The UB Joan Brossa chair is created

The rector, Joan Guàrdia, and the director of the UB Joan Brossa Chair Glòria Bordons, together with the Dean of the Faculty of Education Roser Boix and the president of the Joan Brossa Foundation, Vicenç Altaió, presented on September 5, at at 5 pm, in the Aula Magna of the University of Barcelona, the UB Joan Brossa Chair, promoted by the Joan Brossa Foundation.

The chair, which will be attached to the Faculty of Education, is headed by the professor of Catalan Philology Glòria Bordons, member of the Department of Linguistic and Literary Education, and Didactics of Experimental Sciences and Mathematics, who is also vice-president of Studies of the Joan Brossa Foundation and patron of this entity. Likewise, given the interdisciplinary nature of the poet to whom the chair is dedicated, the monitoring committee will include Eva Figueras, professor in the Department of Visual Arts and Design of the Faculty of Fine Arts, and Jordi Marrugat, professor in the Department of Philology Catalan and Linguistics from the Faculty of Philology and Communication. On behalf of the Joan Brossa Foundation, there will be the director of visual arts of the Liberal Arts Center of the Joan Brossa Foundation, Maria Canelles, and the director of performing arts of the same center, Marc Chornet.

In the words of Bordons, "the existence of a university chair with the name of Joan Brossa would be a way of honoring everything that has been done so far from the Foundation, and will allow to have stable communication vessels for research and dissemination in the different areas related to Brossa". The objectives of the chair are to promote research, using as a source the Brossa archive housed at the MACBA; to disseminate Brossa's work and stimulate new editions that provoke new perspectives on his work; to publicize his work in all possible areas as a tool for reflection and empowerment, and advise on the works of his stage poetry that can be performed in the theater of the Joan Brossa Foundation.

Joan Brossa (Barcelona, 1919-1998), a poet in the broadest sense of the word, wrote poetry in traditional stanzas, everyday poetry (also called antipoetry, due to the subject matter and prosaic form), prose, theater and film scripts. At the same time, he experimented with visual poetry, objects, installations and physical poems.

For Brossa there were no genres or borders between the arts. He began his career during the forties, under the guidance of Josep Vicenç Foix, Joan Miró and Joan Prats. He co-founded the magazines Algol, in 1947, and Dau al Set, in 1948, and collaborated assiduously with artists. Despite developing an intense activity from its beginnings, it was not until 1970 that he began to be known from a literary point of view thanks to the publication of Poesia rasa. In 1986, the first anthological exhibition on his work was inaugurated at the Miró Foundation: Joan Brossa or words are things. From that moment on, he established himself as one of the key figures in contemporary Catalan literature and art.