Júlia Febrer: "Poetry is about creating bridges between things."

PalmJust half a minute of talking to Júlia Febrer (San Juan, 1998) is enough to know that, although Inocidal root This is his first published book of poems; poetry is an essential, inseparable, defining part of his life. The jury of the Miquel Àngel Riera City of Manacor Poetry Prize highlighted "a surprising linguistic work," a quality derived from the profound respect, and also the devotion, that Febrer feels for words.

Winning the City of Manacor Prize has meant, in his case, publishing a work for the first time. How are you experiencing this?

— Yes, the prize has made it possible to publish this collection of poems, and that's wonderful and new for me at the same time. Sometimes it's painful to enter these circles, and things like this make it possible. And the truth is, it's also given me the impetus to write more, to have more confidence in what I do. Until now, all these verses were just mine, an intimate and personal work, and now I see that it's time for other people to read them.

Where does your interest in poetry come from?

— I would say that poetry is a way of seeing and feeling the world, of creating relationships with others. And I feel that all of this has been with me since I was about 15, when I had a Catalan teacher at Mossèn Alcover who introduced us to poets and verses. A friend and I would go to the library and search: we would sit by the poetry shelf, where all the books were half-collected because no one ever looked at them, and we would share verses. Something resonated then, and it still has. If I lost that, I would lose my fascination with the world: I like to think that poetry is also that.

However, she also works in art through other disciplines. Are they all connected in some way?

— Yes, it's all part of the same way of expressing yourself. It's been said and repeated many times these days: labels like literary genres and artistic disciplines have been transcended, although each can maintain its own idiosyncrasies. But I like to think about what happened during the avant-garde movements: how the word left books and entered other media, and how drawings, photos, and many other things entered books in the same way. This exchange still yields a great deal. For me, poetry is much more than a collection of verses: it's about creating bridges between things, including the disciplines I work with.

The word is its primordial material, isn't it?

— Yes, it's not just another material; it's essential to everything. The word passed through the body, through the hands, and through the mouth. When I was studying sculpture, my works drew from poems and literary fragments.

Who are your role models in this regard?

— They're not just poems, not at all. I'm thinking of people like Fina Miralles, Perejaume, and Giuseppe Penone, among others, because for them poetry goes hand in hand with other practices, like performance art and installations. And these three also share a fascination with the element of the tree, which for me is also essential. In any case, for each artistic project I feel I have specific points of reference, which can also be theater companies or photobooks or… These three I mentioned, for example, write as much as they walk and paint and take photographs, and they feel that it's in these gestures that poetry gains added value.

And this Inocidal rootWhere does it come from?

— One day a friend told me that a grain of wheat had gotten stuck in her ear and sprouted. It's a story that's been repeated a lot, but it stuck with me then. It sparked my interest in things we might not see at first glance, but that are there and somehow affect us: for me, the secret is to notice everything that isn't explicit or obvious. So, in a way Inocidal root It means being available, attentive to everything that surrounds and shapes us, even through silences. It also relates to the ARA newspaper, the origin of the poetry collection.

How is?

— Well, I usually read it to my parents at home after it's been through many hands. In fact, it often arrives to me after both my mother and sister have already underlined it, but it doesn't matter because I also like to cut out words when I read it, as a way of having them physically as well. And one day my mother gave me one she had cut out that had made her think of me: it was the verb. inoirIt was written on some page of the newspaper, and when she gave it to me, I thought I would never let go of that word. So, actually, it also comes from there.