracle. Coming across a bookstore on a corner always seemed to me, and still does, to be a stroke of luck, a luxurious coincidence." What a lovely idea, that coming across a bookstore is a stroke of luck, right?
