Scenarios of the captive word

How can we cut across the language crisis through theatre and philosophy? When and how do words become both prison and freedom? What are the spaces for an untameable word?

Daniel Gamper (Barcelona, 1969) is a professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and regularly contributes to the media like Ara and La Vanguardia newspapers. His research has focused on the fields of democracy, politics and religion. He has published numerous scholarly articles around the role of religions in democratic societies. Some of these reflections are compiled in Laicidad europea. Apuntes de una filosofía política postsecular (Bellaterra, 2016). He has also reflected on topics like tolerance and the limits of liberalism, and he has translated benchmark authors like Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Scheler and Jürgen Habermas. In conjunction with CCCB, he has interviewed thinkers like Zygmunt Bauman, John Gray and Michael Walzer for the Dixit collection (Katz publishers and CCCB). His latest book, Las mejores palabras. De la libre expresión, won the Anagrama essay prize in 2019.

Lídia Pujol is a singer and performer. Her versatility is captured in both live shows and recordings, where she constructs an identity of her own, one that is clearly Catalan yet based on traditional Yiddish, Celtic, mediaeval, Sephardic or flamenco music. Theatricality, performance and commitment to the message are indissociable from her musical proposals. She broke onto the Catalan music scene with the combo Lídia Pujol and Sílvia Comes, who recorded two records in which they set to music poetry by the likes of Walt Whitman, Lusic Cernuda, Allen Ginsberg, Federico García Lorca and Jacques Prevert, among others. After the duo was dissolved, she released her first solo record, Iaie (2003), which further explores emotion by bringing her voice beyond the limits of words. Her partnerships with artists like Mayte Martín, Dulce Pontes, Idir, Jackson Browne, Kepa Junkera, Brian Dunning (Nightnoise) and Miguel Poveda, among others, have plunged her into all the facets of World Music.