Tour and collective reading on the road. 6-10 pm

Little path

sandy tongue

lit

by corpses.*

There is a ghost road between Vallecas and Alcalá de Henares, a road that was never completed. A road that leads nowhere and therefore is an anomaly in journeys and progress. It is in the midst of dumps, industrial estates and barren nature. It contains the remains of buildings concluded in 2005 and vegetation peeking up through the cracks in the asphalt. It is 17 kilometres that some residents use to take walks or bicycle rides, and an occasional film is shot there.

The People’s University group will travel to this road and walk it to María Bastarós’s words as the sun sets. As if we are diving into one of her stories, the writer will prepare a lecture-story designed for this place, so that it accompanies us and dredges up something from its abandonment and future wreck that might lead us to think about aesthetics, art and the moment in which we live. We know how the story begins, but together we’ll have to discover how it ends.

María Bastarós is a writer, art historian and curator of exhibitions and performance series. She has written Historia de España contada a las niñas (Fulgencio Pimentel, 2018) and the storybook No era esto a lo que veníamos (Candaya, 2021), among other publications. She brings to the world extraordinary yet fully commonplace situations and scenes that conceal the politics and beauty that are never seen. In her work, fiction merges with sheer realism, always with the territory as the essential narrative element: her characters stray from the roads of the Monegros Desert, suffer from the heat of the Bardenas badlands, marvel at the motorway running over the ocean in the Florida Keys and swear off asphalt to dive into the forests in Valle de Tena.

*Translation of an excerpt from the story ‘Ritual iniciático’ from the book No era esto a lo que veníamos by María Bastarós.