[Reading] Cecilia Pavón

We are delighted to welcome you for a reading by poet, writer and translator Cecilia Pavón. The reading will move from her nineties gaze up to her most recent work. It will be followed by a conversation with poet and programmer Jimena Casas.

Schedule

17:30 - reading by Cecilia Pavón, followed by a conversation with Jimena Casas 

About

Poet, writer, and translator Cecilia Pavón emerged in the late 1990s as one of the most prolific and central figures of the young Argentine literary scene—the so-called “Generation of the 90s”: artists and writers whose aesthetics and politics were an earnest response to the disastrous impact of American-exported neoliberal policies and the resulting economic crisis of 2001. Their publications were fragile—xeroxed, painted on cardboard—but their cultural impact, indelible.

A cofounder of Buenos Aires’s independent art space and publishing press Belleza y Felicidad—where a whole generation of soon-to-be-famous Argentine artists showed their work for the first time—Pavón pioneered the use of “unpoetic” and intimate content—her verses often lifted from text messages or chat rooms, her tone often impish, yet brutally sincere.

In 2015, Pavón’s first volume of collected poems, ‘A Hotel with My Name’, was published in English. Contemporary writers in the United States, Australasia, and Europe discovered a deep affinity with her work. Pavón’s protagonists, Ariana Reines noted, “are absolute women, guileless dreamers, saints in sneakers, on sidewalks, in jail, in Zara, on buses, in nightclubs, in bed.”

Jimena Casas is a poet, singer and cultural programmer from Buenos Aires based in Amsterdam. Central to her practice is the persistent investigation of voice as material. As a programmer, Jimena works at Perdu and ROZENSTRAAT, organising and curating literary events. Her curatorial interest focuses on South American voices, inviting poets from the region to Amsterdam. She studied audiovisual arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and graduated with a degree in teaching from the University of San Andrés.