Kiko Amat (51 years old, Barcelona) moves nervously and sarcastically.
Her tattooed hands up to her nails change from one pose to another, without the need for orders, before the camera.
She insists that Bones appear, the plastic Shakespearean skeleton that she has brought to the set.
The writer recalls by the quickness of her gestures a mountebank, and the inside of her head a
ring
.
Either you are with me or against me.
The author of
Revancha
—An Irvine Welsh with ultras from Boixos Nois from the outskirts of Barcelona— has just launched the Subsol festival of popular culture and subculture that he defines as the antithesis of academic culture.
The self-taught writers;
the biting comedians;
musicians
drill
they leave their habitat and are placed under the spotlight of the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB).
A plea for fun and macarrismo.
Death to the solemnity.
Amat is irritated by serious culture.
He is annoyed that a few hold a chair on "certain eighteenth-century classics, which can be a
badge
and perhaps no longer have a practical use for
entertainment
."
He is horrified by encrypted books, such as Joyce's
Ulysses
.
He hates that high culture closes its doors to the "rabble", "those who have no education or lineage."
He does not forgive that, with his exaggerated theories, "those people, with no soul or fornication", undersell his classics: "Shakespeare was hilarious.
He wrote plays for the people and people were going to have a great time for four fucking hours in the mud and with the black plague in the making”.
The artistic enmity with the upper echelons is its fuel.
“The grudge is what drives me to open the computer at seven in the morning.
Love does not”, she sentences with echoes of his last essay,
The Enemies.
Self-taught, he dropped out of school at 17. He grew up on the outskirts of Barcelona, with his back to exhibitions or literary gatherings, in an environment where the extreme was not a
performance
but the blood with mucus that suppurates the nose of a friend.
The harsh reality, "an unspoken space" in the literary canon that Amat has verbalized through his novels, and that forged his ability to tell stories.
He takes a reflection from the journalist Marc Giró and explains: “Why do [those of the working class] speak so fast and try to always talk funny?
Because we didn't have parents or teachers to tell us we were great.
You had a hostile audience and you had to win them over."
Rightly so, hence his eloquence and the jokes she darts about as he paces up and down with Bones.
Despite his battle against theorizing, the dialogue with Amat has been quite brainy, a natural contrast in an adversary of literary life who acts as a writer.
"There is an apparent paradox in the things I do that interests me," he explains.
"I recognize myself in people like John Carey, an intellectual who hates Cambridge academics, or Kevin Rowland, a pop musician who spent his life shitting on pop music."
Subsol was born with vaudeville momentum, to tell good stories.
The Granada novelist Juarma (
In the end the monsters always win
) participated in the first day;
Kike García, from
El Mundo Today
;
rapper Bebegrande.
On April 9, it will host the
trap-punk
in Basque by Chill Mafia or the humor of four authors from
El Jueves
.
On May 12, the curtain will be closed by cartoonist Peter Bagge;
the leader of Primal Scream, Bobby Gillespie, and the Catalan rapper Baya Baye.
It is a double twist of the Primera Persona festival, directed by Amat together with the writer Miqui Otero from 2014 to 2021. This is an attempt to do something “more rogue, less recoverable by the intelligentsia”.
Choosing the artists was for Amat like writing a letter to the Kings: "Who are the ones that I like?".
And that's it.
So banal and puerile.
Authentic.
Cool show by itself.
"To laugh, dance, fornicate."
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