Hay Festival Medellín 2023

Anthropologist, engineer, professor and activist Yayo Herrero (Spain) is one of the key voices of ecofeminism, a current of critical thought and activism that unites the positions of feminism and environmentalism to rethink humanity's relationship with the natural world. Herrero is the co-author of around twelve books, in which she reflects on the ecological challenges and problems we face as a society in order to conserve the natural bases that sustain life on the planet. The author will talk with Jenny Giraldo about how we can build our bond with the planet from an ecofeminist point of view, and will propose alternative forms of economic, political and social reorganisation that will allow us to recover the broken bonds between nature and people.

Lina Flórez and Pablo Pérez are the founders of Altais Cómics, a pioneering project in Colombia dedicated to the production, research and dissemination of independent national comics. As creators, both have produced the comics Emilia, Crónicas de una mujer de 1,49 (Chronicles of a woman of 1.49), and Tres horizontes (Three Horizons), the latter being the winner of the Convocatoria de Estímulos para el Arte y la Cultura de la Secretaría de Cultura Ciudadana de Medellín. In Tres horizontes, the authors fuse comic strips with journalism to narrate the lives of three women of different ages and social strata, revealing aspects of their daily lives in Medellín and the way in which they face the challenges they encounter in their professions. In this conversation, the authors will tell us more about the process of creating this work, their work at the helm of Altais Cómics and how they understand the art of comics.

A Persian proverb says that "whoever builds a garden becomes an ally of light, no garden has ever emerged from darkness". Gardens are not only a material construction but also a refined cultural artefact with which philosophers, thinkers, architects and kings have thought about mankind's ideal of life on earth over the centuries. The lecturer, philosopher and gardener Santiago Beruete (Spain) has spent his entire career studying the relationship between the ordering of nature and human thought, in an attempt to reflect on how the relationship and care of nature brings us closer to becoming the best version of the human condition. In this talk, the author will talk with Paula Villegas about his trilogy on the subject, the essays Jardinosofía. Una historia filosófica sobre los jardines (Gardensophy. A philosophic story about gardens), Verdolatría. La naturaleza nos enseña a ser humanos (Greenery. Nature teaches us how to be humans) y Un trazo de tierra (A piece of land), where he invites us, through his stories, to preserve the environment, offering us a close and intimate look at our sustenance, nature, and all those handfuls of earth that make up what we are.

The writer and priest Pablo d'Ors (Spain) is the author of the celebrated "Trilogy of Silence" and founder of his group of thought nomads, "Amigos del Desierto", from which he promotes an updating of the mysticism and teachings of the Gospels adapted to the chaotic modern life. In his latest book Biografía de la luz (Biography of Light) (2021) he follows the line of his previous works, advocating for a return to silence and a search for oneself through contemplation. In the company of Ana Cristina Restrepo, the author will be talking about his work and will give us the keys to start us on the path of meditation and self-knowledge with the aim of achieving a fuller life.

Andrés Felipe Solano (Colombia) is a writer and chronicler, author, among other titles, of the journalistic book Salario mínimo: vivir con nada (Minimum wage: living on nothing), in which he recounts his experience in Medellín as a textile factory worker for six months; and of Corea, apuntes desde la cuerda floja (Korea, notes from the tightrope), winner of the 2016 Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana Prize. In this conversation with Isabel Botero, he will be presenting his most recent work, Gloria, a novelistic biography in which the author reimagines his mother's experience as a young immigrant in New York in the 1970s. The author, also an immigrant in South Korea, recounts the daily life of immigration, her interaction with the city and with other immigrants, her world of work, her longing for his native country and, ultimately, her loneliness in the face of the difficulty of building a bond with a foreign society and country.

No one can deny that the Internet has become an essential tool for survival in the modern world, but what will happen the day the network goes down? How will users react? Will chaos ensue? The answer to all these questions is in Error 404. ¿Preparados para un mundo sin internet? (Error 404. Ready for a world without the Internet?) (2021), where Esther Paniagua (Spain) has traced other examples of network failures in history, to try to imagine what will happen on the day when the Internet collapses worldwide. In conversation with Diego Agudelo, the author will talk about how this could happen and the possible consequences of such a big blackout, as well as how the Internet has become a nest of control, manipulation and disinformation (and how to reverse its self-destruction).

Leonardo Padura (Cuba) presents the book Personas decentes (Decent People), the latest novel in the saga featuring his well-known character, the detective Mario Conde. The murder of a former Cuban hierarch dedicated to the repression of artists in pursuit of ideological purity, at a time of maximum social and political effervescence in Cuba with the visit of Barack Obama in 2016, is the starting point for this thriller with which Padura portrays one of the most sinister pages in the history of the Cuban revolution. The abysmal differences between the Castro elite and the rest of the population, spiced by political corruption and the use of sex work as a means of livelihood on the island, make up this novel in which many crimes, some physical and others historical and spiritual, are recounted. Róbinson Úsuga Henao will talk to the author, considered to be one of the renovators of the police genre in Spanish.