Today is Tàpies. Perejaume – Marta Tafalla

Aquest event forma part de: Today It’s Tàpies

Today is Tàpies    is a series of conversations across generations and disciplines, led and moderated by arts journalist Rita Roig (Terrassa, 1997) and organised by the Fundació Antoni Tàpies as part of the Tàpies Centenary Year. It sets out to interpret the artist’s texts as a starting point to discuss current issues such as environmentalism, self-determination for peoples, interculturality and the political commitment of art.

The series will encourage people to think about the artist’s words and thoughts though thirteen events at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies involving people from a range of professional backgrounds (arts, education, science, politics, the environment, health and life sciences) and different generations. Altogether it will construct a polyphonic dialogue that will be recorded in podcast form thanks to cooperation with Catalunya Ràdio, in order to recover and experience the knowledge generated in a different format and a different context.

Chapter 9: Environmentalism and other directions

Tàpies wrote time and again about nature. He did so in talking about the Montseny massif in particular, to combat the degradation of this landscape he loved deeply, but every word he devoted to the Montseny actually referred to the natural environment, the life around us. For him, “The environment is a material from which all of us are committed to constructing what should be the most beautiful and delicate of our works of art: life itself.” The concern to represent the landscape, care for it and value it is a constant in Tàpies’ work, and in that of many other artists influenced by him. In this conversation, Perejaume talks to philosopher and environmentalist Marta Tafalla about the relationship between the environment and art, creation and nature and the commitment artists must have to this.

PARTICIPANTS

Perejaume is an artist and writer who combines visual and literary creativity. Since the early 1980s he has produced an extensive body of work including books of poetry, essays, criticism and catalogues in which he constantly questions the relations between nature and culture with the aim of reformulating the relationship between art and territory. Joan Brossa, Joan Miró, J.V. Foix and Jacint Verdaguer are some of the figures whose creative work has influenced his artistic vision, which also draws on the popular culture of the Maresme area and the world of farming. In 2005 he won the national visual arts prize awarded by the Catalan government, and in 2006 the national arts prize awarded by the Spanish ministry of culture.

Marta Tafalla is a philosopher who explores the relationship between animals, humans and nature from an ethical and aesthetic point of view. She considers environmentalism and animalism essential concepts in coping with today’s challenges. She currently lectures in ethics and aesthetics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and is also a member of the scientific council of the Centre for Animal Ethics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Her most recent publication is entitled Estética ecoanimal (Plaza y Valdés, 2019), an essay in which she rethinks our relationship with nature and sets out a multisensory, ecologist and animalist proposition that is essential to facing up to today’s challenges.

Today is Tàpies programme

Podcasts Today is Tàpies, by Catalunya Ràdio.