Le piano oriental (The Eastern Piano) explores the cultural relations between East and West through the images drawn by Zeina Abirached. Their graphic and narrative structure draws us along two different timelines. Abirached was inspired by the life of her great-grandfather, Abdallah Chahine, transforming him into a music aficionado who invents a bilingual piano in the 1950’s. This piano unites the two shores of the Mediterranean with one fantastic beat of its pedals. The instrument put together by Abdallah is a symbol of the proximity between two cultures. Abirached uses that idea to discuss the need to integrate the unique historical and cultural features of these two lands without causing them to lose their own identities, all with a wonderful sense of humor.

The event will include attendance by Zeina Abirached, a graphic novelist and the book’s author, as well as Guillermo Altares, a journalist for El País, Karim Hauser, who is responsible for Casa Árabe’s Governance Area, and Catalina Mejía, the editor of Salamandra Graphic.

Zeina Abirached (Beirut, 1981). Ms. Abirached graduated from Lebanon’s School of Fine Arts with a major in graphic arts, and in 2004 she moved to Paris, where she studied animation at the National School of Decorative Arts. In 2006, she directed the short film Mouton (Sheep), which she later adapted into an illustrated children’s story. That same year, she debuted in the world of comics with two works that remain unpublished in Spanish: [Beyrouth] Catharsis ([Beirut] Catharsis), which won first prize at the Beirut Festival of Comics, and 38, rue Youssef Semaani. In 2007, she became renowned as an author of comics with the publication of A Game for Swallows (published in Spanish as El juego de las golondrinas by Sins Entido, 2008), selected by the International Comic Festival of Angoulême as one of the year’s essential titles. The book was a successful bestseller in France and got translated into a dozen languages. In 2008, her following work came to light: I Remember Beirut (translated into Spanish as Me acuerdo. Beirut, published by Sins Entido, 2009), in which Abirached borrows devices from the book with the same name written by Georges Perec in 1978. Le Piano Oriental was published in 2015 and was selected as one of the finest works of the year at the Angoulême Festival, where it received the Phénix Award for 2016.