A conference on “artistic activism in Ancient Greece”, music and activist Nadya Tolokonnikova, founder of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot, marks the opening of the fifth edition of the Forum of the Future in Porto.
The “thinking festival” opens at 4 pm at the Municipal Theater Rivoli, with video artist Ali Cherri from Lebanon, showing “Water Blues”, a “reflection on the power that mud exerts on us as material and metaphor, “followed by another audiovisual work, ‘Hidden Park’ by the Chinese Guan Xiao, a reflection on the body and humanity.
After the two works, the session is followed by Tolokonnikova, in a look at ancient Greece as a house of academic philosophical tradition, by the “writing of Plato and Aristotle”, but also “of the tradition of a practical philosophy.”
The Forum, which extends until November 10, has as its background theme ‘Ágora Club’, in an allusion to the public square of debate, and a reflection “on our time and especially on the future”, from “Antiquity and of its manifestation in contemporary culture, “declared the mayor of Porto, Rui Moreira, in the presentation, in which he described the event as a” political statement of the city. ”
On the second day, Londoners Slavs and Tatars look at Lenin and the USSR at 5:00 p.m., at Rivoli, before a session with a professor of astrophysics at the University of Geneva and leader of the HARPS project, Michel Mayor, at 9:30 p.m..
The astrophysicist who heads the project known as the “planet hunter” talks about “the plurality of worlds in the cosmos”, in a session with professor at the University of Porto Orfeu Bertolami, on a day that also includes a lecture by the Italian philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato, about the “Empire of Debt”.
The German archaeologist and historian Vinzenz Brinkmann travel to Porto for a lecture at the table during a lunch in the company of Mala Voadora about the classical aesthetics of the Greek-Roman period.
Moderated by Natacha Antão, the session of Tuesday, at 13:00, also dialogues with the performance ‘The Metamorphoses of Ovid’, which the Suitcase presents on 09, at 23:30, from the work of the Roman poet and in dialogue with Brinkmann’s research.
Among the 52 guests from 17 different countries is the Japanese Toyo Ito, Pritzker Prize in 2013 and for the first time in Portugal, speaking on Tuesday of the “new public arena” and new space organizations for debate, encounter and confrontation of ideas.
On July 7, British playwright Martin Crimp will preview the play ‘The Rest Will Be Familiar To You From The Cinema’, which Nuno Carinhas and Fernando Mora Ramos will stage at the National Theater São João, with the premiere scheduled for March 27, 2019.
Crimp rewrites Euripides’ “The Phenicia” and anticipates the premiere of the new production in a conversation with the researcher Maria Sequeira Mendes, on a day that also includes a conversation between the British Marina Warner, president of the Royal Society of Literature, and the Spanish Beatriz Colomina.
The Indian Pankal Mishra, the Spanish Eva Franch and the German theatre critic Hans-Thies Lehmann are other names of the poster, which has as one of the biggest highlights the presence of the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood.
Atwood, whose novel “Penelope’s Odyssey” arrived in October by Elsinore publishers, will be in the large auditorium of Rivoli on the 8th, in a conversation with the curator of Whitechapel Gallery Gareth Evans, to speak “about the importance of mythology in his work. ”
Another of the topics covered is the weight of identity, social order and language in the work of the author of works such as ‘The Blind Assassin’, winner of the Booker Prize, ‘The Story of a Servant’ or ‘Called her Grace’.
In line with the theme that defines the programming of the Forum of the Future, the work, published in 2005 and with a first Portuguese translation, exhausted years ago by Teorema (2006), revisits Homer’s ‘Odyssey’, following Penelope, a dead and forgotten woman of Ulysses who wanders through hell and here has an opportunity to tell his version.
On the last day, the stage is by the British composer Harrison Birtwistle, who returns to the House of Music after, in 2017, Britain’s year of space, was the composer in residence, with Cinema Trinity to receive, the day before, the screening of the documentary ‘What Is Democracy?’ by the American Astra Taylor.
With members from various regions of Colombia and Venezuela, the musical collective Candeleros will close the fifth edition of the Forum of the Future, with ‘Baile de Cúmbia’, a work on the music of indigenous origin.
