Manel Esteller (ICREA at IDIBELL) has been recognised with the National Research Award jointly by the FCRI (Fundació Catalana per la Recerca i la Innovació) and the Catalan Government.
In the same ceremony, Frank Koppens (ICREA at ICFO) has been distinguished with the Young Talent Award, a category for researchers under 40.

Congratulations to both!

Please see more details here.

Festival Sud de Poesia

The Quest of the South (we have lost the North)

The first edition of the Festival Sud de Poesia brings together distinguished and fresh voices in a unique long flow of two afternoons-evenings. Short and long poems, angry and joyful poems, interrogative, nostalgic, aporetic, enigmatic, evocative, boisterous, emancipatory, revolted and ironic poems will be read and develop their echo and ramifications within us.

All the poems evolve around the central the of this encounter : The Quest of the South (we have lost the North).

The quest of the South refers to the quest of the imaginary South. It refers to a South that is the object of a pursuit, a South that is perhaps never reached, and is thus not a determined, physical or geographical place or space. It is an imaginary horizon, in the sense  that  it defines  a  limit,  an  end:  of  the  world,  the  journey,  the  imagination.

Looking for the South necessarily poses the question of the North. So using the expression ´hem perdut el Nord´ (which also exists in Spanish and French, and means ´we have become mad´) in our title, we want to turn its meaning around and assert it positively. We propose a refusal of the North as the point whose loss leads to loss of mind or, slightly differently, that the loss – by extension, loss of orientation, void, gap - contained in the imaginary South is a loss that is worth referring to and out of which we can make a reference.

festival_sud_de_poesia.doc