The FIL of Oaxaca celebrates its 40th anniversary forced to reinvent itself by the pandemic

Visitors to the Oaxaca Book Fair Arturo Pérez /

The Oaxaca International Book Fair (FILO) has presented this Tuesday the official program for its 40th edition, a celebration that will take place virtually due to the covid-19 pandemic.

The event, which will take place between October 17 and 30, proposes a calendar of activities that seeks to interpret the possible future after the health contingency.

"We want to think about the role that literature plays in accompanying us at this time when the world is being written in front of our eyes," said the general director of FILO, Alejandro Quijas-Corzo during the presentation.

In the last two years, FILO changed the streets of the historic center of the city of Oaxaca for the Cultural and Convention Center of the state capital to consolidate itself as one of the most important appointments of literature in Spanish with almost 100,000 visitors in its last two editions.

But the impossibility of organizing a face-to-face event has cut her budget to almost a fifth of the usual.

“It has been an achievement to have found resources at this time,” Vania Reséndiz Cerna, president of the Ventura Fund, the civil association in charge of FILO, emphasized during the press conference this Tuesday.

Reséndiz has also announced that, in addition to the virtual broadcast of the event, the organization has begun to seek alliances with community television stations and radio stations in the State of Oaxaca in order to bring the panels and conversations closer to the indigenous communities furthest from the State.

The central axis of FILO will be the future (and the present) possible after the covid-19 pandemic.

The new panorama imagined by the organizers of the fair goes through a reconstruction of the post-pandemic social fabric that is transversal to questions about the environment, identity, native languages ​​and feminism.

Among 179 confirmed events and 271 guests, the participation of the American poet Anne Carson, the last Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, stands out, with an unpublished reading prepared especially for the event, and the talks with the writer and environmental activist, Terry Tempest Williams or the journalist and feminist Vivian Gornick.

The presence of the winners of the Herralde de Novela award, Mariana Enríquez and Juan Pablo Villalobos, the journalists Alma Guillermoprieto and Leila Guerriero, the Spanish writer Javier Cercas, the Argentinean Selva Almada, and the tribute to the Mexican Margo Glantz in celebration of her 90 years also stand out among the activities.

This context marked by the coronavirus crisis is not the one that the organizers expected to celebrate the 40th anniversary of an event that has become an unmissable event for Spanish literature, but the collaboration between writers, editors and cultural managers has remained intact .

"The scenario for next year is just as complex and we will have to start working from scratch", admitted Vania Reséndiz at the end of the presentation of the event.

“But no matter what the budget is, we are going to do it the same.

The important thing is collaboration and that the event goes ahead ”.