The Spring 2024 Dénia Edition starts Festival of the Humanities with the presentation that took place in the Municipal Library this Wednesday of number 63 of the magazine Portbou's Suitcase, dedicated to the second edition of the festival. They were present at the event Vicent Grimalt, Mayor of Dénia, Joseph Ramoneda, director of the publication, and Martí Domínguez, essayist, writer and professor of journalism at the University of Valencia.
Under the title "Looking back to know where we are going", this monographic issue is a compilation of the reflections contributed last October by philosophers, scientists, economists and writers such as Marta Sanz, Zülfü Livaneli, Arcadi Navarro, Clara Serra, Pankaj Mishra , Nuria Oliver, Cristina Monge, Martí Domínguez, Antón Costas, Sophie Baby or Chiara Bottici, among others.
«The present is the future of the past; If we want to know where we are going, we must know that we have built this present from the past," Ramoneda explained about the general objective of the articles compiled in the magazine.
The director of the publication wanted to highlight that within the pages the reader will be able to find certain "warnings" about the situation of current society, for example, "for the countries of the south, those of the West have always been the most violent and hypocritical regarding his speeches on human rights.
"We must be able to be awake to consider those things that we now perceive and, if we do not know how to understand, they can create a future different from what we could wish for," he declared.
In this sense, Martí Domínguez wanted to highlight the importance of readers who consume this type of reflective reading, since "today it is easier for information to be read through social networks, such as Twitter, than in a magazine."
Furthermore, Domínguez has denounced that "the academic world has stopped writing essays", and therefore has highlighted the role it has Portbou's Suitcase in a world of scientific articles "boring and written in a language that is not used by the majority of citizens."
"It has a lot of coherence of content, a lucid look, but it also transmits a vision of failure and a suffocating vision of society in the face of the dangers we are facing," the writer said about this issue.
"Reflection, dialogue, thought and science are interesting and interesting," said Vicent Grimalt, who added that Dénia is a "cradle of great thinkers" and highlighted the importance of this festival. The mayor has invited the Dianenses to attend the event tomorrow, Thursday: two days in which they will reflect on aging.
For his part, Ramoneda wanted to remember that in October the main event of the Dénia Festival de les Humanitats will take place, which will revolve around the theme of limits: "We must not lose the sense of limits, when it happens, everything ends badly », the thinker has concluded.
