Date: may 1 - 31th
Place: Centro Civico Rigoberta Menchu
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“PALESTINE AND IRAQ IN THE EYES OF KALVELLIDO AND AZAGRA”
This year comics will have their cosy corner in the festival. Two extremely prestigious strip cartoon artists have offered their work to recount both the Palestinian and the Iraqi conflicts. There will be a show of twenty cartoons through which the authors gather their perceptions about those conflicts, with tenderness and solidarity but without losing their blaming and critical stroke against those who execute, tolerate and defend the strongholds of power instead of those of reason.
Juan Kalvellido, a cartoonist rooted in the working-class (or as he puts it “sunken in the working class”) who has never stopped believing in the Revolution. He was born in Cádiz in 1968 and he lives in Fuengirola (Málaga).
He publishes daily in www.insurgente.org, www.rebelion.org, and www.kaosenlared.net. He writes monthly for the newspapers Diagonal, Mundo Obrero, the magazines El Viejo Topo, El Batracio Amarillo and the humour magazines El Karma and Monográfiko, and in any other which asks him to. He has illustrated a record with the trade union “CGT Chiapas de Madrid” entitled “LOS RITMOS DEL ESPEJO II” which is already on sale, and a good deal more of poetry books and records, as well as the books “ODIO ENAMORADO” and “LA POLLA MÁS GRANDE DEL MUNDO”, by Patxi Irurzun (inseparable friend in hardship).
The last books he has illustrated are “NADA ES LO KE PARECE” by journalist Enriqueta de la Cruz, and the collection of poems “PERRO PULGAS” by Manuel F. Trillo, as welll as the short-story book by Flores Magón “¡VIVA TIERRA Y LIBERTAD!”, all of them published by the publishing house Tiempo de Cerezas Editores, which has also published his first and, so far, only comic book “¡SALUD Y NI UN PASO ATRÁS!” (15 €). For more information:
jkalvellido@wanadoo.es
Carlos Azagra was born in Morón de la Frontera (Sevilla) and he was brought up in Zaragoza. In the seventies he moves to Barcelona to study Fine Arts; there he first becomes interested in politics, cooperating with clandestine groups such as the Unión de Juventudes Comunistas de España, as well as with a number of Aragonese neighbourhood associations. Since then his interest in politics will mark his work with a strong critical component.
In Barcelona he gets in touch with the group “Butifarra”, cooperating with them in their work with local neighbourhood associations; later, in the eighties, he moves to Santa Coloma de Gramanet, where he starts working for the emerging comics “Makoki” and “El Víbora”, as well as for fanzines linked to trade unions such as CNT or CGT. In 1984 he signs for the weekly “El Jueves” where he has been working for the last twenty years. In this weekly his most popular characters “Pedro Pico y Pico Vena” and “Ovidio” come to life for the first time. Apart from this he also collaborates with comic publications such as TMEO, Carrer, Taxi, El Periódico, Liberación, fanzines of protest and other publications of neighbourhood associations.
