Hay Festival Segovia 2022

Casa de las Conchas s one of the most iconic architectural elements in Salamanca. Late Gothic with the first signs of Plateresque, the style in which this land expressed its first Renaissance. In this singular place, the novelist Reyes Monforte, author of books such us La violinista roja, Postales del Este or La memoria de la lavanda, talks with the writer and journalist Carlos Aganzo on the value of art and literature as an alternative to a decomposing world in this Spanish and European cultural capital. They speak of the return to Nature as the only way to return to the Earth everything that the Earth has given to man... and mankind denies. Words for reconstruction. Stories for a new world. Lyrics for a rebirth that are accompanied by a reading by María Antonia Eliott, ambassador of the United Kingdom in Spain, and the Salamancan, Castilian and Leonese poets: Mónica Velasco, Asunción Escribano and Fermín Herrero, on the essential reconciliation of human beings with their environment.

Presented by Ramona Domínguez.

Event in Spanish.

Culture, as well as playing its role in disseminating knowledge and fostering people’s critical spirit, can shape a city's discourse. Indeed, cities that truly invest in culture eventually see an improvement in their capacity to attract and retain talent. Culture can also be seen to help shape tourist demand, favouring the arrival of visitors who are respectful of their destination city. Exploring these themes, Miquel Molina, journalist and writer, assistant director of La Vanguardia and author of titles such as Cinco horas en Venecia and Naturaleza muerta and Jordi Corominas, writer, literary critic and cultural agent who has published novels, essays, and books of poetry. He collaborates with RNE and the supplement La Lectura and has published, among others, Paragraf de Barcelona, The Violent City, Barcelona 1912, the last book of old Europe. They talk to Xavier Vidal, director of the Nollegiu bookshop in Barcelona.

The event will be presented by Sheila Cremaschi, director of Hay Festival Segovia.

Event in Spanish and in Catalan.

12:00 La Alhóndiga. Sede de Gales / Llwyfan Cymru

Opening of the Bernardo Pérez photography exhibition

Bernardo Pérez is one of Spain's most well-known photojournalists. With a career that began in the 1970s, in large part linked to the newspaper El País, he has witnessed the most important international events, and his camera has recorded wars, famines, climatic disasters, political changes, cultural and sporting events of the greatest significance. The exhibition is an anthological journey through a career that covers all genres of journalistic photography. His work is guided by his commitment to the right to have free and truthful information and his non-intervention in a situation. Including but not limited to portraits, travel reports and photographs of events, grouped in series such as Gente con luz, Los agujeros negros del Planeta or his work in progress: Bar.

With the support of Asociación Nacional de Informadores Gráficos de Prensa y TV and the City Council of Segovia.


12:30 Inauguration at Torreón de Lozoya

WATERBURNING

A sea of refracted light, created by the reflection of luminescence on small graduations of the shining surface of a myriad of very slightly mirrored glass discs. The effect of carefully calculated angles of light create strong caustics that illuminate this renaissance courtyard in an infinitely self-renewing work, “WATERBURNING”.

Subtle undulations of the reflecting surface give rise to a light map of gleaming nodal points, bright fields and areas of darkness. The sculpture itself appears only mildly undulating, but the sun amplifies each tiny nuance and turn in texture, illustrating the radically different outcomes created by small changes, inviting us to consider how small decisions generate ilarger nterconnected effects.

As always with the work of Daudy and Novoselov, this work combines art and science together to invite the viewer to consider the importance of each person in society. Empowering the individual to realise the valuable contribution each of us can offer to those around us, to the larger community, to our natural system and planet.

The materials used in this exhibition have been ethically sourced. Both the glass and metal are completely recyclable. Working with the renowned glass workshop of Alfonso and Pablo Muñoz, Daudy and Novoselov have taken care in sourcing low carbon-footprint materials and to celebrate the very best of Spanish artisanship here in Segovia, whilst reiterating the message that we, at every instant, have the potential to be a powerful agent for positive change.

This event invites us to explore reality and imagination from the perspective of speculative architect and filmmaker Liam Young. The artist will give a performative talk that, through his words and images, will transport us to real and imaginary worlds that invite us to examine our present and rethink our future. The talk will incorporate an exploration of the use of Artificial Intelligence through a conversation between Liam Young and young researcher Piera Riccio.

Artist Liam Young (Australia, 1979) works in a hybrid space where architecture and design, film, science and fiction intersect to generate powerful audio visual pieces that envision the risks and potential of new technologies. At a time when technological transformation seems to be happening faster than our ability to understand what the effects might be, the worlds that Young constructs invite us to explore their possible outcomes. In his own words, we don’t need more charts and graphs to show us what’s going wrong with the world, we need to dramatize data to get people emotionally engaged.

Liam Young's work has been exhibited in some of the world's leading exhibition spaces, including the MET, MoMA, the Royal Academy and the Venice Biennale. His pieces have also been broadcast on BBC and Channel 4 and he has been nominated for BAFTA awards. He has been a visiting professor at Princeton University and MIT and was on the faculty of the Strelka Institute until its closure.

The young researcher Piera Riccio is working on her doctoral thesis in the field of Artificial Intelligence, with the European ELLIS programme at the University of Alicante and a grant from the Banco Sabadell Foundation for the promotion of young talent. Riccio’s doctoral thesis deals with the social implications of the use of Artificial Intelligence algorithms in social networking platforms and how they are defining the flow of information in our society, thus establishing new paradigms of mass communication.

A herd of 400 Castilian sheep belonging to local shepherd Mr. Rafael Montes will be walked by Daudy and Novoselov to the area beneath the historic Roman aquaduct in Segovia, in a participatory performance proving the perfection of Einstein’s Unification Theory.

Grand Unified Theory (GUT) is a model in particle physics in which, at high energies, the three gauge interactions of the Standard Model comprising the electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces are merged into a single force.

The sheep, each inscribed with SÍ or NO (YES or NO), will form random groups and arrangements, proving perfectly to us the possibility of individuals living peacefully together, however disparate their point of view.

The paint used to write the words on the sheep's coat is ecological and completely harmless to the animal.

A flock of sheep painted with numbers at Daudy and Novoselov’s recent WONDERCHAOS exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK caused a stir in the worlds of mathematics, science and engineering, by creating more random numbers in a month than there are atoms in this universe. As the sheep passed each other, thousands of different number combinations were created, forming in effect a living random number generator. A film by Daudy and directed by Gautier Deblonde illustrating this phenomenon, entitled ALTERNATIVE RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR: THE SHEEP OF MR. CHARLES PLATTS (2021), will also be premiered at the festival.

Volver a Contar: Latin American Writers in the British Museum Archives is an international collaboration between the British Museum and the Hay Festival, which explores 10,000 years of human history in the Americas. The project has involved inviting a group of writers to explore narratives about the past by means of a collection of Latin American objects never seen by the public in the British Museum. Carlos Fonseca (Costa Rica and Puerto Rico), author of Austral; Lina Meruane (Chile), author of Sistema nervioso and Cristina Rivera Garza (Mexico) author of El invencible verano de Liliana will talk to the journalist Andrea Aguilar (Spain) in order to present this anthology of short stories published by Anagrama, which mingles rigorous research and fiction in order for us to better understand our history and try to resolve the gaps in the historical narrative.

Event in Spanish

After this event, Anagrama will offer a drink to celebrate the launch of the Volver a contar anthology

Ai Weiwei, one of China's most internationally renowned artists, both for his creative activity and his political activism, will come to the Hay Festival in a streamed event. His memoirs, entitled 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, explore themes that touch on the very core of the Hay as a Festival of creation and thought: freedom of expression and activism, cultural and political history, as well as his creative life. His is a career that has not been limited to the visual arts, but encompasses other fields such as architecture (he participated in the design of Beijing’s National Stadium), music and film. In the book, the artist recounts his life in the United States from 1983 till 1993, and his rise to the status of superstar in the world of art.

Ai Weiwei will be in conversation with Anne McElvoy, British journalist and executive editor at The Economist, who has previously served as policy editor and head of audio. The Economist Ask, the bi-weekly Thursday programme/podcast conducted by McElvoy, has brought together hundreds of leading newsmakers from around the world.

Event in English with simultaneous translation into Spanish.

Audio content is growing in importance in our digital age. Podcasts and other formats have become new sources of information and entertainment. In this territory, one characterized by the power of the spoken word, audiobooks are becoming a new way for people to get to know literary classics and well-known actors are bringing their talents to narrative. The actor and singer Leonor Watling, who has made films with Pedro Almodóvar and Isabel Coixet and who sings with her band Marlango, has given voice to George Orwell's classics Animal Farm and 1984. Cristina Plazas is known for her roles as Marina Salgado in the Antena 3 TV series Los hombres de Paco and Miranda Aguirre in Vis a vis, among others. She currently plays Laura Bertrán in TVE's Estoy vivo. She has given voice to Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Both will talk about this new experience.

Event in Spanish

Currently Budapest has Europe’s largest and most ambitious urban cultural development, the Liget Budapest Project. An urban and cultural development plan that has transformed the Hungarian capital, involving internationally acknowledged architects, like Sou Fujimoto or Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA). With five new buildings and half of the park area completed and three more to go, the project’s visionary, Laszlo Baan, also director of the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest, will be at the Hay Festival to explain and elaborate on the project, and how it relates to comparable projects in Europe.

Isabel Fuentes, PhD in Museology of Natural and Human Sciences, has spent twenty years working in scientific communication and cultural management in institutions such as the Residencia de Estudiantes, the National Museum of Natural Sciences and the La Caixa Foundation. She is currently the director of CaixaForumand an expert in the transformation that a museum can bring about in the city inwhich it is installed.

Baan and Fuentes will talk with Miquel Molina, journalist and writer, assistant director of the newspaper La Vanguardia.

Event in English with simultaneous translation into Spanish and vice versa

Patronage of different kinds is one of the major forms of promoting and protecting creative works. Three outstanding cultural figures who understand its importance, both in the public and private spheres, come to the Hay Festival Segovia. They are Antonio Filipe Pimentel, Director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, also in the Portuguese capital, who will talk about private patronage; and the ambassador Antonio Monteiro, Chair of the Millennium Bank Foundation, who will talk about support for public institutions and private creators through his foundation.

Prince Lorenzo de’ Medici, a direct descendent from a branch of the historical family of patrons, will moderate this event.

Event in Spanish

Culture is undoubtedly one of the main engines of change in a society. The directors of two of the country's most important cultural centres will return to the Festival they both know so well to debate this idea. Valerio Rocco has been director of the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid since 2019 and was previously vice-dean of Research, Knowledge Transfer and the Library at the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where he teaches History of Modern Philosophy. Isabel Fuentes, PhD Museology of Natural and Human Sciences, has spent twenty years working in scientific communication and cultural management in institutions such as the Residencia de Estudiantes, the National Museum of Natural Sciences and La Caixa Foundation. She is currently the director of CaixaForum.

Event in Spanish