An East London café is holding an event devoted to queer poetry on Friday the 25th as part of the Festival of Queer Spanish Literature, which features work from Spain and Latin America.
This is the festival’s second outing, and it runs from today until the 26th. Live and online events are being hosted all over the capital, including in East London, where queer writers from Chile are going to read poetry at the Atlas Grinds Café in Stoke Newington.
The festival is organised by independent bookshop Romancero Books, with the support of the office for cultural and scientific affairs of the Spanish embassy in London.
Festival organiser and founder of Romancero books, Jorge Garriz Fernandez, told me why he started the bookshop: “I felt very detached from Spanish culture. In London, you can buy books written in Spanish, but they were always bestsellers and classics. I am very proud to say that this has changed since Romancero books started.”
This year ‘s festival will hold four live events, including a lecture by art historian and gallery director Joaquin Garcia Martin, based on an exhibition he curated last year about queer Madrid in the 1920s.
I spoke to Joaquin on Instagram to find out more about this fascinating period of queer history, which he is currently writing a book about.
“Spain in the 1920s is kind of a moment in history that has been kept hidden from us,” because of what followed after the Spanish Civil War, Joaquin told me.
The civil war broke out in 1936, between republicans and nationalists, and was won by General Franco’s nationalists.
“After the war, the winning side did not want to acknowledge all the things happening before, especially because they were against that,” said Joaquin.
“So from the beginning, my project was to analyse, to show … that generation of artists in general: painters, writers, dancers, performers, who were actively working and living in Madrid in 1920 with a visibility in their queer side of life”, he explained.
One of the points Joaquin wants to stress through his lecture at the festival is that Madrid’s queer writers and artists were not isolated individuals. They were part of a wider community. “They were part of groups, and they shared a common interest, and that was their ‘queerness”.
“I’m so pleased to be invited to this project,” Joaquin told me, “as since it started, it has been very close to my heart. This project is political”.
You can see the whole programme here.
Edited by Khadijat Akande
