The long-awaited launch will take place next Saturday, December 10th, at 3 pm at Casa do Meio-Dia / Sul, Sol e Sal, in Loulé, and will be attended by the members of the jury, Dr. Adriana Freire Nogueira (Regional Director of Culture of the Algarve), Lídia Jorge and Patrícia Amaral (Mákina de Cena).
In 2020, the Planet was hit by the pandemic caused by the New Coronavirus – SarsCov2. During the first confinement, Time, the one we always complain about, entered our houses inside and stayed there, imposing and static. Thus, Mákina de Cena launched, still in 2020, an Open-Call of Photography, [ISO]lados, which, in the rest times that the pandemic provided, became an exhibition in the Municipal Galleries of Loulé and at the IPDJ in Faro.
In 2021, upon returning to confinement, we launched another Call, this time literary: />> SLASH FORWARD, which challenged participants to dialogue with their ‘future self’. This edition is the result of that challenge, which had a total of 36 participations from all over the country, with 23 of these texts being selected for printing. With the dragging of the pandemic, the launch was postponed several times, until now.
Still in the aftermath of an effervescent weekend, with the second edition of Festival Contrapeso invading the city of Loulé, Mákina de Cena promotes, next Saturday, December 10th, the launch of this very particular anthology, featuring with the presence of the Regional Director of Culture, Dr. Adriana Freire Nogueira, Lídia Jorge and Patrícia Amaral (Mákina de Cena), and most of the authors selected in the national call, in what will be the last event of 2022 organized by this structure.
The initiative />> SLASH FORWARD was supported by the Municipality of Loulé, the Garantia Cultura programme, and the Portuguese Institute of Sports and Youth.
The distinction between past, present and future is a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Albert Einstein
We often travel to the memories of the past because, because they seem concrete to us, they explain, console us, stir us up…. Traveling to the memories of the future is already more complex, because they are abstract, because they seem unreal, artificial, because end, useless. The participants of this />> SLASH FORWARD confessed it: the exercise, which seemed simple, turned out to be more complex than they thought.
Do you write to the future to question the present or to purge it, evading us? To lead our mind to build a future potential, according to the recent conclusions of neurophysiology? Or, purely and simply, to play around with a literary exercise?
What is the use, after all, of a dialogue with the Self of tomorrow? Let’s leave this question open, challenging all who read us to give it a try.
Having all the creative freedom with regard to form (it did not necessarily have to be a letter), speech, or graphics – in fact, the only rule was to follow the theme –, the participants surprised us with a very interesting uniformity : on the one hand, practically everyone followed the motto to the letter (letter to tomorrow’s self), opting for the narrative and direct epistle; on the other hand, the covid theme is present in almost all texts. Everyone, even those who do not express it, resounds with the famous question “will everything be okay?”. We think so, since everyone, without exception, dialogues with themselves in the future, which reflects resilience, survival and even longevity – everyone is alive, in that future we are talking about.
More than a literary anthology, this edition is a small sample of a society confronted with a pandemic and its ‘children’: confinement, curfew, fear, protective equipment, vaccines, distance, distance, distance…
Now, more than a year after the production of these texts, when everything seems to be slowly returning to normality and minds are in a hurry to forget the hideous animal, it becomes even more interesting to read them.
The jury
Adriana Freire de Nogueira
Lídia Jorge
Patricia Amaral