Collective residencies / RELIGIOUS BELIEFS / Olot
VÍCTOR PALLEJÀ
From Tuesday, 12 September 2017 to Sunday, 1 October 2017
Bio
Traveler and scholar, expert in Islamic thought and history of religions. He graduates at the Sorbonne (EPHE Section V) and trained as a linguist in Arabic at the University of Barcelona with complementary studies in Hebrew, Persian and Syriac. He works as an independent researcher and teacher. He maintains regular contacts with traditional teachers and intellectuals from Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, as well as Turkey, Iran, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and India. He has taught at Pompeu Fabra University, New Haven University, University of Alicante, International University of Catalonia and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and associate researcher in the European Research Council (ERC). He has participated in dozens of international conferences around the world and has given nearly two hundred conferences. He has also been an advisor to several institutions and public and private media.
Project
In Faber he wants to write a practical compendium of absurdities that make more damage to the vision of the Muslim history and culture in Hispanic lands with the aim of contributing to a more accurate knowledge of this great legacy. Both the past and the present depend on our reciprocal ability to understand each another in real time. Mirages of romanticism and current forms of incitement to hatred depend on this very spread essentialism and rarely subjected to critical.
He wants to publicize these traps and examine the current state of affairs of Islam inside and outside our home.
The absence of every day’s continuous flow of interruptions, calls and messages has been replaced here by interesting and witty discussions
Days have passed by at Faber Residency so fast that I can hardly believe it. It has been both a nice and a surprising experience. Unfortunately, it is long since I have had a moment to devote myself to peaceful creative writing. What an amazing surprise has been to discover such a friendly atmosphere together with the quietness and landscape beauty of this lovely part of Catalonia. I realize that the absence of every day’s continuous flow of interruptions, calls and messages has been replaced here by interesting and witty discussions. I cannot be but extremely grateful to the fate that took me to Faber Residency.
Yet these lines are not mere tales about nice memories, it is about the fate of intellectual life in the Global World. I guess many of you dislike the crazy rhythm imposed by our productive intellectual system. I am afraid our usual way of life nowadays has reached a point in which our main task which is real thinking is at risk. The quality time and the peacefulness required to hear your own creative little voice is more and more in lack. You all know, inner speech it is not easily heard in the absence of a minimum of requirements. And low, I have found myself enjoying that sort of conditions up to an unbelievable high degree. Namely, the awesome Olot town and neighborhood, the wonderful team lead by Francesc taking care of every life need, and last but not least a nice number of new friends. I think that experiencing all this together is precisely the thing I have most appreciated.
The fate of any intellectual quality work is linked to these particular ways of quality life requirements which are definitely opposite to industrial Stakhanovist procedures. So I call to the common wealth of those people interested in creative ideas and the institutions that sponsor it.
I wish all the best for Faber Residency and I hope too that it will stand for a long time against haters of all sorts that despise both real thinking and people’s freedom.
