“The danger of being sane”, a literary recommendation by Patricia Tamayo | The Vademecum | News today

Readings

The Danger of Being Sane (2022)recommendation by Patricia Tamayo

Synopsis: Based on her personal experience and the reading of numerous books on psychology, neuroscience, literature and memoirs by great authors from different creative disciplines, Rosa Montero offers us a fascinating study on the links between creativity and mental instability. And she does so by sharing with the reader numerous amazing curiosities about how our brain works when creating, breaking down all the aspects that influence creativity, and assembling them before the reader’s eyes while writing, like a detective willing to solve the scattered pieces of an investigation. Essay and fiction go hand in hand in this exploration of the links between creativity and madness, and thus the reader will witness the very process of creation firsthand, will discover the theory of “the perfect storm”, that is, that in the creative explosion a series of unrepeatable, chemical and situational factors converge, and will share the personal experience of how Rosa Montero lived firsthand, and for years, very close to madness.

Reader: “I recommend “The Danger of Being Sane” by Rosa Montero. It is a book that moves between fiction and essay. She writes about mental illness, but also about the creative process and how the minds of writers and artists like Silvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, among others, create parallel worlds and can have a greater willingness to live in parallel realities and to be creative. She says that we are all classified as weird, but she says it herself in her book, there is nothing strange about being weird. We are all weird in our own uniqueness. It is a book that I really liked for that reason, because it puts on the table a topic that interests me a lot. It also talks, at a somewhat investigative level, about neuroscience and how we protect it. Words and narrative can change your life and I have always liked Rosa’s style.” Patricia Tamayo, actress.

• Author(s): Rosa Montero
• Gender: nonfiction novel

First person singular (2021), recommendation by Daniel Valero, Politics editor of El Espectador

Synopsis: Teenage loves evoked with serene nostalgia, barely glimpsed young women, jazz reviews of impossible records, a poet who loves baseball, a talking ape who works as a masseur and an old man who talks about the circle with several centres… The characters and scenes in this highly anticipated volume of stories blow up the boundaries between imagination and the real world. And they bring back to us, intact, lost loves, broken relationships and loneliness, adolescence, reunions and, above all, the memory of love, because “no one can take away from us the memory of having loved or having been in love at some point in our lives,” says the narrator. A first-person narrator who, at times, could be Murakami himself. Is it then a book of memoirs, stories with autobiographical overtones or a volume exclusively of fiction? The reader will have to decide.

Reader: “Everything that happens with Murakami, even if it is reached – as in my case – by chance, by a red thread that never breaks, is of a brutality that shakes up any routine. And that happened with the eight stories that are written in the 257 pages of First Person Singular, a work in which the Japanese author gives his readers a journey that goes from the never forgotten and unrequited loves of adolescence, through those first times that are engraved in the soul and continues, without leaving aside the jazz and classical music so present in his lyrics, with a baseball poet who refuses to give up his passion for a run-of-the-mill team. He can’t miss it and makes acquiring With the Beatles an obligation.” Political editor of El Espectador.

• Author(s): Haruki Murakami
• Gender: literary novel

In theaters

Made in England: The Powell and Pressburger Films (2023)

Synopsis: Martin Scorsese celebrates the legacy of visionary writer-directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, two of Britain’s greatest filmmakers. Using a treasure trove of film clips and archival material, Scorsese investigates the genius and impact of this duo on film history.

Review: “The documentary begins by recounting the work of these filmmakers from the perspective of the American director, who recalls the long hours in front of the television, impressed by the stories that Powell and Pressburger brought to the screen. The former was the one who took on more of the role of director, the latter the one who shaped the stories, although both appeared credited as producers, directors and screenwriters. Of all the British films that were shown on the schedule in the 40s and 50s, the ones that always excited Scorsese were those that had the seal of the production company The Archers (in Spanish, the archers), which always hit the mark of the interest of this boy from New York. Read the full text here.

• Director): David Hinton
• Gender: Documentary film
• Where to see?: MUBI

Perfect Days (2023)

Synopsis: Hirayama seems completely satisfied with his simple life as a toilet cleaner in Tokyo. Outside of his structured daily routine, he enjoys his passion for music and books. He loves trees and takes photos of them. A series of unexpected encounters gradually reveal more of his past.

Review: “The film has a marked Western influence. The protagonist’s everyday life is accompanied by a selection of mostly English-speaking music, including artists such as Patti Smith, The Rolling Stones and Lou Reed. The German director leaves his mark on the film, although always with an eye on the cinema of the Asian country. Yasujirō Ozu, the Japanese director of films such as “Late Spring” (1949), “Tokyo Story” (1953) and “The Taste of Sake” (1962), is considered by Wenders to be his “great teacher” and “the most important figure in the history of cinema”, as he said in a space on the film social network Letterboxd. Read the full text here.

• Director): Wim Wenders
• Gender: Drama
• Where to see?: Bogota Cinematheque

Inside Out 2 (2024)

Synopsis: Inside Out 2 returns to the mind of a newly teenaged Riley just as Headquarters is undergoing a sudden renovation to make room for something totally unexpected: New emotions! Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust, with years of impeccable management behind them (according to them…) don’t quite know what to feel when Anxiety appears. And it seems that it doesn’t come alone.

Review: “The film’s first attempt is to give a face to the emotions that the child is feeling through the characters and the colors of each one. Its creator, Pete Docter, was inspired by his daughter Ellie to write the film, asking himself what was going through her head, what she felt and how she felt it. These questions led the team on the set to begin telling anecdotes about their young children and, later, to begin in-depth research with psychologists and specialists to create the characters and understand each of the emotions, to capture them in the most accurate way possible. Read here the full text.

• Director): Kelsey Mann
• Gender: animation
• Where to see?: Cinecolombia

On stage

Exposure: Pulses of the Bogotá River art-science-community

On Friday, June 14, Galería Sextante inaugurated the exhibition by artist Fernando Cruz and environmental engineer Luis Alejandro Camacho. The exhibition displays for the first time images on canvas and paper in which the Bogotá River is revealed. The works were created during a cycle of workshops and collaborative processes in 2023 that connected art, science and community, by putting into dialogue the measurement of the river’s quality and the creation of images with its waters.

This process arises from the artistic technique created by Cruz that he calls “Aquaauragraphy.” This technique captures the aura of the water and the place it invokes. Several elements take part in this process: the author and his intention, the place, its climate, cyanotype chemicals used at different times and order, time, water and its natural contents.

Exposure: Encounters in the dust factory

On June 15, the Miguel Urrutia Art Museum inaugurated the exhibition “Encounters in the Dust Factory”, an anthological exhibition of the work of the artist María Elvira Escallón, which was curated by Ana María Lozano. The exhibition covers a time span that goes from 1997 to the present and includes in this tour nine works, several of them site-specific installations and video installations, which will be seen for the first time in the rooms of the Miguel Urrutia Art Museum.

María Elvira Escallón’s work includes different media such as sculpture, photography and installations. Her practice has been crossed by long and complex research processes in which she has dialogued with history, spaces and architecture. The exhibition will be open until January 20, 2025.

Concerts: The Colombian Youth Philharmonic Orchestra with Valeriano Lanchas

The Colombian Youth Philharmonic Orchestra will perform in six cities in Colombia in early July. The group will join with singer Valeriano Lanchas and the Metanoia Collective, a group of visual artists, for the concert series. Lina González-Granados, conductor of the Los Angeles Opera, USA, and winner of multiple awards including the ECHO Special Prize of the prestigious ‘La Maestra’ competition, will conduct the youth orchestra for the first time.