Festival of complexity explores democracy and borders
Acclaimed writers, poets and philosophers will be exploring the challenges of democracy and borders at the Festival of Complexity, a series of events running in Nova Gorica and Gorizia until November as part of the European Capital of Culture.
Functioning as a recurring theme at various other conferences and festivals, the festival will open with a talk by the Sarajevo-born Croatian author Miljenko Jergović, the 2024 Vilenica Prize winner. He will discuss the question of the new objectivity first at the Gorizia Culture Home (Kulturni Dom) and then at the Nova Gorica book and coffee shop Maks, CE Report quotes STA.
Comprising four major strands and a series of smaller events, the festival relates to the Ljubljana Manifesto on Higher-Level Reading, launched as Slovenia featured as the guest of honour at the 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair.
The Ljubljana Manifesto underscores the role of reading not only in personal cognitive development, but also as a practice that is essential for democracy.
"Reading allows us to face an increasingly complex world with understanding and empathy," the festival's head Miha Kosovel told the STA. The literary programme and debates on reading during the festival are meant as an "incentive to read and reflect together on our destiny".
The first such panel debate, in Nova Gorica on 12 March, will feature three authors of the manifesto, Miha Kovač, Adriaan van der Weel and Andre Schüller-Zwierlein, and other guests.
The festival will address a range of topics, issues facing people in border areas and beyond, multilingualism, the relationship between minority and majority languages, the relationship between being on the margins and being central, between rural and urban, as well as the themes of war, peace-building and the environment.
The first section of the festival will resume on 22 March as authors Sebastijan Pregelj (Slovenia), Nada Gašić (Croatia) and Federica Marzi (Italy) talk about writing in the shared area of the North Adriatic.
In the second section between late May and early June the festival will host Bulgarian-born author Kapka Kassabova, who writes in English and Bulgarian, and Igiaba Scego, an Italian writer, journalist and activist of Somalian descent.
The programme's centrepiece will be the 10th edition of the City of Books festival, from 29 August to 6 September. The festival will also see several philosophers, France's Didier Eribon, Italian Franco Bifo Berardi and Austrian Robert Pfaller.
The November section will feature a conference of Eurozine, a European network of cultural journalists and associations, to discuss different aspects of translation with several international intellectuals, including Slavoj Žižek.
"We're also going to talk about how certain ideas 'grow' and are translated in different cultures. There will be a section on politics, how different autocracies translate into different cultural contexts," Kosovel said, promising big names, but would not reveal all of them yet.
The festival will also address literature in minority languages, keen to present peoples such as the Catalans, the Slovenian minority living between Istria and Gorizia, and ethnic groups on the British Isles.
It will also host Davide Toffolo, the author of Italian Winter, a graphic novel about the deportation of Slovenians to fascist camps, as seen through the eyes of children. Toffolo will also perform his eponymous music and comic strip recital in Nova Gorica.
The Festival of Complexity is being organised by the Goriška Humanist Association, founded in Nova Gorica in 2006 by students of social sciences and humanities.
The association has since evolved and expanded outside the region. Its projects include the City of Books festival, the Carinarnica (Customs Office) cultural hub at a former border crossing, and the journal Razpotja.
