The word fight with images that want to be unique

Ecuadornews:

During a week the third edition of the orality days was held in Guayaquil with storytellers who believe in the word as a possibility of new worlds. Carmen Guerra, the grandmother of Galician narrator Celso Fernández, repeated her stories to the point of exhaustion. The angry grandson replied: “that story you already told me.” Now, that he has made of his life to narrate live and travel the world with it, what he did not give because she tells him his story again.

Celso learned to tell from his grandmother, from all the times that she spoke of her experience of leaving Feas, her town in Galicia; or when an aunt tricked her into taking her in exchange for a free boat ticket to Argentina. This narrator, moreover, has informants with whom he meets in the taverns and spends a lot of time listening to older people to select very carefully what he wants to tell in his shows.

Celso believes that humanity has lost the habit of sitting down to tell life, stories, and legends, everything that encompasses oral literature. “Arrival of the technological age, the attention times became others, the hours, being together and talking became much smaller and the attention went to those media,” he admits.

Consider that these media speak for people without people being able to replicate them, and there revives the need for orality. “We realize that people have the need to tell things in person,” says this storyteller who was one of the guests at the third Days of Orality called “Everything we invent is true”, prepared by Imaginary Corporation, the same creators of the legendary festival “Un cerrito de cuentos”.

These meetings focused on oral experiences and train teachers to make their students count and, as their creator says, the cultural manager Angela Arboleda, “can look the world differently.”

For Arnau Vilardebó, another of the invited Spanish storytellers, “one tells a story and in that story there is a river, we see only one, but if we saw the amount of images of each person we would have many possibilities of river and each viewer imagine one even if the media reduce everything to the same image “. His are the stories of Greek mythology. “They were born many years ago, but luckily or unfortunately they still reflect how we are now,” says Arnau.

Marco Flecha is a storyteller from Tacuatí, a town in Paraguay where the predominant culture is the Guaraní. He grew up listening to radio on the phone and to the hunters, the people in charge of counting cases (almost always killings with fantastic elements). When he went to sleep and listened to noises, he imagined things.

Knows well that fear, like the possibility of dreaming of other realities, enters through the ear. While he was speaking for this interview, he did it calmly because his mind always makes stories in Guarani and then translates into Spanish.

His idea of going out to tell has to do with the possibility of transmitting everything he has heard in his native place.

For Virgina Imaz, she told that she came to Guayaquil for the first time to talk about the stories she grew up in the Basque Country, orality is a cutting-edge technology, “a space of intense communication, intense poetry. Every time we move more in a logical rational scientific-technological thought and it is more necessary access to divergent thinking, to metaphor, access to knowledge that we cannot always express linearly, with the cerebral-logical hemisphere, “she says convinced.

She coincides with Arnau and with Celso when she points out that we have access to a huge amount of images but that it is often the same image, manipulated and manipulated. Faced with this, he believes that “it is urgent to decolonize the collective imaginary of clichéd images, official versions, and unique versions. There is no story, there are thousands of stories. I tell myself because I feel safe when I tell. I feel at home. I try when I tell people to sit there. ” (I)

Source: https://www.eltelegrafo.com.ec/noticias/cultura/10/jornadas-oralidad-cuenteros-guayaquil