The LibrA festival in Olmedo reflects this weekend on the possibilities that the art has of relating to books and how they can penetrate people’s emotions. The Patio de la Merced and the CAE San Pedro host different conversations between artists, gallery owners and the visitors themselves, in which they debate culture and its ways of expressing themselves.
Among the participants in these meetings is the artist Amparo Blázquez, who presented the Escriptum publishing house, specialized in art books that combine quality with artisanal manufacturing, as well as the evocative power of images and the rigor of research, and delved into in the process of creating his works. After her, Beatriz Díaz Ceballos, together with the gallerist Lorena Bodas, took a tour of her pieces exhibited in the Patio de San Pedro, explaining her beginnings and how she jumped from drawing to analog photography or metal letters with goldsmithing techniques, according to Ical.
During this Saturday afternoon, the artists José María Yagüe, Carlos de Gredos, Javier Ayarza and Ignacio Gil will open a colloquium together with the director of the LibrA Festival, Javier Pérez Lázaro, on ‘Arts and the people’. All of them launched cultural artistic actions in their territories, and at this meeting they will start a debate in which they will reflect on how these initiatives can affect people. “Our goal is to provoke to open minds, to dare to look at new things and experience something different. Not to stay in what is already done or what is normalized,” explained Javier Pérez Lázaro.
Meanwhile, exhibitors from the different publishers and specialized bookstores participating in the meeting will be located in the Patio de la Merced, such as Árdora editions, Escriptum, Editorial Deméter, Kalandraka or Ediciones Menguantes, among others.
For its part, in the patio and the CAE San Pedro there are different exhibitions such as the intervention of Luis Moro, Castilla y León Prize for the Arts 2022, who through Fontanar editions has brought his poetic, interactive, graphic and multidisciplinary pictorial ‘In a place of the word’. In it, his works are accompanied by original poems by Ana Bladiana, Princess of Asturias Award 2024; Elena Poniatowska, Ernesto Cardenal Prize for Literature 2024; Mircea Cartarescu, FIL Literature Prize 2022; and the winners of the Miguel de Cervantes Awards Antonio Gamoneda (2007), Ida Vitale (2019) and María Zambrano (1989).
The CAE corridor hosts, for its part, the exhibition of books and paintings by Beatriz Díaz Ceballos, completed with another of sculptures in the Patio de Sampedro. In addition, visitors will find illustrations and chlorotype prints by Laura Montes, unique pieces and artist books by Amparo Blázquez, with ‘Escriptum’, and numbered books and catalogs provided by the Caja Burgos CAB Art Center.
Inside the CAE San Pedro there is the exhibition ‘Scenes to look again’, where Roberto Coromina intervened in the stalls with works to make the public reflect and Aixa Portero proposed the defense of culture’s roots in Mother Nature.
The exhibitions are completed with ‘In the shadow of the letters’, in which the cultural manager specialized in arts, Vanesa Calzada, from Creoyrecreo, and the architect Yolanda Martínez, from Laboratorio circular, created a space of leisure for all ages where you can play with literature.
Sunday’s day will start with the roller printing workshop, led by the artist Isabel Fuentes García. The closing, for its part, will take place at 1:00 p.m. This year’s edition, launched by A la labor cultural, Proyectos de Artes para Convivir, has the collaboration of the Junta de Castilla y León, the Olmedo City Council and the Caja Rural de Zamora.
