Attendees

High school students, students in the Bachelor’s Degree Programme in Audiovisual Communication at the UPF and ARSENAL Projects and En Residència

Description of the activity

Fiction as a critical tool of expression and reflection. Creative writing features at least three conversations at the same time. First, it looks inward and addresses our emotions, experiences and memories. Second, it looks outward and engages with the world around us. Third, it converses with the echo of the stories and imaginary spaces that we have been traveling through over time.

In this workshop we presented these three conversations. We proposed and wrote the synopsis or initial outline of three projects. For each project we posed constraints or narrative problems to be solved. We moved between calculated writing and free form writing:

We invented based on moments and lived experiences to look at them in a new light and sing them to a different tune through the stained glass windows of fiction.

We created a possible world, an imaginary neighbourhood or city, an impossible home, a strange means of transport... We did all this from the critical analysis of the world around us. We introduced radical alterations that allowed us to say unexpected things about it.

We wrote a story from another story: we "plagiarized" its structure, specific resources, some twists or certain techniques to bring everything to our own terrain, then make something completely new and different.

Manel Ollé (Barcelona, 1962)

Olle is a professor at the UPF Faculty of Humanities. He has published the poetry books De bandera Liberiana (1994), Mirall negre (2002), Bratislava o Bucarest (2014) and Un grapat de pedres d'aigua (2022). He directed the anthology Combats singulars: antologia del conte català contemporani (2007) and The Book of Barcelona (Reading the City, Comma Books, 2021). He has translated The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac (1997), The Case for Literature, by Gao Xingjian (2004) and Strange Tales from the Leisure Pavilion, by Pu Songling (2001). He has directed anthologies and translated the collection entitled Pedra i pinzell. Antologia de la poesia clàssica xinesa (2012) and Apunts sobre pintura del monjo Carbassa Amarga de Shitao (2024). He has also published essays on Chinese history in different languages such as La Empresa de China: de la Armada Invencible al Galeón de Manila (2003), Made in China: el despertar social, político y cultural de China (2006) and Islas de plata, Imperios de seda: juncos y galeones en los Mares del Sur (2023).