France’s Ambassador to Spain, Yves Saint-Geours, with the director of the French Institute, Nicolas Kassianides, and actresses Carmen Maura and Hiba Abouk, patronesses of the event./ Photo: JDL
Juan David Latorre. 23/01/2016
France’s Ambassador to Spain, Yves Saint-Geours, presented, on Wednesday 20 January, the programme of the French Institute’s cultural season 2016 at its Spanish headquarters.
As well as by the ambassador, the event was attended by the director of the French Institute, Nicolas Kassianides, and this edition’s patronesses, actresses Carmen Maura and Hiba Abouk.
This year’s programme, supported by the topic «Contemporary odysseys», intends to be, according to the French Ambassador, a «cultural response» to the terrorist threat and the challenges Europe must face. The subjects of diversity and integration are key elements to different events organized in Spain by the six French Institutes (Barcelona, Bilbao, Madrid, Seville, Valencia, Zaragoza), but also the French Alliances and the numerous French teaching centres.
Debates about ideas, photography, literature, cinema, philosophy, dance or music. The French cultural year in Spain will be marked by «Contemporary odysseys».
“Throughout the entire 2015, the ambassador pointed out, especially after the attacks of Charlie Hebdo, the French feel the need to reflect on what we are, on identities…, and the word odyssey won because Ulysses’s great adventure seems like the great adventure of Europeans, the mix of cultures and nations, the diversity of the East and the West. And then November events reaffirmed our idea: it was the time, it was more necessary than ever to dialogue with others through culture (…), we want to prove that Humanity is one (…) and there are no countries more similar as regards culture than Spain and France, even if we have had different historical sequences and experiences, and even if our respective odysseys are not the same”.
