First Entresures Meeting
in the City of Buenos Aires, Argentina

(October 28th – November 5th, 2004)

We have come together in the city of Buenos Aires from October 28th to November 5th, in order to exchange ideas and strategies surrounding the development of the Entresures project, and with this purpose in mind, brought together our diverse experiences from Mexico, Colombia, Bahía Blanca and Buenos Aires, as cultural mediums with a development in our places of origin, within the fields of literature, publishing, education, and a relationship with the arts and social sciences. As a result, we were able to determe the tasks to be undertaken in order to reach the short-term goals scheduled for 2005-2006, while also establishing the project’s subsequent development toward 2007 and culminating, yet not terminating, in 2009-2011 (dates of the bicentennial celebration of Latin American independence movements, pretext and opportunity for a historical, social, political, economic and cultural revision of our regions).

Entresures assumes as its own the endeavor of re-thinking Latin America as an integral and diverse body, at the threshold of the bicentennial celebrations which are only five years away. It is about a task which requires a long-term perspective and one which, in order to come to fruition, necessarily requires a joint effort and the confluence of strengths and dreams. It is acknowledged that this is not an easy assignment, particularly given the global environment within which social and economic systems promote and almost obligate a conscience situated in, and busy with, the immediate present and short-term endeavors (not to mention the notion of creative expression as an individual, isolated experience). A phenomenon which impedes our own construction of a different future, a desirable future, and -why not?- a better one (rest assured that those who we tend to blame, with certain fatalism, for our current situation and the apparent course of society, are, at this particular instant, thinking jointly about the future- not a future five years from now, but one twenty and fifty years from now; at this very moment, “they” are thinking about “our” future). This is why Entresures does not conceive itself as merely a literary project, but as an agent with growth and resonance potential (1) in terms of re-thinking Latin America.

As a result of the meeting, the first agreement has been to acknowledge the importance of the project conceived and initiated thanks to the vision and persistence of Jeannine Diego and which has, within a few months and despite the understandable difficulty implicit in interweaving correspondence between writers from different countries, already shown a visible dynamic of approximations. Proving that electronic means can in fact serve as a vehicle of mutual understanding, due to the advantages of speed and its simultaneous nature. The topics that have surfaced in this virtual space allow for an insight into the hinges of our future convergence: the identity of Latin America and the Caribbean, its unity and plurality, the relationship of the writer with his/her society via literary expression, the exercise of the thinking needed to re-think the relationship between literature, education, nations, states, globalization; the possibilities of projecting literature as a means of dialog with education, the arts, the social sciences.

It is within this framework that we have dreamt that with these promising beginnings, the project must be consolidated over the course of the following year, and thus have agreed to proceed in several directions.

The first is to stimulate the dialog via a first document that, arising from the fertile ideas exchanged in this meeting, will be elaborated for its distribution in the month of December and which will serve as a platform that will help to view the situation of writers within the context of Latin America: what we have been, what we are, where we are and where we tend to head within economic, political, social and cultural dimensions proper to our region and in the global ambit. Understanding the difficulty and complexity of the task and parting from the idea that certain unity configured in the midst of the radical plurality of our existence as peoples and states one and diverse, we think of this document not as a manifesto, but as a principle from which we may enrich, with different perspectives, the expression of the participants to the virtual forum. Each of us is also an expression of absolute diversity and nothing would be powerful enough to believe that our subjectivities could be enclosed within a sort of regional or global formula.

In addition, we wish to move forward in terms of one of the ideas drawn out by Jeannine Diego when she decided to organize this exchange, not only as a means of virtual communication, but as a means of physical proximity between writers, based on the idea of a temporary stay in a distant and different city on behalf of the writers, whereupon they will undertake an exercise of deciphering the host city via an approximation to a person who, due to age and experience, incarnates, so-to-speak, a living yet untold memory of the host city.

In summary, over the course of the next few months, (November 2004 - February 2005), Entresures will focus on several undertakings of immediate importance: a) the broadening of the framework of participation within the forum on behalf of thinkers, writers and communicators whose commitment with or preoccupation with the subject of Latin America forms an intrinsic part of their thinking; b) alongside item a), an overview of the current cultural situation (with a special focus on literature) of Latin American countries, in terms of production as well as activities and support on behalf of institutions and societies; c) the initial composition of a document that will serve as a kind of statement of purpose from which topics for the electronic dialog will be extracted and which will serve as a historical, social, political, economic and cultural reference: it is a living document which, according to the development of the electronic dialog, will undergo transformations and adjustments, nurtured by information, opinions, coincidences and disparities that surface within the dialog itself; d) the design of the map of collaborations/exchanges to take place in 2005, to be determined based on the electronic dialog as well as on a second general meeting scheduled for the end of April, to take place possibly within the setting of the Book Fair held in Bogotá, Colombia.

Carried out with the support of RAIN (Rijksakademie Artists Initiatives Network, through the Dutch Ministry of Foreign), through the initiatives of the network: TRAMA in Argentina and “el despacho” in Mexico, the first meeting of the organizers of Entresures in Buenos Aires, accomplished the mission of establishing the objectives and potential of the project.

We’d like to express our acknowledgement of the hospitality of Argentina and specifically the city of Buenos Aires, the cultural dynamism of which we were able to appreciate upon attending editors and writers gatherings organized by one of our underwriters, Gustavo López, editor in chief of Vox which, alongside other magazines of the region, now organizes a Latin American poetry contest, the requisites of which may be viewed at: concurso@revistavox.org.ar

Jeannine Diego, Gustavo López y Gabriel Restrepo

(1) The energy needed to carry an electron from a normal orbit to another, next orbit.