Cosmopoética 2010: El jardín de la inocencia
Perhaps one of the greatest virtues of Cosmopoética is its ability to create intra-stories in the streets, those corridors between high culture and citizens who intermingle like wild climbing plants until they form a thick and invisible blanket of experiences, encounters, smiles and discoveries. In addition to promoting reading and expanding knowledge to unexpected confines, the International Poetry Festival of Córdoba, one of the most important of its kind in Europe, turns the city, for ten days, into a true enclave for dialogue, a shared territory where different expressive disciplines overlap in order to soak naturally into the metropolitan epidermis and the day-to-day pulse of its inhabitants. In this sense, perhaps one of the most striking experiences in this seventh edition of the festival has been El jardín de la inocencia [The Garden of Innocence], a large joint work developed by four painters and twelve poets1, which has turned a central public space into an original oasis of synaesthesias where the literary and the pictorial coexist.
The setting chosen by Miguel Gómez Losada, the man behind the event, are a series of large walls painted totally black, at the entrance to the old Palacio de Orive, negative walls which manage to create an atmosphere as strange as it is enveloping. The nexus joining the artists taking part is the fact that they all work with vegetable motifs, a leitmotiv open to many interpretations, which links the impressions taken from the wild landscape with a certain bucolic sense, which has been almost lost in urban environments, a respectful approach to Nature, seen as a space for peace, relaxation and reflection. In this Utopian garden two opposing walls stand out. The main one has been occupied by a mural by Maria José Gallardo and Felipe Ortega Regalado, a design which resembles a votive altar crowned by a sort of totem of fertility. The panel includes pleasant details such as the Diana of Versailles or the beguiling meticulousness of cross stitch, but it suffers from excessive rigidity, as well as focusing the attention too intensely, something which should have been avoided if what was desired was a general and evocative atmosphere.
In contrast, the space intervened by Patricio Cabrera and Gómez Losada is dynamic and zigzagging. As no hierarchies exist about what is seen on the wall, it neither directs the gaze nor conditions the spectator, allowing him to create his own itinerary, pausing at whichever details he finds most suggestive. The continuous incomings and outgoings by Cabrera, as well as his imaginary cutaways to fantastic and unknown dimensions, are excellent. The window with the waterfall, for example, is simply marvellous. The dialogue established between the two discourses –even though their approaches are very dissimilar– complements both of them. The night-time postcard designed by Gómez Losada (using a lamp as an improvised moon) is delicate and silent. It is conceived as a cyclorama which, like a backdrop, attempts to unfold a diaphanous patina rather than to define specific elements. The calligraphy verses on the walls, which are short and suggestive, sprinkle the corners of the esplanade. One of the most beautiful is by Eduardo Chivite: “Where I look there are trees / They remind me of you”.
Literature and painting, two lyrical disciplines capable of inspiring fantasy and emotion, offer spectators a series of resources which arouse personal concerns through the inventions of others. The aim of those taking part is to awaken in the visitor an emotional memory. As Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote when he observed a small gesture one morning, in his patio: “You walked through the garden, / and your hand, playing, / distracted, / ripped a feeling from me”. This is what El jardín de la inocencia seeks to achieve: to arouse, subtly and simply, “hidden feelings”2.
1. Artists: Miguel Gómez Losada, Patricio Cabrera, María José Gallardo and Felipe Ortega Regalado. Poets: Elena Medel, Alejandra Vanessa, Pablo García Casado, Nacho Montoto, Joaquín Pérez Azaustre, José Luis Rey, Rafael Antúnez, Eduardo Chivite, Juan A. Bernier.
2. Jiménez, Juan Ramón. Eternidades. Editorial Visor. Madrid, 2007. P. 147.
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