The Fitzcarraldo Winter Party
Ben Eastham at el Café Gíjon
The Floating World
AT EL CAFÉ GIJÓN
A meditation on grief, late capitalism and art in the face of imminent climate apocalypse, The Floating World is thrilling repurposing of Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel.
Skye Arundhati Thomas will guide us through readings and a discussion about the novel and its art with author Ben Eastham.
“The Floating World is fantastical, its dialogue brilliantly funny, but it is not an unserious book. The city is being built against a present-day backdrop of genocide, inequality and corporate interest: its residents want to be sheltered from the crimes they have committed; the people building it fear they will not be allowed to remain once it is finished. In the face of this injustice, the protagonist must also process the death of his wife and prepare for the next chapter of his life. As immaculately observed as the book’s satire is, its grief is just as devastating, its anger just as skilfully steered.”
Una reflexión sobre el duelo, el capitalismo tardío y el arte ante el inminente colapso climático, The Floating World constituye una fascinante relectura y reapropiación de La invención de Morel, de Adolfo Bioy Casares.
Skye Arundhati Thomas nos guiará a través de una serie de lecturas y una conversación en torno a la novela y su dimensión artística, junto a su autor, Ben Eastham.
Evento en Inglés.
Skye Arundhati Thomas is a writer and editor from India. They are co-author of Pleasure Gardens: Blackout and the Logic of Crisis in Kashmir (MACK Books, with Izabella Scott) and editor of Palestine is everywhere (TBA21, Silver Press). They are currently based in Madrid, as Curator and Editor at TBA21.
Ben Eastham is an art critic and editor based in London. The editor-in-chief of e-flux Criticism, and a regular contributor to the Guardian, he was previously a founding editor of The White Review and an editor at ArtReview. He has edited books on Luis Camnitzer, Arshile Gorky, Fabio Mauri and Stephen Spender, worked on exhibitions including the Shanghai Biennale and documenta, and is on the advisory panel of EVA International. He began his career as a journalist at the BBC reporting on global mass media and propaganda, and has lived in Athens and Rome. His previous book, The Imaginary Museum (TLS Books, 2020), is about how works of art change the way we see the world.