Manchester Day 2016: a celebration of one of Europe’s most progressive and innovative cities

June 19th was the Manchester celebration day, choosing the Archimedes famous old exclamation Eureka as a slogan and parade theme for the festivities, which were closely related with the city’s penchant for discovery, technology and science, in an environment of fun for both children and adults.

The parade stopped at the city’s main points of reference, such as Albert Square, St Ann’s Square, Exchange Square and the Great Northern Square. In each of them there were activities such as circus acts, bands and artists playing jazz, folk, swing and opera, photography competitions, as well as science-based activities sponsored by the Manchester Metropolitan University, the University of Manchester and the University of Salford-Manchester.

As the Multicultural city it is, a band of locals dove into the tropical rhythms of Brazilian samba to the delight of an audience that didn’t mind the incessant rain. Arabian sounds were present too at the Great Northern Square, for the recognition and the delight of the vast Arabic population living in the city. Carousels full of children and the elderly taken care of by their grandchildren, joined together for the festivities that included various culinary dishes, as well as barrels of delicious ales.

Recently named “European City of Science for 2016”, Manchester is a somewhat small but incredibly significant city with plenty of reasons to feel proud of and celebrate. One of the centres of the Industrial Revolution, it’s known worldwide for its contributions in the foundation of various industries that changed the world since the 19th century: engineering, textiles, communications… you name it.

The establishment of Manchester as a nucleus for industrial production turned it into one of the most polluted and toxic cities of the 19th century. A few years later, when Britain was at war and most of its cities were destroyed by the German offensive, there was not another option but to reconstruct. Manchester in the 1960s saw a surge of utopian visions of a futuristic city that never came to be, such as the plans for a subway network and the few family complexes that were built with disastrous results, like the Hulme Crescents development that was demolished in the 1990s.

The crisis of the mid 1970s until the last years of the Thatcher era turned the city into a grim place to live, polluted, with no jobs and plenty of violence, conditions that ironically were the fuel for a resurgence of a cultural resistance in the fields of art and specifically, music, because an undisputable source of Mancunian pride is its history of seminal rock bands that redefined the genre in one of the darkest political periods of the country. The Buzzcocks, Joy Division and the whole roster of Factory Records, New Order, The Smiths, The Stone Roses and later Oasis, are all expressions of a disenchanted youth that reclaimed their city from hopelessness.

Aware of its place in modernity, the city promotes its history in various museums that are free for visitors, such as the Museum of Science and Industry, which displays in two redesigned buildings some of the first machines built for mass production, or the early vapour locomotive machines that changed forever the mercantile relationships in the modern world.

The People’s History Museum celebrates another type of progressive agenda: the conquer of rights since the 19th century, such as the female vote, the workers unions and other types of organizations that at the time were considered so clandestine and dangerous, that protesters were massacred simply for gathering and demanding rights that we take for granted nowadays.

More recently, the museum shows the conquest of human rights by the LGBT collective, one that has a large and significant presence in the city, with its own officially recognised Gay Village area of museums, bars, cafés and night clubs that promote the inclusion of all people, regardless of their sexual orientation. The city is so tolerant and diversity-affirming that it officially promotes the adoption of children by same-sex couples:

Moss Lane East, Manchester. Caption reads: "Complete your family. Adopt with Manchester. manchester.gov.uk/adoption". Billboard sponsored by the city. Photo: Nayma Gonzalez.

Proud of its history in the field of innovation, Manchester, through its two main universities, is leading some of the most important scientific research taking place in the world, such as the treatment of graphene as the material of the future (it’s been called “the wonder material”), for its amazing properties that have the potential to revolutionize, again, most of the industries of our time.

Take for example the ultra-modern The National Graphene Institute, a building at the University of Manchester, advertised as “Manchester’s Revolutionary 2D Material”, and built after many years of research led by physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, who won the 2010 Nobel prize for isolating this material. The building cost 61 million pounds, funded by the UK government and the European Union via the European Regional Development Fund, which is also funding the revitalisation of the central avenue of the universities zone, Oxford Road.

Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net)., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47757711

Local investment can be found in other massive projects: The Media City in Salford (approximate cost: 1 billion pounds), only 30 minutes from the centre of Manchester, and now home to the country’s most important media corporations, such as the BBC and ITV. 

MediaCityUK. Photo: Nayma Gonzalez.

The already completed Birley Fields campus of the Manchester Metropolitan University in the Hulme area of the city. This ultra-modern and sustainable building cost around 150 million pound and was designed by Sheppard Robson, an UK architecture firm that was influential in the 1950s and 1960s, and now champions sustainable architecture:

Source: http://www.sir-robert-mcalpine.com/projects/?id=64115

A work in progress is the University of Manchester Engineering campus, a 350 million pound large complex that will open in 2020 and is being built by Dutch firm Mecanoo. In front of the Graphene Institute and next to the Manchester Aquatics Centre, the Engineering campus will be a five stories building, with an extension of about 78,000m2 that will connect the universities zones with the centre of Manchester. If the renders are completed, this building will probably have one the largest horizontal roof gardens in any ultra-modern building.
More information:
http://manchesterday.co.uk/manchester-day/
More photos of the Birley campus:
http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/business/revealed-new-140m-manchester-metropolitan-7866638

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10 years of Caja Negra, independent publishers from Argentina

After Spain, Argentina is the biggest market for literature in Spanish. With a rich tradition of mainstream and independent publishers, a demanding readership and various fares, like the Buenos Aires annual international book fair (Feria Internacional del Libro de Buenos Aires), the field of literature in this country remains in good condition despite its frequently convulsed economy.

With so much competition, it’s hard to find a specific audience and begin building a catalog. Caja Negra has been doing so for the last ten years. Just like the case of Mexican Sexto Piso, Caja Negra was set up by two friends with no particular plans to get a formal job, and instead a dreamed occupation based on personal interests and taste was the basis for this publishing house. No marketing and no business plan: just the intuition that if you publish what you love reading, others will want to read it too. They were right.

Raised in the 1980s, Diego Esteras and Ezequiel Fanego’s cultural baggage is composed in equal parts by Latin American literature, universal classics, philosophy and pop culture. They’re far from the high brow/low brow distinction that’s still prevalent in the field of literature. Inspired by a Ballard quote, they’re following their obsessions and what they know. They’re publishing what they want to read. The result? A diverse catalog where British postpunk and Baruch Spinoza, among others, compose an exchange of ideas no one else believed possible before the editors. In their words, Caja Negra is “an invitation to compose heterodox traditions”.

Just like in pop music it was immediately recognizable anything signed by labels such as the British 4AD or Creation (hence the phrase “a 4AD sound”), Esteras and Fanego want their published products to have a signature, to be a discourse, something that distinguishes them but mostly, something that makes their readers maintain their trust in their judgment. A literary “selecta” of sorts, Caja Negra bases its accomplishments in something intangible and hard to pin down, just like a rare night when you find a DJ with the right vinyls.

It’s easier to compare the publishers to DJs or music label directors than to other literary publishers because it’s precisely music the most distinguishable topic in their catalog, specifically music criticism, a discourse that has plenty of readership in English, but it’s marginalized to newspapers, magazines or websites in Spanish. Their best seller remains “After Rock” by Simon Reynolds, the English music journalist, following an editorial line that proves to be a very demanded one, not only in terms of what can be translated, but what can be published by local music critics and read by an avid audience searching for quality criticism.
According to the publishers, in the current era of digital and traditional publishing, it’s the taste and the signature of an editorial house what can set it apart from competitors, and not the format. In Esteras and Fanego’s case, it’s also a sense of boredom what will tell them it’s time to move on to another project and not develop and rely on a tried formula. However, the format of their books is carefully chosen. A Caja Negra collector will probably take care of the books as of they were small pieces of art, with independence of their content.
This poses a problem, though: expensive and rare books sooner or later are only read by those who can afford/find them. This is a problem especially in the Latin American market, where art or rare books are expensive and public libraries will rarely have them in their catalogs.
Yet a sense of elitism has surrounded this editorial house since its founding. Its carefully selected subjects have been translated to attract a specific audience in mind. Back to Simon Reynolds, a sort of godfather of Caja Negra, has now three translated books (“Postpunk”, “Retromanía”, “Después del Rock”), but just as rare is Vilém Flusser’s “El universo de las imágenes técnicas”, the Czech journalist’s compiled academic writings from his 30 years of activity as a teacher in Sao Paulo.
The world of cinema is well represented with the works of other Latin American authors dismissed by big publishing houses, such as Brazilian Glauber Rocha, the man whose films and theoretical writings composed a revolutionary political and aesthetic manifesto known as Cinema Novo (“new cinema”). Caja Negra’s “La revolución es una EZTETIKA” compiles the early thinking of Rocha, as well as interviews and other articles written during his lifetime.

Rocha was radically opposed to the “aesthetic colonization” of Hollywood, just as much as “realism” in cinema, which he thought was nothing but a manifestation of the bourgeois. With his texts and his images, he wanted to confront the spectator with images of misery, pain and hunger. A must for scholars and fans of cinema in general, is his seminal text of the 1970s “La estética del hambre” (“the aesthetics of hunger”), as well as “La revolución del Cinema Novo” and “El siglo del cine”, two other important articles that have been dispersed until now.

Other film figures appear in Caja Negra’s catalog, such as a collection of Ed Wood’s articles for various magazines, from Science Fiction to sex fantasies. Wood belongs to the cult “Z genre” of film, characterized by low budget production and mediocre scripts that have gained validation by their viewers. If anything, Ed Wood’s texts are an extension of the cinematic interests and abilities of the late American director.

Two really interesting books that will capture the attention of scholars and a larger audience are the recently deceased German filmmaker and theoretician Harun Farocki’s “Desconfiar de las imágenes” (roughly, “To mistrust images”), whose work has had a re-emergence in various exhibitions and publications. Another German filmmaker, Wim Wenders, has in “Los pixels de Cezanne” a collection of essays about his early relation to painting and other filmmakers such as Michelangelo Antonioni. Wenders, in writing about his early loves and influences, perhaps delivers the best type of autobiography there can be.

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