Colm Tóibín (Enniscorthy, 1955), to be able to say his piece about Mercè Rodoreda –an author he has been reading for decades–, has found a gap in his extremely tight schedule and has crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Los Angeles. The author of novels such as Brooklyn and The Magician –both in Catalan from the Amsterdam publishing house– has been the last guest of the exhibitionRodoreda, a forest, which closed its doors a few days ago at the CCCB. 81,880 people have visited it since December, a milestone that has made it the seventh most visited exhibition in the history of the Barcelona venue and the most successful one focused on literature, surpassing those programmed for Claudio Magris, Salvador Espriu and W.G. Sebald.

Reality insists on changing the plans of novelist Richard Ford (Jackson, 1944). If a couple of years ago, coinciding with the publication of the fifth and last book starring Frank Bascombe, Be mine (2023; Sé mía in the Spanish translation published by Anagrama), he hinted that he was giving up writing, he is in Barcelona presenting a new work, How I got on (2026; En palabras sencillas in Spanish by Feltrinelli), an essay of about a hundred pages that starts with a stimulating question: how can we live decently in a world where politics tends to be dishonest?

The Naked Maja, by Francisco de Goya, was a groundbreaking painting from the late 18th century, both for the sensual attitude of the model depicted and because the artist dared to paint a female pubis. But behind this apparently naturalistic and brave image also lies a whole cultural and social framework that led Goya to portray a woman of canonical beauty, sufficiently exuberant yet also sufficiently domesticated, with that white, smooth skin, free of misplaced hairs. Ester Conesa, from the feminist collective Peliagudas, has drawn the missing hairs on an almost exact copy that can be seen in the new CCCB exhibition. Through time and multidisciplinary works of art —painting, photography, cinema, installation—, "The Cult of Beauty", which can be visited until November 8, explores precisely all the ugliness hidden in the pursuit of this ideal. Beauty is intangible and mutable depending on the era, morality, status, race, agenda, industry, etcetera, and it undoubtedly provokes as much pleasure, admiration, and desire as, by opposition, shame, pain, and marginalization for those who are left out.

Palestinian journalist and researcher Mariam Barghouti, an international reference in journalism in occupied West Bank, will spend the coming months in Barcelona as part of the resident program at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània (CCCB).

"It distresses me greatly to lose friends. I enjoy deep conversations with my mother. I worry about not achieving what everyone expects of me. I need a hug. I need to be closer to my family. You grow old when you feel nostalgic. You grow old when you look at supermarket prices." These are just some of the reflections that can be heard in a sound installation at the exhibition. We are seventeen years old, a group portrait, which can be seen until May 17 at the CCCB. Its unique feature is that those who speak are 17-year-olds, and what they reveal is very intimate: their thoughts, their concerns, and their worries, free from the pressure of social media or the prejudices of the adult gaze.

The brain of Jeanette Winterson (Manchester, 1959) is so privileged that he is able to connect the stories of Arabian Nights with the dangers of artificial intelligence, the importance of libraries, and a still-valid lesson from psychoanalysis. "Without imagination there is no future," he argues from one of the rooms at the Open University of Catalonia, shortly before receiving his doctorate. honorary cause Throughout her career—everything we have built and all the solutions to overcome obstacles have come from the imagination. The most important thing we can offer young people is the superpower of imagination.” We must “protect, honor, and respect it,” just as Aladdin does with the magic lamp he finds inside a cave, which is the starting point of the author’s new book.Written on the body (1994) and Why be happy when you could be something normal? (2011).

"I'm sure you've all wondered at some point how to pronounce my friend László's surname," began translator and writer Adan Kovacsics, with a friendly smile, sitting next to the latest Nobel laureate in literature. "I have the answer," he continued. "It has to be separated into two parts, kraszna and horkaiIt is a word of Slavic origin: krasny It means pretty, and horkai, hill." The "pretty hill" that is László Krasznahorkai He was also smiling on Wednesday night at the CCCB while his friend assured everyone that the work of the author of Satanic Tango and Melancholy of resistance It connects with great classics like Dostoevsky and Kafka and broadens the spectrum of the contemporary novel thanks to its demanding nature, both in form and content.

Anna Ortiz is passionate about Mercè Rodoreda's novels. She's read quite a few. Not all of them, though. "After seeing the Mercè Rodoreda exhibition at the CCCB, I'm really looking forward to reading the ones I haven't read yet," she says. Anna attended the exhibition with about twenty subscribers. ARA Award, on the guided tour of this exhibition, which delves into the creative universe ofauthor of The Diamond Square, Prize of Honor for Catalan Letters in 1980. Rodoreda, a forestCurated by Neus Penalba, the exhibition brings into dialogue the work of the great novelist with plastic and audiovisual works by artists from different eras, and also incorporates original documents from the Mercè Rodoreda Foundation collection and numerous photographs.

One week after inaugurating what will be one of the exhibitions of the year, Rodoreda, a forestThe Centre for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB) has presented its main lines for 2026. And just as the exhibition about the writer is full of contrasts and opposing poles that coexist, so too will the upcoming program, marked by two major exhibitions: The atomic age and The cult of beauty"The lights and shadows of our present—this is the dialectic that will mark the 2026 program," explains CCCB Director Judit Carrera. The Center will have a budget of 16.8 million euros. In 2025, it received 470,000 visitors, a figure close to that of 2024. Next year, there will be three artists in residence linked to war, displacement, and memory: the Russian writer Maria Stepanova, exiled in Berlin; the Palestinian journalist Mariam Barghouti; and Castro. From the world of literature, authors such as Michele Nieva, Amitav Ghosh, Sara Torres, Jeanette Winterson, and Richard Ford will visit the CCCB.

"For many decades, the adolescent ritual has been to read Rodoreda. I read Broken mirrorI loved it, but I didn't understand a thing. And at school they told me about the author's life, which doesn't help with understanding. Broken mirror"Laments essayist, literary critic, and professor Neus Penalba (Tarragona, 1982). For years, the work of one of the great authors of Catalan literature has been read in a partial and biased way. Mercè Rodoreda's literary magnitude has been conditioned by factors external to her work, by the endearing photograph of a grandmother obsessed with plants, by the need to canonize her as a literary icon from the 1980s onward. "There is a double substitution: one is the idea that Rodoreda is Colometa, perhaps thinking that our grandmothers didn't have enough imagination to create characters, and the other is that she is supplanted." The Diamond Squarewhich softens the blow and recreates characters that are far less strange. If those adults who think they've read Rodoreda reread The Diamond Square "Now, tell me if it's corny!" Penalba challenges.

The exhibition Mercè Rodoreda, a forestThe exhibition, which will be on view at the CCCB from December 5, 2025, to May 25, 2026, has been curated by professor and essayist Neus Penalba. Conceived as an exploration of the writer's imagination, the exhibition transforms the museum space into a forest that represents and analyzes Rodoreda's universe. According to Penalba, visitors wander and discover "the literary and personal roots and the experience of uprooting caused by exile; the trunks of the experience of war; the branches that reach out to the great names of Western culture—writers, painters, and filmmakers; the canopies that shelter the bird, germinating and bearing fruit" in so many contemporary creators. In this report, we will reconstruct the biography and imagination of the author of The Diamond Square, also walking through a forest. Specifically, the forest of the houses where he lived and the houses that most iconically mark his narrative.

When she was just a child, Kapka Kassabova (Sofia, 1973) spent her summers with her family in a seemingly idyllic village in southern Bulgaria called Michurin during the Soviet era (now Tsarevo). "I could consider myself privileged, because with my parents, who were scientists, we went on vacation, while many of the children I knew spent their summers working in the tobacco fields," she recalls now, coinciding with the publication of the first Catalan translation of one of her books. Border (Comanegra, 2025; translation by Ariadna Pous), which presented at the CCCB Kosmopolis festival“At that time, I couldn’t have known that in the villages of the so-called Red Riviera, one out of every two waiters worked for the Bulgarian State Security, and that there were also many KGB and Stasi agents secretly watching the East German vacationers: some of them were making their way through the forest, hoping for a new life far from communism,” she explains.

When she was little, the Italian illustrator Beatrice Alemagna used to compete with her sister to see who could draw the prettiest picture. This kind of sibling contest was her father's idea, who years later admitted it might not have been his best. Although it might seem a questionable approach, it was also true that it planted the seed for his daughter Beatrice's career. When she was eight, the family went to Paris. My father chose the Eiffel Tower as the subject: whoever drew the best picture would win a Corolle doll, which I imagine was a kind of Nancy doll of my time. Alemagna wanted to win and studied the tower intently. That night, her father decided the doll was for her sister, and she cried in despair. However, at that moment, she promised herself that one day she would draw a beautiful Eiffel Tower and publish it in a book. Not only did she keep that promise, but today she is one of the most recognized and admired illustrators in the world, whose work in Catalan can be found published primarily by Combel and A Buen Paso.

In its thirteenth edition, the Kosmopolis festival has set out to focus on what is seemingly marginal and peripheral and place it at the center. Hence, three of its axes are comics, South Korean literature, and creation in Galician. "If we make the effort to move away from the comfort of the center, we will have the opportunity to discover new names and recognize their talent," says Elisabet Goula, director of the festival, which will be held from October 22 to 26 at the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB) and will feature ninety artists from around the world, such as Spiegelman, Charles Burns, and Chris Ware; novelists such as Isabella Hammad, Sigrid Nunez, Kim Hye-hin, José Eduardo Agualusa and Miquel de Palol; poets such as Ismael Ramos and Blanca Luz Vidal; essayists such as Didier Eribon and Kapka Kassabova, and filmmakers such as Carla Simón.

Thirty-seven percent of homes in São Paulo are inhabited by single mothers. This figure reflects the emergence of new family forms, rental housing, and new economic and social models, according to Brazilian anthropologist Teresa Caldeira, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "The 37% is an average. In the suburbs, the figure is even higher," explains Caldeira. at the CCCB, where she serves as curator of the research project An urban interregnum, along with Edgar Pieterse, founder and director of the African Centre for Cities in Cape Town, and urban planner Gautam Bhan, a researcher at the Indian Institute for Urban Settlements.

Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil is a leading linguist and activist in defense of linguistic rights, especially for minority communities like her own, the Mixe (Oaxaca, Mexico). Raig Verd has just published her first translation into Catalan, One of us without a state, and this quarter she will be a resident at the CCCB, where she will develop a program that addresses issues such as multilingualism, mestizaje, the climate emergency, colonization, and diversity.

Two shows with unconventional formats built on words. The surprising Manual for beings live shows from the emerging company La Mula, which swept the board with its first show (Thauma) and the History of love from the veteran Agrupación Señor Serrano, who far from following beaten paths seek new narratives with a creation of ambitious title and less surprising results.

"Best, best, best"This is what she said, excitedly, a fan of writer and artist Chris Ware, while he was signing one of his books at the Barcelona Comic Festival. His emotion was captured in a report on the program Martians from TV3 (get it back!) about the visit to Barcelona, ​​​​a few weeks ago, of the American comic book artist, on the occasion of the opening of the retrospective exhibition about him that can be seen at the CCCB, Drawing is thinkingThis article is, above all, to convey this message: don't miss it. Well, actually, there are two messages: let me add that Chris Ware is a genius.

Perhaps because he lives a hundred meters from the Colosseum, always infested with tourists, the journalist and writer Marco de Eramo (Rome, 1947) has ended up dedicating an essay to him. The world's selfie (Anagrama; translated into Spanish by Xavier González Rovira) delves into "the most important industry of our time," in the author's words. "Just two centuries ago, no one could have foreseen that we would spend so much money and so much time traveling," he explains. According to Marco de Eramo, who recently visited the CCCB, tourism was made possible thanks to two revolutions: "The first, the technological revolution in transportation. The first person to dedicate a book to the experience of traveling on a cruise was Mark Twain. The innocents abroad [The Innocents Abroad] (1867-1869) is well worthwhile." The second revolution has to do with social conquests resulting from the class struggle: "If transport made it possible to move physically, paid free time and, later, the pension system made it possible for tourism to become democratized. It is important not to forget that tourism was the result of a political struggle. If at first only the elites could afford luxuries such as Grand Tour, tourism expanded to increasingly broader layers of society, until reaching the current tourism low cost".

At the exhibition In the moved air... French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman (Saint-Étienne, 1953) proposes taking a critical step back and stopping to read, allowing images to move us, but also to ask us questions. He does this by following in the footsteps of some of Lorca's verses and through three hundred works by artists such as Goya, Dalí, Giacometti, Miró, Picasso, Colita, and Rodin. The exhibition, which begins and ends with the gaze of children, is a co-production of the CCCB, where it can be seen until September 28, and the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, where he was present last year. Didi-Huberman has a long body of work dedicated to the uses and meanings of images and has never tiptoed around some highly controversial topics.. Among his works are: Images despite everything (2004; Images despite everything: visual memory of the Holocaust in the Spanish edition of Paidós), When images take position (2008; When images take position to Antonio Machado Books) and Passer, what is the cost? (2017; Pass, whatever the cost in Shangrila)