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A Look at the East: Traveler Lady Montagu and the painter Ingres

September 12, 20177:30 p.m.
MADRID
Casa Árabe Ambassadors’ Hall (at Calle Alcalá, 62). First floor. 7:30 p.m. Free entry until the event’s capacity is reached.
In Spanish.

Casa Árabe is hosting a conversation in Madrid with Patricia Almarcegui and Pilar Rubio about the books “The Painter and the Traveler” and “Letters from Istanbul,” by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

This conversation between Patricia Almarcegui and Pilar Rubio, director of Línea de Horizonte, which has published the letters written from Istanbul by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, is the starting point for the Open Reading “The imaginary encounter on the book The Painter and the Traveler by the author and coordinator of the reading, Patricia Almarcegui.

The book tells the story of the life and viewpoint of a painter and a woman on a journey and is the result of an impossible desire: imagining what the painter Ingres and traveler Lady Montagu would have seen and spoken about if they had ever met. Although this encounter never actually took place, the book narrates long, imaginary conversations about the East, painting, music, women and travel that certainly would have occurred if the two main characters had met.

Patricia Almarcegui and Pilar Rubio will be speaking about some of the topics which are discussed in the book and will later be covered during the Open Reading: Lady Montagu’s view of the East, intimacy (which has so much to do with The Turkish Bath by Ingres), the female view of the Enlightenment, and more specifically Lady Montagu’s, the cultural differences between Western and Eastern women, and the fascination for the exotic among romantic era painters like Ingres who, inspired by the letters which Lady Montagu wrote from Istanbul talking about everything she could see around her, was able to dream about the East and therefore paint some of his famous works.

The imaginary encounter is open to all audiences on the date of September 21 on the LEA Platform for Open Reading and is free of charge.
A Look at the East: Traveler Lady Montagu and the painter Ingres
Patricia Almarcegui
Almarcegui is a writer and professor of Comparative Literature. Her research revolves around Literary Aesthetics and Cultural Studies. She has been a guest professor at The American University of Cairo and La Sorbonne, Paris IV, and she has completed research stays at the Institute of Comparative Literature and Sociology at Columbia University in New York.

Her published books include: Ali Bey y los viajeros europeos a Oriente (Ali Bey and European Travelers to the East, Bellaterra, 2007), in collaboration with L. Romero Tobar, Los libros de viaje: la realidad vivida y los géneros literarios (Travel Books: Reality lived and literary literary genres, Akal, 2004) and her novel, El pintor y la viajera (The Painter and the Traveler, Ediciones B, 2011).

She earned second prize in the Fray Luis de León Awards for the book El sentido del viaje (The Meaning of Travel). In the year of 2014, she received a scholarship to travel to Shiraz and carry out a project titled “The Murmur of Hafez’s Tomb.” She contributes to the newspaper eldiario.es and the cultural inserts of the newspaper ABC and La Vanguardia. In 2016, she had the following books published: Escuchar Irán (Listening to Iran, Newcastle Editions) and Una viajera por Asia Central (A Woman Traveling Through Central Asia, University of Barcelona), and in 2017, her latest novel, La memoria del cuerpo (The Body’s Memory, Fórcola).

Pilar Rubio
A publisher, literary critic, professor and cultural manager who specializes in contemporary travel writing, literature on Africa and Asia, nature and landscapes, Rubio has carried out her professional work on three different fronts since the early eighties. In the field of cultural communication, she was the founder of Lápiz, a contemporary art journal, and chief writer and then director of the cultural journal El Europeo (from 1990 to 1992). She has also been a screenwriter for cultural programs on Canal Plus (1995 to 1997) and a freelance contributor for La Calle, Triunfo, El Globo, Tiempo, Babelia, El Viajero and EPS (El País), Cadena Ser, Diario 16, the newspaper magazines Viajes (El Mundo) and Culturas (La Vanguardia); Futuro, Letra Internacional, Altaïr, Exit, Viajar, Turia, FronteraD, TintaLibre and Revista de la Sociedad Geográfica.

She has also worked on documentation for the TV series “La llamada de África” (2002).  In the field of publishing and books, she was a partner, founder and director of the Altaïr travel bookstore and forum in Madrid (1997 through 2012). She was a founder and director of La Línea del Horizonte Factory (from 2012 to today), a publishing firm which specializes in travel stories and essays, with a cultural management workshop and digital magazine. In the fields of management and education, she is a professor of travel literature for Talleres Fuentetaja, La Central bookstore and Casa del Lector.

She is the author of the monograph Nicolás Muller: Life as an Objective (published by La Fábrica) and “New strategies in contemporary travel literature” in Ten Studies on Travel Literature (published by the Spanish National Research Council, CSIC); “Travel Letters” in Twelve Literary Journeys (Booket), and as a cultural manager she has designed and directed courses, workshops and conference series for summer courses given by the Government of Navarre, the General Foundation of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid at El Escorial, La Casa Encendida, La Casa del Lector and the Sociedad General de Autores-Sala Berlanga, and at present she is directing the festival and encounters titled “Travel and Cultures” for the Conde Duque cultural center in Madrid.
LEA Lectura Abierta is a platform to create trans-media reading clubs, or in other words, virtual classical reading clubs, to which a series of activities are added through other channels of communication (mostly social networks), as well as activities in person, always with the goal of getting more people to read and help readers play a more active, social, creative and participatory role.