Programme

Friday, 15 May

15:00 – 18:00 "Other Literatures: the Comic Strip", with Pedro Moura (chair), Anton Kannemeyer/"Joe Dog" (South Africa), Marcelo D'Salete (Brazil) and Posy Simmonds (United Kingdom).

Without any mutant or preserving agents: the Comic Strip and intercultural dialogue.

The meeting dedicated to the discussion of comic books, which is included in Next Future’s  programme of events for 2015, has invited three quite different guest artists: Posy Simmonds, Anton Kannemeyer and Marcelo D'Salete. They differ from one another in terms of generation, nationality, style, tradition and the subject-matter of their work, so that together they will form a small constellation mirroring the multiple and ever-changing nature of the comic strip, an artistic field that has grown exponentially over recent decades in all of its different aspects. This meeting will seek to understand not only the modes of production, but also the answers, dialogues and reflections that the comic strip has established with the global cultural fabric. (PM)

Saturday, 16 May

10:00 – 12:45 "Other Literatures: the Detective Novel", with Gonçalo Vilas-Boas (chair), Claudia Piñeiro (Argentina), Florent Couad-Zotti (Benim) and Raphael Montes (Brazil).

Crime in Literature

The detective story began to develop in the 19th century, especially in the world of Anglo-Saxon and French literature. From extraordinary private detectives such as Sherlock Holmes or Poirot, the genre moved on to create professional or amateur police detectives such as Maigret or Wallander, considered as ordinary people. It has moved from the whodunnit to the whydunnit. The detective novel has conquered new audiences, such as the African and South American markets, which have their own specific qualities, as we shall see. (GVB)

15:00 – 18:00 "Other Literatures: Science Fiction", with Fátima Vieira (chair), Fábio Fernandes (Brazil), João Manuel Rosado Barreiros (Portugal) and Lauren Beukes (South Africa).

Scintillating girls and 'animalated' people. Vampires that are the fruit of genetic engineering. A counter-attack launched against the Martians, with Jules Verne and H. G. Wells uncovering mysteries.

But what other literature is this that links technological progress to the detective novel, fantasy and horror stories? It is Science Fiction (SF), reinvented by Lauren Beukes, Fábio Fernandes and João Barreiros. The meeting will take place at the Gulbenkian, on 15 May, under the auspices of the Next Future Programme, in a session that proposes a reflection on contemporary culture based on the worlds imagined in three different continents. The discussion of the nature and the geography of contemporary SF, which will also involve the showing of short SF films produced in Africa, South America and Europe, will seek to reveal the potentialities that this literary genre has to offer not only as a weapon of social criticism, but also as an instrument for the construction of what is to come – a future that the SF reader often senses as being frighteningly close at hand. (FV)