The Martínez Cultural Factory is one of those small-format cultural actors and incessant activity that gives flavor to Barcelona life. It is based in an old piano factory, near the Vila de Gràcia square, and is promoted by Inés García Albi. Journalist and historian, she is the niece of the poet Jaime Gil de Biedma, about whom she has curated various exhibitions, and she is married to the biologist and artist Marcos Isamat, also a member of the project.
The factory offers recitals and concerts, whether of Gregorian chant, of the duo Marta y Micó, of Silvia Comes or of a competent imitator of Julio Iglesias. They program “pocket musicals”, such as I remember Mr. Bowie by David Amills and Jaume Vilaseca; a recitation of texts by Svetlana Aleksievich by the actress Patricia Jacas or a course on Buddhism by the specialist Juan Arnau.
It has a reading club that is facing its seventh season and promotes cultural trips through Spain and Europe. The factory has also promoted the publication The Barcelonian, a selection of 102 supposed covers of this imaginary magazine inspired by The New Yorker by Barcelona artists.
In short, the Martínez Factory does not stop. And his last, or penultimate proposal is related to a signature on these pages.
Antonio Iturbe investigates every week the latest trends in the publishing world for his Libroscopio del Cultura/s. Therefore, it is not surprising that he champions an innovative proposal. Iturbe was the winner of the Biblioteca Breve award from the Seix Barral publishing house in 2017 with his novel A sky open. It dealt with the friendship of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, pilot and writer, author of the famous story The Little Prince, with two other pioneering aviators of air mail in the 1920s and 1930s, Jean Mermoz and Henri Guillaumet. The three of them had legendary adventures and none of them lived to be old.
“They chose their own destiny. They lived each year as if they were ten. They conquered their fears, they reached amazing places where no one had gone, they overcame challenges that seemed impossible, they sacrificed themselves so that people could receive their mail in remote places... I don't know if it was worth it, but I'm sure of one thing, they made it happen. Their lives were extraordinary,” reflects his former boss, Daurat, at the end of the novel.
Jordi Brau, theater and dubbing actor - he is the usual voice in Spanish and Catalan of Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise and Robin Williams - together with Luis Posada and Óscar Barberán, have turned A sky open into a work, they say, "of radio drama." . In reality, it is a unique dramatized reading with radio effects - the airplane flights, the music of the time, the sounds of the desert, the hangar, the office, rains and storms, even a political demonstration of the extreme right in Paris. …
“We were inspired by the performance adaptation of Moby Dick by Alessandro Baricco, we wanted to work in that line. With Antonio Iturbe we had collaborated on a fiction podcast titled Garnet; We talked to him, we asked him to adapt his novel and he was very willing although he had to synthesize a lot,” says Jordi Brau.
“At first,” he adds, “we thought about doing the effects live, like when on the radio they imitated the sound of horse hooves with coconuts. But we decided it was better to use current technology. First we record our voices to set the timing, then we create the effects band with our technician Marc Morote, which we play separately and it is what sets the rhythm for us. It is very powerful but the challenge was greater because you have to read at the pace of the effects. Because of this, the work always lasts exactly the same, one hour and 10 minutes.”
The three French pilots will fly again at the Martínez Factory on March 6 and 8, and on May 25 they will repeat their exploits at Seat.
