Between skyscrapers and La Pampa: Spaces that tell a story, with Esther Cross and Laura Ortiz Gómez
Many authors use fantasy to escape an unpleasant reality, while others harness this genre to question these situations and examine them more closely. This is the case of the Argentinian writer Esther Cross, known for La mujer que escribió Frankenstein (Minúscula), and the Colombian author Laura Ortiz Gómez, who is making her début in Catalonia with Indócil (Barret). Both utilise metaphoric elements and genre hybrids to express political awareness and offer a rereading of the past, and they have chosen a physical space (a building and a home) as the key to their recent works. In Kavanagh (Minúscula), Cross makes a Buenos Aires skyscraper a central theme of the book, turning it into a symbolic construction. Ortiz, meanwhile, uses a house in Indócil and reimagines a historical event – the Broom Strike – through a collective, geographic lens. Literature professor and researcher Lucía Leandro Hernández will lead the conversation with the two authors, talking about key themes in their works such as space, memory, class and the body.
