Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API (Chirp) + Gemini 2.5 Flash Non-Thinking. Treat it as a searchable index of what was broadcast, not a quotation record.
00:01:32There is practically nothing left of
00:02:01Looking for what remains of It was Christmas 1992, after the Olympics. My
00:02:04sister worked at the Barcelona project school, where
00:02:08they had children with hemophilia. My sister was a
00:02:10nurse. It turned out that an insomniac, that
00:02:14is, a guy who had done some military service or a substitute
00:02:18service here, went to a refugee camp in
00:02:21ex-Yugoslavia, on the Istrian peninsula. At night
00:02:25he connected his computer to the
00:02:28camp's phone and sent letters. The children from the Bilijose school
00:02:31and the project school in Barcelona, from Tibidabo,
00:02:34the children from the Barcelona school decided
00:02:38to hold some peace days because the war in ex-Yugoslavia
00:02:41was starting and they called me on Christmas
00:02:45Day at my parents' house and they
00:02:48cape, the yellow mistral of the space of the proposed that I go perform at the refugee camp. They told me they would pay for the
00:02:51trip.
00:02:54Well, I couldn't say no and on
00:02:57February 23rd,
00:03:001993, I left for
00:03:01there.
00:03:05We had our doubts about whether I
00:03:08would work out.
00:03:10Then we had a fluctuation, just as we would in a foreign
00:03:13country if we had been contracted. We saw
00:03:17that it worked, that people wanted
00:03:20to laugh. It was in Croatia, but there
00:03:24were Bosnians, there were Serbs, there were Croats and that
00:03:28day everyone... watched the show and when it was
00:03:32over, let's say, we could digest it, we saw that it had served many
00:03:35purposes. From then on, we made another
00:03:39trip with the jugglers and
00:03:41acrobats. He came back very quickly and asked us what we would think of being part
00:03:45of a project called "Clowns Without Borders". We sold 500
00:03:48t-shirts for 1 peseta. We said, "Eh, Tortell, we have
00:03:52500,000 pesetas, two vans, 10 artists, we are ready to
00:03:55go on an expedition" and we were the third historical expedition to
00:03:59leave. To work with refugee children in Croatia from the Balkan
00:04:03War.
00:04:05We have set ourselves the goal of working in favor of
00:04:09refugee or displaced populations. But who
00:04:13knows better if this population has suffered
00:04:16these effects of these problems? It's the
00:04:19agencies that work directly on the ground, for
00:04:23example, the United Nations or Unrwa,
00:04:27which is also the United Nations agency for refugees
00:04:30in Palestine. Eh, there are other
00:04:34organizations like Doctors Without Borders, like Terres des Hommes, like War Child. We have been doing this for
00:04:3823 years. Last year we managed to do 1500
00:04:41performances with the 12 sections that exist. I remember the people from my
00:04:45town saying, "What are clowns going to do in a war?"
00:04:49And we replied, "What is a war doing
00:04:52in a normal country where there are normal children, in the squares where there should be clowns on Sunday?"
00:04:56Nobody could answer us
00:04:58a unitary whole on both sides of either. It's incredible, eh, because,
00:05:02of the "Biblioteca Breve" collection of of course, people don't get paid, they go there voluntarily,
00:05:06and yet we always have a very important
00:05:09demand from artists who want to go with us. It's addicting
00:05:13to go on expeditions with Clowns Without Borders. Many people tell you: "Wow, you're such good people,
00:05:16no, to go there and do that," and you think, "It's
00:05:19reciprocal, because it's an incredible boost." No, I think
00:05:22that all clowns should at some point go on
00:05:26a Clowns Without Borders expedition because I think it gives meaning
00:05:30to the work we do, right? Due to the crisis, because public administration stopped
00:05:34funding, etcetera,
00:05:36eh, we had to resort to asking the artists if
00:05:40they could help us finance a... fourth part of the tours
00:05:43and all like that we still have a lot
00:05:47of artists who want to participate in the
00:05:50project. This organization is for the children in the refugee
00:05:54camps. As long as the children say that we must continue bringing
00:05:57clowns to the daily life of the refugees, we are obliged
00:06:01to do so. We went for a walk in the center of Beirut and we met some
00:06:05children who had been watching our show two days before
00:06:09in the street playing at being us. One
00:06:13was me, the other was the other and they were doing the same pantomime we had done in the act. They had
00:06:16only seen it once, it had stayed with them. Two days
00:06:20later they were still having fun, remembering the performance and the silly things they had
00:06:24done to them, you say, wow, it's not just the
00:06:27hour or the forty-five minutes or however long the show lasts that you're there. Then when
00:06:31the clowns arrive, they manage to get the fathers, mothers and children to come together
00:06:35in a space to do a joint activity, which is to watch a show and
00:06:39enjoy it. Plus, when you see parents and mothers laugh and... those
00:06:42knowing glances, that's when you realize, you say, the work we are
00:06:46doing really has meaning, doesn't it? This global
00:06:49consciousness doesn't make you happy, but it helps
00:06:53at least to be more coherent. There have been countries
00:06:55where certain things you think will make them react by laughing,
00:06:59they get scared, no, they throw a firecracker, Tortell throws a firecracker or you juggle
00:07:03with fire and of course you have to
00:07:06measure and calibrate in each place, each place is a
00:08:07that. I haven't seen any other organization with such involvement from
00:08:10professionals.
00:08:27To explain the experience, I explain that I was lucky
00:08:31enough to go to Sri Lanka a week
00:08:34after the tsunami and there we dedicated ourselves to the
00:08:37schools.
00:08:47There was a day when we performed at a high school. Out of
00:08:50the 1500 children there, only 700 remained. We met
00:08:54very early in the morning. We held
00:08:56some funeral ceremonies.
00:08:59We did the show, the beginning was hard, they weren't children, they were
00:09:03adolescents, so they already knew what had happened and
00:09:07furthermore it was very curious how they were recognizing each other who was
00:09:11there, who wasn't there. And when it finished, when the show
00:09:14completely finished, the school director came and told us: "Eh, they have
00:09:18brought us many things, books, notebooks, pencils, computers,
00:09:22food, blankets, but no one had brought us life. Thanks
00:09:26to you, from today we can talk about life, until today
00:09:29we could only talk about death."
00:09:41And what is... since, well, after all the years I've been doing this, these
00:09:45moments, I wouldn't stop doing it for anything.
00:10:01For me, the most important thing is to see that we are all
00:10:04equal, the people who have nothing and who are having a
00:10:08bad time, these people have
00:10:11human quality.
00:10:22I am clowning for these children and probably
00:10:26it will be the first clown they see,
00:10:29probably it will also be the last and that, well,
00:10:33you carry it in your backpack, no? But what it does do is make you strive
00:10:37to do your best.
00:24:51In 2014, it was 25 years since the death of the poet and
00:24:55editor Carlos Barral, who was a leading figure in the
00:24:59culture of our country. During
00:25:02the gray times of Francoism and the beginnings of the
00:25:04transition, when the Pyrenees were more than just a
00:25:07border, he was the only Spanish editor who did internationally recognized
00:25:11work.
00:25:28an award in which the main European editors participated in open
00:25:31debates with the public, allowing the literary voices of the
00:25:35democratic world to be heard in an environment subject to the rigid censorship of the
00:25:39dictatorship. He also promoted the so-called boom of the
00:25:43Latin American novel, which configured Hispanic literature as
00:25:48the Atlantic. At the head
00:25:52the Seix Barral publishing house and later as director of Barral
00:25:56Editores, he promoted the publication of the best international
00:25:59literature of the 20th century. He also supported young
00:26:03writers who are now considered great masters. His
00:26:06involvement in the struggle for a better world led him to run
00:26:10on the lists of the Socialist Party of Catalonia as a senator for Tarragona
00:26:13in the elections of 1981. During his
00:26:17mandate, he achieved the approval of two laws that had much to do with
00:26:21his areas of interest: the
00:26:24Coastal Law and the Intellectual
00:26:26Property Law.
00:26:31Carlos Barral was a singular character, very sociable, who
00:26:34moved in a select circle of intellectuals, writers and
00:26:37poets. Jaime Gil de Biedma, Gabriel
00:26:41Ferrater, Ángel González, Caballero Bonald, Alfonso
00:26:45Costafreda, Josep Maria Castellet, Julio
00:26:48Einaudi, Jaime Salinas, Jorge
00:26:51Edwards, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio
00:26:54Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, the
00:26:57Goytisolo brothers, Juan García Hortelano, Juan
00:27:00Marsé, Ana María Matute,
00:27:03Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Manuel Sacristán,
00:27:06Alberto Oliart and Joan Raventós were also his
00:27:10friends, frequent visitors to the summer house that Barral
00:27:14had in the fishing village of Calafell.
00:27:19of struggle against the cultural repression of Francoism,
00:27:23during which there was the conviction that culture would play
00:27:26an essential role in the construction of
00:27:28freedom.
00:27:35the cultured, sophisticated environment in which
00:27:38Barral and his friends moved, many of whom are no longer here to
00:27:41remember it.
00:27:44But we have found in the lively gaze and intelligent smile of his wife
00:27:48and inseparable companion, and good horticulturist, that of a
00:27:52past time that we would like to make present.
00:27:55With her, we visit, as every year, the sculptural ensemble that was erected in his
00:27:59memory on Vilaseca beach, in Tarragona.
00:28:03the editor, of the politician, of the singular
00:28:06character, of the man who by vocation wanted to be
00:28:09a poet. With her, we will sail in a boat that
00:28:13is a replica of his fishing boat, which was
00:28:17christened in Calafell with the name Carlos Barral.
00:29:04from the second half, I taught Barral and
00:29:08I believe I managed to spark my students' interest
00:29:11in Barral because Barral is very rewarding, it's like Góngora, once you've
00:29:15entered, once you understand it, you feel very
00:29:18intelligent yourself and in that sense, it is
00:29:21extraordinary and I think there are Barral poems that are
00:29:24truly definitive. A
00:29:27famous presentation that was made of our small group of Barcelona
00:29:30poets in Madrid, in the fifties, I think it was
00:29:341952, at the Ateneo de
00:29:37Madrid, the anthologist José Luis Cano defined us
00:29:41as industrial poets. This, that definition
00:29:45is profoundly ridiculous, but what Cano
00:29:48meant was that we were civil poets, in the sense that our
00:29:52poetry was a poetry of urban experience. I have
00:29:55always kept that memory
00:29:59alive, ah, of those years, they were years
00:30:02of great friendship, eh, there
00:30:06was the certainty that the regime would not last, that that
00:30:10anachronism was impossible, there was also the
00:30:14certainty that the change, the disappearance of the
00:30:17dictatorship, the democratization of Spain,
00:30:21would allow culture to play an
00:30:25absolutely primordial, neuralgic role in that
00:30:29transformation. Culture seemed to be
00:30:33the great instrument of change, not only political but
00:30:36also, eh,
00:30:38mental,
00:30:41eh, and that made the environment in which we lived
00:30:45in those years enormously