Primera Persona 2019 - Session 3: “Mad Women”

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The CCCB presents year 8 of Primera Persona, the benchmark festival that brings together creators from various artistic disciplines who base their work on their own life experience. The festival has its eighth outing in 2019, striking a balance of generations and genres, and underlining its three distinguishing characteristics: special proposals by big names, a showcase for new voices, and thematic capsules of subculture, sociocultural phenomena and secret histories of the city, among others.

May 11, Session 3 / 19.00 / CCCB Theatre

“Mad Women” (Maria Manonelles and Montse Batalla with Laura Fernández) / Emil Ferris with Ana Galvañ / Thomas Page McBee with Use Lahoz

“Mad Women” will open day two of the festival. Mental illness has been the subject of numerous works of art. In novels and films it is common to find the figure of the mad person, be it the romantic artist with a severed ear, the wise fool, psychotic killer or endearing eccentric (or hysterical woman who poisons her children, on too many occasions). The incidence of mental disorders with the appropriate accuracy and seriousness is rather less common. Saturday’s first session of Primera Persona welcomes two comic book artists who take mental illness (in the first person) as the theme of two new works: Maria Manonelles, with her comic Dormo molt (2018), and Montse Batalla, with Manicomio (2019). They will be joined by journalist Laura Fernández. Language: Catalan

They are followed on stage by the US writer and cartoonist Emil Ferris. For years she worked as a freelance illustrator and toy designer. In 2001, at the age of 40, Ferris contracted West Nile Virus (a rare infection for which there is no vaccine) from a mosquito bite. Three weeks after going to hospital, she became paralyzed from the waist down and lost the movement of her right hand. While recovering from her paralysis, Ferris worked on her graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (2017). This expressionist book, influenced by Crumb, written in the form of a diary notebook, tells the story of Karen Reyes, a ten-year-old girl and fan of monster films (like Ferris herself) who, growing up amid the social tensions of the sixties, investigates the death of her neighbor. Ferris talks to the Spanish comic book writer and illustrator Ana Galvañ.

Language: English and Spanish with simultaneous translation (Spanish)

Finally, to close the third session of the festival the US journalist and amateur boxer Thomas Page McBee takes the stage. McBee was the first transsexual boxer to fight at Madison Square Garden. But, of course, that’s just a headline; his story goes far beyond that achievement because his is not a simple narrative of overcoming or of success. Born with the body of a woman, he couldn’t have surgery until he was thirty. When he did, it not only changed his body, it changed his perception of the world. In Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man (2014) he explains in the first person how that in turn changed his view of masculinity and its privileges. He realized that he had learn to relate in a different way, so he enrolled in a boxing gym to explore issues such as violence and identity. At Primera Persona, McBee talks to the writer and lecturer Use Lahoz, author of novels such as Los Baldrich or Los buenos amigos.

Language: English and Spanish with simultaneous translation (Catalan)