The Three Cultures of the Mediterranean Foundation and Arab Housewith the collaboration of Salamandra GraphicThe event, organised by the Spanish comic book publisher, is the presentation of the latest work by one of the most important autobiographical comic book artists of the last decade, Zeina Abirached. At The oriental piano (Salamandra Graphic) Abirached draws on the life of his great-grandfather, Abdalah Chahine, to transform him into an amateur musician who invents a bilingual piano in the 1950s to exalt what unites East and West.
Once again, Zeina Abirached, author of The game of the swallows, demonstrates its graphic and narrative quality.
The oriental piano revolves around a central theme, that of cultural relations between East and West, articulated through two different timelines. The piano built by Abdalah is a symbol of the rapprochement between the two cultures and the possibility and necessity of integrating the historical and cultural particularities of the two territories without losing one's own identity.
See the publisher's full review at this link.
ZEINA ABIRACHED
Zeina Abirached (Beirut, 1981). He graduated from the Lebanese School of Fine Arts, specialising in graphics, and in 2004 he moved to Paris, where he studied animation at the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs.
In 2006 he directed the short film Moutonwhich he later adapted as an illustrated children's story. That same year saw his debut in the field of comics with two works that remain unpublished in Spanish: [Beyrouth] Catharsiswhich won first prize at the Beirut Comic Strip Festival, and 38, rue Youssef Semaani.
A year later, in 2007, she was consecrated as a comic book author with the publication of The game of the swallows (Sins Entido, 2008), selected by the Angoulême International Comic Festival as one of the essential titles of the year. The book was a bestseller in France and was translated into a dozen languages. His next work was published in 2008, I remember, Beirut (Sins Entido, 2009), in which Abirached borrows from the book of the same name written by Georges Perec in 1978..
The oriental piano was published in 2015 and was chosen as one of the great works of the year at the Angoulême Festival, where it received the 2016 Phénix prize.
In conversation with:
Paco Cerrejón (Seville, 1974). Cultural manager and exhibition curator, he is the managing director of the Instituto de la Cultura y las Artes de Sevilla (ICAS), and for 15 editions he has been the director of the 'Encuentro del Cómic y la Ilustración de Sevilla'.
Simultaneous translation from French into Spanish will be provided.
Free entry with prior registration at this link.
Book sale and book signing after the talk.
YOU MAY ALSO BE INTERESTED IN...
- This book is the current book club reading Three with books.
- The Tres Culturas library has a lot of 30 copies of this work for collective lending.
- In the library you can find all the works of Zeina Abirached published in English.
- Link to the space Reflections of the Fundación Tres Culturas dedicated to Zeina Abirached:
Comics, an effective tool for explaining the Middle East. The work of Zeina Abirached'.
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