SITGES FILM FESTIVAL, BEYOND REALITY AND PREJUDICE

October is synonymous with autumn, localized storms, and the flu or common cold, but also with horror and science fiction.

The Grandma wouldn't miss her date with the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalunya. She is a huge fan of science fiction; although it is often -and erroneously- dismissed as a lesser cinematic genre, it is actually one that has produced some of the greatest masterpieces in film history.

So, The Grandma boarded the boat she keeps anchored in the Port of Barcelona and sailed a few miles to the harbour of one of the most beautiful cities you could ever visit -a city she loves deeply and enjoys visiting as often as she can. And doing so to enjoy the film festival makes the visit even better.

Every year, the Mediterranean town of Sitges becomes a meeting point for filmmakers, actors, critics and cinema lovers who share a passion for fantasy, horror and science fiction. 

The Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalunya, founded in 1968, is one of the world's most prestigious festivals dedicated to fantastic cinema.

However, beyond its screenings, awards and international reputation, Sitges represents something much more important: the recognition of a kind of cinema that has too often been dismissed as minor entertainment.

For decades, fantasy and science-fiction films have frequently been associated with B-movies, cheap special effects, monsters, spaceships and impossible adventures. Some critics have regarded them as inferior to supposedly more serious genres, as though imagination and artistic quality were incompatible.

But who decides what makes a film great? And why should a story set in a distant galaxy be considered less meaningful than one set in an ordinary city?

Cinema is an art form, and imagination has never been the enemy of intelligence.

Science fiction is not simply about predicting the future. Very often, it is about understanding the present. Consider Star Trek, a universe in which humanity explores space while confronting questions of diversity, cooperation, prejudice and peaceful coexistence. Behind its futuristic technology lies an optimistic vision of a society capable of overcoming some of its deepest divisions. Or Star Wars, whose spectacular battles between good and evil also explore political oppression, authoritarianism, resistance and the struggle for freedom. Its imaginary galaxy reflects conflicts that have shaped human history for centuries. Ridley Scott's Alien offers another fascinating example. Beneath its terrifying creature and claustrophobic atmosphere, the film questions corporate power, the exploitation of workers and the frightening possibility that human life might become less valuable than commercial interests. Meanwhile, James Cameron's Avatar explores colonialism, environmental destruction and the relationship between human beings and nature. Its extraordinary visual universe invites audiences to reconsider the consequences of greed and the exploitation of other cultures. These films do not merely entertain. They challenge, question and provoke. And that is precisely what great cinema should do.

Science fiction also allows humanity to explore one of its oldest fascinations: the future. 

Christopher Nolan's Interstellar takes audiences on an extraordinary journey through space and time, combining scientific ideas with deeply human emotions. Beyond black holes and distant planets, it asks fundamental questions about survival, sacrifice, love and our responsibility towards future generations. What will become of humanity? How far can science take us? Are there limits to our knowledge? And what happens when technological progress develops faster than our ethical understanding? These questions belong not only to cinema but also to philosophy, science and literature. Long before modern science-fiction films, Jules Verne was already inviting readers to imagine extraordinary possibilities.

In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, Journey to the Centre of the Earth and From the Earth to the Moon, Verne combined scientific curiosity, adventure and an extraordinary ability to imagine worlds beyond the limits of his own time. Today, his novels are recognised as literary classics. His imagination is celebrated rather than dismissed. Why should cinema be treated differently? A spaceship can be as powerful a literary symbol as a sailing ship. An alien civilisation can reveal as much about human nature as a historical society. And an imaginary future can sometimes explain our present more clearly than a realistic drama.

The value of a story does not depend on whether its world exists, but on what that world allows us to discover. There is another aspect of fantastic cinema that deserves recognition: its ability to entertain. Not every film needs to deliver a philosophical message or a political warning. Sometimes we simply want to experience fear, excitement, wonder or adventure. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Cinema was never intended exclusively for intellectual reflection. It is also a celebration of storytelling, emotion and spectacle. A modest horror film can become unforgettable. A low-budget science-fiction production can introduce an original idea that changes the genre forever. A so-called B-movie can inspire generations of filmmakers.

The history of cinema demonstrates that artistic creativity does not always depend on financial resources, critical prestige or sophisticated technology. Sometimes, all it takes is a brilliant idea. The distinction between serious cinema and popular entertainment is often more artificial than meaningful. A film can be enjoyable without being superficial, just as an ambitious production can be visually impressive without having anything particularly interesting to say. Entertainment is not the opposite of art. It is one of the many ways in which art reaches people.

This is why the Sitges Film Festival is so important. Since its beginnings in 1968, the festival has helped provide fantastic cinema with a space where creativity, experimentation and unconventional storytelling are celebrated rather than marginalised. Its importance goes beyond promoting horror, fantasy or science fiction. It reminds audiences that cinema cannot be confined to rigid categories of cultural prestige.

Fantastic cinema can be disturbing, humorous, political, philosophical, experimental or simply entertaining. It can transport us to imaginary worlds while forcing us to confront very real fears and contradictions. Above all, it gives filmmakers and audiences the freedom to imagine the impossible. And perhaps this is the greatest achievement of Sitges: defending a cinema that refuses to accept reality as the only possible setting for meaningful stories.

Human progress has always begun with imagination. Before humanity travelled beneath the oceans, someone imagined exploring their depths. Before human beings reached the Moon, writers had already sent fictional travellers into space. And before we can build a different future, we must first be capable of imagining one. Fantastic cinema reminds us that reality is not the limit of human creativity. It invites us to dream, to question established ideas and to look beyond what we already know. Perhaps a film about distant planets, mysterious creatures or impossible journeys will not provide all the answers. But it may inspire us to ask better questions. 

And that alone makes it worthy of being called great cinema. Because imagination is not an escape from intelligence. It is one of its most extraordinary expressions.

Science fiction does not simply imagine worlds that do not exist. It helps us understand the world we inhabit and inspires us to create the world we would like to live in.

More info: Sitges-Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantàstic de Catalunya

Tout ce qui est dans la limite du possible 
doit être et sera accompli.

All that is within the limits of possibility 
may and shall be accomplished.

Jules Verne

JOAN PETIT WAS MURDERED BUT HIS MEMORY IS ALIVE

Today, The Grandma wishes to pay tribute to Joan Petit. She first encountered him when she was very young and began singing his song. Today, decades later, she continues to remember, sing about, and honour him, especially on a day like this, the anniversary of his murder.

History is full of Joan Petits, and it is our duty to remember each one of them and keep their memory alive; for the very act of preserving that memory keeps alive their struggle and the ideals for which they were murdered.

There is one thing the powerful cannot always control: what a people decides to remember.

On 8 October 1643, a man named Joan Petit was brutally executed in the town of Vilafranca de Roergue, in Occitania.

He had participated in a popular uprising against injustice, excessive taxation and the abuses of royal authority. His execution was intended to punish rebellion and frighten anyone who might dare to challenge the established order.

Yesterday marked the 383rd anniversary of his death. Almost four centuries later, his name has not disappeared.

In Catalunya and Occitania, generations of children have sung and danced to a traditional song known as Joan Petit quan balla in Catalan and Joan Petit que dança in Occitan. Most of us learned it at school, at traditional dance gatherings or during popular celebrations. We moved our fingers, hands, feet and arms, laughing and dancing without ever imagining the terrible story traditionally associated with its origins.

Behind the apparent innocence of a children's song lies the memory of a man who dared to resist injustice. And perhaps the most extraordinary part of his story is not how he died, but how his name survived.

Seventeenth-century France was a country marked by war, inequality and poverty. The Thirty Years' War had placed an enormous financial burden on the population. Heavy taxation, poor harvests and the privileges enjoyed by powerful institutions made life increasingly difficult for ordinary people.

In the Roergue region of Occitania, discontent grew into open rebellion. In 1643, the inhabitants of Vilafranca de Roergue rose against the fiscal demands and abuses of royal officials. Among the leaders of this movement was Joan Petit, a local surgeon who became one of the most memorable figures of the Revolt of the Croquants.

The Croquants were ordinary people, particularly from rural communities, who refused to accept a system in which the poorest were expected to bear an intolerable burden while the powerful protected their privileges. They demanded relief from excessive taxation and challenged the authorities who imposed it. Their struggle was not simply a dispute over money. It was also a demand for dignity and justice. The monarchy could not tolerate such defiance. Royal troops eventually suppressed the uprising, and its leaders faced severe punishment.

On 8 October 1643, Joan Petit and another rebel leader, known as Brasc, were publicly executed in the Place Notre-Dame in Vilafranca de Roergue. They were condemned to the breaking wheel, one of the cruellest forms of execution used in early modern Europe. Their bodies were broken, and their remains were displayed as a warning to the population.

The message of royal authority was unmistakable: those who challenged the established order would pay a terrible price. But history does not always remember what those in power want it to remember.

According to a deeply rooted Occitan tradition, the familiar song about Joan Petit preserves the memory of his execution. The different parts of the body mentioned in its verses have been interpreted as references to the terrible injuries inflicted during the breaking-wheel punishment. What children now perform as a joyful dance may therefore have originated in a deeply tragic historical experience.

Although the precise relationship between the song and the events of 1643 remains a subject of historical debate, this interpretation has become an important part of Occitan and Catalan cultural memory. And that is what makes the story so remarkable.

A song can change its meaning over time. Its original context may disappear, its words may be adapted, and its melody may travel from one community to another. Yet something remains. A name. A memory. A trace of the past. For centuries, children have continued singing about Joan Petit without necessarily knowing who he was. His executioners have long since disappeared, but his name continues to be spoken. The authorities could destroy his body. They could not prevent future generations from remembering him. 

Traditional songs are much more than entertainment. They are repositories of collective memory, carrying stories, beliefs, fears, hopes and experiences from one generation to the next. Before widespread literacy, oral traditions were essential for preserving the history of ordinary people. Songs travelled where official documents could not. They passed from parents to children, from villages to towns, and from one generation to another. And sometimes they preserved stories that those in power would rather have forgotten.

Catalan and Occitan popular culture is particularly rich in songs whose apparently simple words conceal complex meanings. A children's song may contain references to death, poverty, injustice or social conflict. A traditional dance may preserve the memory of a historical event. A lullaby may express anxieties that are almost invisible to modern listeners.

The same phenomenon can be found in English-speaking cultures, where traditional nursery rhymes and lullabies have sometimes carried political satire, social criticism or memories of hardship. However, not every popular explanation of a nursery rhyme's historical origins can be verified. Oral traditions are constantly transformed, and their meanings are often more complex than a single interpretation. This does not diminish their cultural importance. On the contrary, it demonstrates that popular culture is alive. It changes, adapts and survives. And while official histories have often concentrated on monarchs, generals and powerful institutions, traditional songs have helped preserve the voices of people who rarely appeared in the chronicles. The anonymous, the forgotten and the defeated have also left their mark on history. Sometimes, that mark is a song.

Joan Petit's story is a powerful example of this struggle between authority and remembrance. The royal authorities wanted his execution to become a lesson in obedience. Popular memory transformed his name into something that could be passed down through the centuries. The man was killed. The memory survived. 

Almost four hundred years separate Joan Petit's rebellion from our own time. Our societies, institutions and political systems have changed enormously since 1643. Yet the questions raised by the Revolt of the Croquants remain painfully familiar. Who should bear the economic burdens of society? What happens when political authority ignores the suffering of ordinary people? How far can power go in defending its own privileges? And what responsibility do citizens have when they witness injustice? These questions have accompanied humanity throughout history.

The struggle for dignity, equality and social justice has taken many forms, from peasant uprisings to labour movements, from demands for democratic rights to contemporary campaigns against discrimination and inequality. We should not pretend that every historical conflict is identical or that the past can be transferred unchanged into the present. But we can recognise the human aspirations that connect different generations.

Joan Petit belonged to a world very different from ours. His demand for a more just society, however, remains understandable today. Remembering him is not simply an exercise in nostalgia. It is a reminder that rights and freedoms have often been defended by people whose names history nearly forgot.

There is something profoundly moving about imagining generations of children singing the name of Joan Petit. They may not know the story of the Croquants. They may never have heard of Vilafranca de Roergue. They may not understand the violence of seventeenth-century royal repression. Yet the name survives. From Occitania to Catalonia, through countless voices and generations, popular culture has carried it into the present. This is one of the greatest achievements of oral tradition. It does not require grand monuments or official ceremonies. Sometimes, a simple melody is enough.

The story of Joan Petit reminds us that historical memory belongs not only to historians and institutions, but also to ordinary people. To those who sing. To those who tell stories. To those who listen. And to those who pass them on. Perhaps this is the final irony of Joan Petit's execution. The authorities wanted to make an example of a rebel and silence resistance. Instead, the memory of that rebel became part of a cultural tradition that has lasted for centuries.

On the 383rd anniversary of his death, Joan Petit deserves to be remembered not merely as the name of a children's song, but as a man who resisted injustice and paid for that resistance with his life. 

They could end his life, but they could not erase his name. And as long as someone continues to sing, the memory will remain alive.

More information: Life on La Lune

Quan la història pertany als poderosos, 

les cançons es converteixen en la memòria 

d'aquells que van ser silenciats.

When history belongs to the powerful, 

songs become the memory 

of those who were silenced.

Joseph de Ca'th Lon

ROBERT GRAVES & MALLORCA, A FOREIGNER FINDS HOME

Today, The Grandma has been practicing another of her favourite hobbies: reading. She has chosen the amazing Breus històries mallorquines by Robert Graves, a literary gem that is a must-read, especially for those who, like The Grandma, have Mallorcan roots.

Some places are visited. Others are inhabited. And a very few become part of the person who arrives there. For Robert Graves, Mallorca was one of those places.

When the English poet and writer arrived on the island in 1929, he was not simply looking for beautiful Mediterranean scenery. He was leaving something behind. Graves belonged to a generation profoundly wounded by the First World War. He had fought on the Western Front, had been seriously injured and had witnessed the destruction of friends and an entire generation. The experience remained with him long after the war had ended.

By 1929, he had also reached a moment of personal and intellectual rupture with England. His autobiography, Good-bye to All That, published that same year, was exactly what its title suggested: a farewell. Then came Mallorca.

Graves and the poet Laura Riding left England in October 1929. During their journey they visited Gertrude Stein in France, and it was Stein who suggested Mallorca as a place where they might live. They travelled to Palma and from there discovered Deià. The village was very different from the internationally known place it would later become. Stone houses climbed between the mountains and the Mediterranean; terraces of olive trees covered the slopes; the sea appeared below the cliffs. Something in that landscape spoke to Graves. He stayed. Eventually, among the olive terraces outside Deià, he built Ca n'Alluny -the Far House. Mallorca had ceased to be a destination. It was becoming home. 

The importance of Mallorca in Graves's life cannot be measured simply by counting the years he spent there. The island gave him something more valuable: distance. Distance from England. Distance from convention. Distance, perhaps, from some of the ghosts he had carried since the trenches. And in that relative isolation, Graves wrote. It was in Mallorca that he produced I, Claudius, published in 1934, the historical novel that would eventually become his most internationally famous work.

But Graves never regarded himself primarily as a novelist. He considered himself a poet. Poetry was at the centre of his understanding of life, mythology, love and creativity. Deià offered him a place in which that private intellectual universe could exist. And slowly, the foreign writer began observing the people around him.

There are many ways for a foreigner to write about another culture. One is to remain outside it. Another is to exoticise it. But there is a third possibility: to stay long enough to begin understanding the silences. Graves stayed. He listened to stories, observed customs, learnt about local rivalries, friendships, prejudices, honour, humour and the complicated mechanisms through which small communities function. He even became remarkably knowledgeable about village gossip.

Mallorca gradually entered his literature not as an exotic Mediterranean postcard but as an inhabited world. Academic research into Graves's Mallorcan stories has identified precisely this process: their characters, social relationships, language, cultural practices and settings grew from his observation of Palma and Deià and from his own experiences on the island. And that brings us to a Robert Graves rather different from the author of I, Claudius.

Breus històries mallorquines brings together eighteen stories connected with Graves's Mallorcan world. Written and published between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, they belong to a completely different literary scale from the Roman palaces and imperial intrigues for which Graves became famous. Here there are no emperors. There are neighbours. A bicycle can become the centre of a story. So can a theatrical performance, a question of education, an infidelity, a misunderstanding or one of those apparently insignificant incidents that can occupy an entire village.

Some of the stories originally appeared in publications such as The New Yorker. The eighteen pieces now gathered in Catalan include the eleven stories Graves himself grouped as Mallorcan Short Stories, together with seven other Mallorcan tales later collected by his daughter Lucia Graves. And perhaps their apparent smallness is precisely their charm. They are little windows.

Reading these stories today, it is tempting to think of them as a kind of literary costumbrisme written by an outsider. Graves watches. He notices gestures. He listens to the peculiar logic behind everyday behaviour. His Mallorcans can be cautious, stubborn, suspicious of novelty, proud, extraordinarily practical and wonderfully ironic. But Graves's gaze is interesting because he occupies an unusual position. He is neither entirely inside nor entirely outside. He retains the foreigner's ability to notice things that locals may consider completely ordinary, while possessing the familiarity of someone who has lived among them long enough to understand that what appears strange from outside often makes perfect sense from within. That tension gives these stories much of their humour. He sees Mallorca with foreign eyes, but no longer with the eyes of a tourist.

The recent Catalan edition, Breus històries mallorquines, translated and contextualised by Nofre Moyà, makes this lesser-known Graves accessible through precisely this everyday world. 

History, however, interrupted Graves's Mallorcan life. The Spanish Civil War forced him to leave the island in 1936. For years, Mallorca became something he could remember but not inhabit. And absence revealed something important. He missed it. His first substantial writing about Mallorca and its people, The Place for a Holiday, published in 1948, was permeated by the longing he had felt for his Mallorcan home during those years of exile. The text would later evolve into Why I Live in Mallorca and become central to Mallorca Observed.

In 1946, Graves finally returned to Deià, this time with Beryl and their family. The foreigner came home.

There is something particularly moving about belonging to a place in which one was not born. Birth gives us an origin. Belonging is something different. It can be built slowly through years of ordinary life: knowing the roads, recognising voices, understanding jokes, watching children grow older, sharing celebrations, remembering people who have died. Perhaps Graves never ceased to be el foraster entirely. But after decades in Deià, the distinction had become almost irrelevant.

The village had entered his writing. Its people had become his neighbours. Its landscape had become the geography of his imagination. And its stories had become some of his stories.

Robert Graves died in 1985. He could have been commemorated in many places. His literary career had been international; his books belonged to readers throughout the world. But Graves was buried in the cemetery at Deià. His grave is remarkably simple. There is no monumental tomb celebrating the internationally famous author of I, Claudius, The White Goddess and more than a thousand poems. His grave was made using humble Mallorcan lime mortar. And upon it were scratched simply his name, his dates and one word: Robert Graves, Poeta. Nothing more was necessary. 

Perhaps that modest grave above the Mediterranean explains his relationship with Mallorca better than any literary biography could. He arrived as a foreigner searching for distance. He found a village. He built a house. He wrote books. He listened to stories. He left and longed to return. He returned and stayed. And eventually he asked that the island should keep him. The author of Roman emperors, Greek gods, ancient myths and great historical narratives also understood that literature can be found in much smaller things: a stolen bicycle, a piece of village gossip, a neighbour's eccentricity, a conversation overheard, a story told over a table. 

That is the Robert Graves we discover in Breus històries mallorquines. Not Graves the classical scholar. Not Graves the celebrated novelist. Not even Graves the English poet. But simply Robert of Deià: a foraster who stayed long enough to discover that sometimes the place where we were born and the place where we belong are not necessarily the same.

And perhaps that is what Mallorca ultimately gave him. Not an escape from home, but another meaning of the word home.

More information: La Casa de Robert Graves

I found everything I wanted as a writer: 
sun, sea, mountains, spring-water, 

shady trees, no politics...

Robert Graves

FBI SA DANA SCULLY, BRINGING SCIENCE TO PRIME TIME

Today, The Grandma has been enjoying one of her favorite hobbies: LEGOs. She has received the latest LEGO set she had been eagerly awaiting, the one featuring the laboratory of Dana Scully, the protagonist of The X-Files. She didn't build it alone, though; she had the help of Claire Fontaine. After all, when you share your hobbies with friends, you enjoy both the hobbies and the friendships even more.

When The X-Files first appeared on television in 1993, Special Agent Dana Scully walked into a basement office at the FBI and changed television. Perhaps nobody knew it yet.

She was there, after all, for a very specific reason. Her superiors had assigned her to work with Fox Mulder because she was everything he was not supposed to be: rational, methodical, scientifically trained and sceptical. Mulder wanted to believe. Scully wanted evidence.

But Dana Scully soon became much more than Mulder's scientific counterweight. She became one of the most powerful female characters in television history.

Dana Katherine Scully was a medical doctor, a scientist and an FBI Special Agent. That combination mattered. Television had certainly shown intelligent women before her, but Scully occupied a space that women were still rarely allowed to inhabit in mainstream popular culture. She was not the assistant to the scientist. She was the scientist. She examined bodies. She performed autopsies. She studied tissue samples. She interpreted toxicology reports. She challenged hypotheses. She demanded evidence.

And when Fox Mulder presented an extraordinary explanation, Scully's response was rarely to ridicule him. She simply asked: Can we prove it? That distinction is essential to understanding the character. Scully's scepticism was not closed-mindedness. It was methodology.

Science does not say that something is impossible merely because it appears extraordinary. Science asks for evidence before accepting it as true. And that made Scully much more interesting than a simple sceptic.

One of the great achievements of The X-Files was that it never truly asked us to choose between its two protagonists. Mulder had intuition. Scully had method. Mulder looked at the impossible and asked, Why not? Scully looked at it and asked, How do we know? And somewhere between those two questions lay the truth. Their relationship worked because neither ultimately destroyed the other's worldview. Instead, over the years, they influenced one another. Scully learned that not everything could easily be explained. Mulder learned that believing something did not make it true. Faith needed reason. Reason sometimes needed imagination. The truth, perhaps, required both.

There was another quiet revolution taking place. Again and again, Scully entered an autopsy room. She put on her gloves, switched on her recorder and began examining the dead. The scene became one of the visual languages of The X-Files. 

Today this hardly seems unusual. Television crime drama has made forensic laboratories, autopsy rooms, medical examiners and pathologists completely familiar to us. Think of CSI and its many descendants and spin-offs, Body of Proof, Forever, Bones, NCIS, Major Crimes and countless other procedural dramas. The forensic expert eventually became almost indispensable. But Scully had been there years earlier.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, for example, did not premiere until 2000, seven years after The X-Files. It would subsequently make forensic science the very centre of one of television's most successful franchises. It would be too much to claim that Dana Scully single-handedly created the television forensic boom. She did not. But she unquestionably helped prepare audiences for it. She made scientific investigation dramatic. She showed that an autopsy could move a story forward. And, perhaps most importantly, she demonstrated that the person holding the scalpel could be a woman.

This may be one of Scully's greatest achievements as a character. Her strength was never based on becoming masculine. She could carry a gun and perform an autopsy. She could confront killers and challenge FBI superiors. But she could also be vulnerable, frightened, compassionate and deeply emotional. She could be a scientist and a Catholic. She could question faith and still possess it. She could love. She could grieve. She could doubt herself. None of these things diminished her intelligence. None made her less capable. And this was enormously important. Scully did not demonstrate that women could succeed by behaving like men. She demonstrated that competence has no gender.

Her influence eventually escaped fiction altogether. It became known as the Scully Effect. Researchers studying the phenomenon found that women who had watched The X-Files regularly were significantly more likely to regard STEM positively, to consider working in a STEM field and to identify Scully as an inspiration.

A major study conducted by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media described Scully as one of the first multidimensional female STEM characters on popular television -and the first to occupy such a prominent leading role. 

Gillian Anderson herself later discovered that women had become doctors, scientists and FBI agents partly because they had grown up watching Scully. Chris Carter has recalled hearing the same thing from viewers years later. 

That is an extraordinary legacy for a fictional character. Because representation does something very simple and very powerful. Before someone can think, I can become that, sometimes they first need to see someone like themselves doing it.

Dana Scully was never designed as a superhero. She had no extraordinary powers. Quite the opposite.  Her power was her mind. She observed. She studied. She questioned. She reasoned. And when the evidence contradicted her hypothesis, eventually she changed the hypothesis. There is something profoundly powerful about that.

Popular culture often celebrates certainty. Heroes know what they are doing. They know who the enemy is. They know what is right. Scientists cannot work that way. Science requires the courage to say: I don't know. And then to start looking. Scully made that search heroic.

More than three decades after Dana Scully first entered that basement office, television is full of female doctors, forensic scientists, detectives, pathologists and investigators. They are no longer unusual. And perhaps that is one of Scully's greatest victories. Characters such as her eventually made themselves less exceptional because they helped change what audiences considered normal. Dana Scully opened a door. Others walked through it. And behind the FBI badge, the red hair, the autopsy table and the wonderfully sceptical raised eyebrow, there remains something even more important.

A generation of girls watched a woman enter rooms traditionally occupied by men and behave as though she had every right to be there. Because she did. 

Before she was a doctor, Scully was a physicist. Her senior thesis, Einstein's Twin Paradox: A New Interpretation, already tells us something essential about her character. Scully was never simply a woman who refused to believe. She was a woman trained to question, test and reinterpret. Long before she entered an autopsy room or joined the FBI, she had already been taught to look at the universe and ask whether the accepted explanation was enough.

Dana Scully taught us that scepticism is not the absence of imagination. That science is not the enemy of wonder. That asking questions is not a weakness. And that perhaps the most courageous response to the unknown is neither I believe nor I don't believe. It is: Show me the evidence.

More information: Geena Davis Institute

Nothing happens in contradiction to nature, 
only in contradiction to what we know of it.

Dana Scully

UP! STRENGTH, BALANCE, COURAGE & COMMON SENSE

Yesterday was a day of intense emotions. With hardly any time to rest, Claire Fontaine and The Grandma drove to Tarragona, where the greatest castells competition in history awaited them. 

Congratulations to the champions, Castellers de Vilafranca, and to all the colles that put on a fascinating, thrilling, and unique spectacle.

There is something almost impossible about a castell. Hundreds of people gather in a square. They look at one another, tighten their faixes, take their positions and begin to build. Bodies become foundations; shoulders become floors; arms become supports. Slowly, almost improbably, a human structure rises above the crowd. And somewhere at the very top, a child raises one hand. For a few seconds, architecture becomes human.

The origins of the Catalan castells can be traced back to the ball de valencians, a traditional dance related to the Valencian muixerangues. These performances ended with the construction of small human towers.

When this tradition reached the Camp de Tarragona, something changed. The human constructions gradually became more important than the dance itself. Rivalry encouraged groups to build higher and more difficult towers, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century two rival groups were already documented in Valls.

Valls became the cradle of the castells, and its Plaça del Blat is still considered kilometre zero of the casteller world. From there, a tradition was born whose fundamental idea is astonishingly simple: people standing on other people in order to reach higher. But simplicity disappears very quickly when a castell begins to grow.

A castell is not simply a tower. It is a carefully calculated human structure. At its base is the pinya, the mass of people that supports the tower, stabilises it and protects the castellers if the structure collapses. In the most difficult constructions, additional supporting levels appear above it: the folre and, in some cases, the manilles. Then comes the tronc, the visible body of the castell. Above it is the pom de dalt, formed by the youngest castellers. Finally comes the enxaneta, the child who climbs to the summit and raises a hand  -the aleta- to show that the castell has been carregat.

But reaching the top is only half the achievement. A castell must come down again. Only when every casteller has descended safely can it be said to have been descarregat. This is perhaps what makes castells so fascinating. They are architecture without stone, steel or concrete. Their materials breathe, tremble, become tired and feel fear.

A cathedral is designed not to move. A castell survives because hundreds of tiny movements constantly correct one another. It is an architecture of balance.

The traditional motto of the castellers is: Força, equilibri, valor i seny. Strength, balance, courage and common sense. Yet there is another element that is perhaps even more important: trust.

The enxaneta climbs because someone is underneath. That person stands because somebody else supports them. And beneath them there are dozens -sometimes hundreds- of people whose faces may never appear in the photograph of the completed castell.

There are no insignificant positions in a human tower. Perhaps that is why castells have become such a powerful symbol of Catalan popular culture. The individual achievement is impossible without collective effort. A castell does not ask who is the most important person. It asks where each person is needed.

This also explains the extraordinary capacity of the colles castelleres to integrate people. Age, origin, profession, social status or physical appearance matter much less than the contribution each person can make. There are positions for different bodies, different strengths and different abilities. And anyone can enter the pinya. You do not need to be born into the tradition to become part of it. You learn by standing beside others, rehearsing with them, trusting them and eventually becoming someone whom others can trust. Integration here is not theoretical. It is physical. You literally become part of something larger than yourself.

For most of their history, however, castells were overwhelmingly a male world. That began to change decisively during the final decades of the twentieth century. From the late 1970s and especially during the 1980s, women became increasingly present in the colles, not simply as spectators or supporters, but as castellers.

The change was social, but it was also technical. Different heights, weights and body types allowed the architecture of the tronc to evolve. Lighter structures could be built without sacrificing strength, helping the colles imagine constructions that previous generations could barely have contemplated. Women did not simply enter the world of castells. They helped transform what a castell could be. Their presence also reminds us that traditions survive not by remaining unchanged, but by being capable of changing without losing their identity.

On 16 November 2010, UNESCO inscribed the castells on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The recognition went far beyond the spectacular nature of human towers. UNESCO highlighted something deeper: the way castells transmit knowledge from generation to generation and create a sense of identity, continuity, social cohesion and solidarity. That distinction seems particularly appropriate. A castell is intangible heritage in the most literal sense. When the tower comes down, nothing physical remains. There is no monument. No building. No object. What remains is the knowledge of how to build it, the memory of having done it and the community capable of doing it again.

And then came Sunday, 4 October 2026. The XXX Concurs de Castells in Tarragona offered one of those days when the limits of a tradition suddenly seemed to move. The Castellers de Vilafranca completed the 3 de 10 amb folre i manilles. Then the 4 de 10 amb folre i manilles. And finally they achieved something that had never been completed before: the extraordinary 9 de 9 amb folre. Nine people on each level. Nine storeys. A human structure of almost unimaginable complexity.

The Colla Vella dels Xiquets de Valls also pushed the frontier, completing the formidable 4 de 9 sense folre and loading the 3 de 9 sense folre, another structure situated at the extreme limits of what the human body and casteller technique can achieve.

Watching the Concurs, an inevitable question emerged. Where is the ceiling?

Every generation of castellers has probably believed that certain constructions marked the natural limit of human towers. And then another generation arrived. Techniques improved. Rehearsals became more sophisticated. More people joined the colles. Women transformed their structures. Medical and biomechanical knowledge increased. Castellers learned how to distribute weight more efficiently and control movements with extraordinary precision.

The impossible became possible. Then the possible became normal. And a new impossible appeared. But human beings have limits. Gravity has not changed. Bodies have not stopped being fragile.

There must be a point at which adding another level, removing another support or creating an even more complex structure becomes physically impossible. Perhaps some of the castells we are seeing today are already approaching that frontier. Perhaps the ceiling is close. Or perhaps, somewhere in a local d'assaig, somebody is already imagining a way of moving it again. That uncertainty is part of the beauty of the castells. Because their greatest achievement may not be reaching ten storeys, completing a castell sense folre or inventing another construction.

Their greatest achievement is demonstrating what human beings can do when nobody climbs alone. A castell rises because hundreds of people agree, for a few extraordinary minutes, to trust one another completely. And perhaps that is why, when the enxaneta raises a hand above the square, we all look upwards. Not because one person has reached the top. Because everyone has.

More information: Coordinadora de les Colles Castelleres de Catalunya

Ai quin plaer!

Quin regositj veure el nen en lo bell cim

com fa l'aleta...

Oh, what joy!

What delight, to see the child at the very top,

raising a hand in the aleta...

Josep Anselm Clavé

BARCELONA, THE CITY BUILT OVER HIDDEN STREAMS

After spending a few days in Lyon visiting old friends and enjoying an entertaining football match, yesterday, Joseph de Ca'th Lon returned to Genève, while Claire Fontaine and The Grandma headed back to Barcelona, ​​where a massive storm was awaiting them, just a day before their planned trip to Tarragona for the Concurs de Castells this afternoon.

Sudden, rain-heavy storms -featuring lightning and intense localized downpours- are common in the Mediterranean region during late August and September. They didn't appear this summer, but they have arrived this autumn, bringing a difficult weekend for many Catalan towns -especially those that expanded by burying streams and torrents, building over wetlands, or encroaching on rivers that had been artificially canalized.

Nature is, after all, unpredictable and uncontrollable; water always finds its way back to its natural paths, even if those paths have been altered -with varying degrees of ingenuity- by human hands.

After a night of record-breaking rainfall in the city -particularly in the Sants and Les Corts districts- The Grandma wants to talk about Barcelona and how it grew over dozens of river basins. While these are no longer visible as they once were, local place names remind us that they have always been here and remain so today: Riera Blanca, Riera Escuder, Riera d'Horta, Riera de Vallcarca, Riera de Cassoles, Torrent de l'Olla, Torrent de les Flors...

Barcelona is usually imagined as a Mediterranean city of stone, streets and avenues, lying between the mountains and the sea. Yet beneath this familiar urban landscape lies another Barcelona: a city shaped by water.

The map of its old streams and watercourses reveals a geography that has almost disappeared from sight but has never entirely ceased to exist.

Barcelona grew on a plain enclosed by four great geographical boundaries: the Mediterranean Sea, the Collserola range, the River Llobregat to the southwest and the River Besòs to the northeast. Between those two rivers, however, water followed countless smaller paths.

For centuries, rain falling on Collserola descended towards the sea through a dense network of streams, torrents and seasonal watercourses. Some were relatively important, such as the Riera d'Horta or the Riera Blanca; others were much smaller. Together, they carved shallow depressions into the Barcelona plain and carried sediments from the mountains towards the coast. They also helped create the land on which the city would eventually grow.

Long before Barcelona became an enormous urban landscape, water was one of the reasons why humans settled here. The prehistoric plain contained streams, wetlands and lagoons, while fresh water could be found relatively close to the Mediterranean. Later inhabitants exploited springs, wells and underground water, gradually transforming the natural hydrological system into an increasingly human landscape.

Then the city expanded. Streams were diverted, channelled, covered or incorporated into the urban drainage system. Roads and buildings occupied their former courses. The visible geography of water slowly disappeared beneath another geography made of streets. But it left traces. Some survive in place names. Others can still be recognised in the shape and slope of certain streets. And sometimes, during episodes of exceptionally heavy Mediterranean rain, water seems to remember paths that the modern city has forgotten. That is perhaps what makes maps of Barcelona's ancient streams so fascinating. They show us that the apparently orderly grid of the modern city was superimposed upon a much older landscape.

Before streets, there were streams. Before neighbourhoods, there were valleys, wetlands and torrents. Before the city organised the water, the water had already organised the land.

Barcelona has always lived with a geographical contradiction. It is squeezed between mountain and sea, yet protected and nourished by two rivers. Collserola collects the rain; gravity sends it towards the Mediterranean; and the urban plain lies directly in its path. For centuries, people adapted to that geography. Later, engineering attempted to control it. Yet geography never completely disappears.

The extraordinary rainfall that occasionally falls over Barcelona reminds us that a modern city is not separate from the landscape on which it was built. Asphalt can cover a stream, buildings can hide a valley and sewers can channel the rain underground, but the logic of the terrain remains. Perhaps that is the most beautiful lesson contained in this old hydrological map.

Barcelona is not simply a city between the Llobregat and the Besòs. It is a city born from the sea, the mountains, the rivers -and hundreds of forgotten paths of water running between them. A hidden blue Barcelona still exists beneath our feet.

This hidden geography is particularly meaningful to The Grandma because she lives between two names that preserve the memory of Barcelona's ancient waters: Riera Blanca and Riera Escuder.

But these were not simply two neighbouring streams. They belonged to the same hydrological landscape. The Torrent d'Escuder fed the Riera Blanca, which collected water descending from the slopes of Collserola before continuing across the plain and eventually reaching the Mediterranean west of Montjuïc.

Today, water has been replaced by streets, buildings and an administrative boundary. Riera Blanca (next to the Camp Nou) still separates Barcelona from L'Hospitalet, while Riera Escuder survives in the urban fabric of Sants. Yet the old landscape has not completely disappeared. It remains in street names, irregular plots, unexpected slopes and the shape of the neighbourhood itself.

The streams may have disappeared from sight, but they have survived in the language -and even in the geometry- of the city.

Perhaps Barcelona has not forgotten its water after all.

More information: Meet Barcelona

D'eix cavall de la riera
prenc la brida barroera,
i als torrents i a la ribera
vaig dient: pas al raier!

I seize the rough bridle

of this river's wild horse,

and to the torrents and the riverbanks

I cry: Make way for the raftsman!

Jacint Verdaguer

DE SER I SER DEL TOT, PLENAMENT: UN INSTINT DE PÀTRIA

No puc dir el teu nom.
O el dic negligentment.
No puc dir el teu nom.

Certs dies, certes nits, em passen certes coses.
Tinc el desig de tu.
Esdevens, aleshores, la meua sola pàtria.

No puc dir el teu nom.
Esvelta, tendra, càlida.
Terriblement esvelta, dempeus, com una pàtria.

No puc dir el teu nom.
Car, si el dic, l'he de dir amb una certa negligència.

No puc dir el teu nom.
No és un desig tan sols sexual, conjugal.
És el desig del riu, i el llençol, i la brossa.
És un instint de pàtria.
És el desig de l'arbre, i del cel, i del cànter, i el pitxer, i l'argila.

De ser i ser del tot, plenament: tenir pàtria.
I una pàtria lliure, i lluminosa, i alta.

I cannot say your name.

Or I say it carelessly.

I cannot say your name.

On certain days, certain nights, certain things happen to me.

I desire you.

You become, then, my only homeland.

I cannot say your name.

Slender, tender, warm.

Terribly slender, standing tall, like a homeland.

I cannot say your name.

For if I say it, I must say it with a certain carelessness.

I cannot say your name.

It is not merely a sexual or conjugal desire.

It is the desire of the river, and the sheet, and the brushwood.

It is an instinct for a homeland.

It is the desire of the tree, and the sky, and the water jar, and the pitcher, and the clay.

To be, and to be wholly, fully: to have a homeland.

And a homeland free, and luminous, and lofty.

More information: UNIR

De ser i ser del tot, plenament: tenir pàtria.
I una pàtria lliure, i lluminosa, i alta.

To be, and to be wholly, fully: to have a homeland.
And a homeland free, and luminous, and lofty.

Vicent Andrés Esteller