2023-07-16 22:14:10
Eleven years on Spanish Television, fifteen writing for La Vanguardia, ten directing Altair magazine. At the age of 54, reporter Pere Ortín has decided to rebel against the arrogance of traditional journalism by publishing Periodismo Dada (FES Comunicación). A very beautiful book, more like a manifesto, full of handwritten pages and collages that make up a different and provocative way of building a story that aims to highlight the monotony of a profession that he loves but that he believes needs to be revolutionized. The interview took place in Bogotá, during the Gabo Festival, in which the author presented the book.
What is Dada journalism?
It is an act of rebellion against conventional journalism. An act of disappointment against the way I was built as a journalist. In the same way that more or less reasonably intelligent men now face the machismo in which we were educated, journalists have to review and change.
Are you doing a deconstruction of your journalistic training?
Yes, it is a process of deconstruction on the personal, professional side, but also a process of rebellion at one point in your life. Immersed in the conventional dynamics of work, I believed that I was saving the world with journalism, that what I was doing was a fundamental act, that society needed what we were doing to progress, to be more democratic. This is a process, it doesn’t happen one day. Through the experience of my relationship with artists and creative people in Black Africa, I began to realize that much of my reporting on the conflicts in Mozambique, Angola, South Africa, racism, etc., they were made without having a fucking idea. That it was a paratrooper approach and that that was what almost all of us were doing, it didn’t matter if it was Africa or another place. And you start to reflect on all your other jobs and you wonder if they were also full of as many mistakes as the ones made in Africa.
I understand that you are not a supporter of nostalgia.
No, no, no, I am there with the song by León Benavente that says Say no to nostalgia. Nostalgia seems to me a horrible thing. It seems to me something that is not going to lead us anywhere. It is also true that I believe that the future loves us, but does not need us. And at that point in the game I believe in the here and now. That is why I always say that we cannot do journalism with the dogmas of the 20th century, which were a tradition invented by some gentlemen that was very good, with which we were educated, but today we are in the 21st century. And the device with which we recorded this conversation [un smart phone] it changes everything.
He goes to the revolution writing by hand and doing journalism with newspaper and magazine clippings.
Dada journalism uses the rebellious gesture of an avant-garde from the beginning of the last century in Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire, applying it to what I am passionate about, interested in, motivated and inspired by, which is journalism. And now I do it through the collage essay, creating a different Time.news using mixed languages, which is complex and does not respond to the logical norms of a conventional narrative of subject, verb, predicate and which has multiple readings, which are sometimes difficult. .
Do you still have faith in journalism?
I still have enormous faith. I want to do journalism until I die. The best journalism is yet to come. The best journalism is done by boys and girls who are 17 or 18 years old and who are going to build things that we can’t even imagine. Media, narrative formats, ideas of how to represent reality that we don’t even know now that they are beginning to boil. That the networks, the media will use…
I have your book in hand. It sounds very interesting, but at the same time it’s a very complex language for the audience to understand, let’s say. I guess this is just the beginning…
Clear. The seed is planted and we are watering it, waiting to see how it grows. It is a laboratory process. The scientists who come in to discover a vaccine have some clues, they know how the molecules work, how that virus works, and they are trying a logical trial and error process. And in that I am.
Is it a provocation?
Also, but I am more interested in the idea of irony, because I feel that many times we take what we do too seriously and we put subtitles under our names like the truth kills the darkness and things like that…
How do you combine your Dada journalism with, for example, the fight against corruption? Can’t it be a bit naive?
Yes, but what difference is there between the naivety that a journalist can have who says that his story on political corruption is going to overthrow a government. I give an example that we know in depth, which is the case of El Salvador, where they have the oldest digital communication medium in Latin America, El Faro. Edited by friends we admire and respect. His journalism in the fight against corruption, against the authoritarianism of its president, Nayib Bukele, has confronted his readers, his fellow citizens. What has happened to us for that to happen? Have we not been excessively pretentious, have we not been excessively aggressive towards our societies, telling them that they thought badly, that they knew nothing, that they elected corrupt politicians, even if that were true?
Do you hide a punch towards the arrogance of journalism behind the irony of a childish collage?
I don’t hide it, it’s direct. I think you have to stop being pretentious, create something new. Make journalism, journalists, reflect. Somehow it’s a punch, perhaps better a punch on the table, not a punch, because I don’t even have aggression in that sense. I adore everyone, everyone hugs me, kisses me and that makes me happy. Although later he is saying to our mutual friend Martín Caparrós, damn Martín; or even if our mutual friend Óscar Martínez tells you [jefe de redacción de El Faro]Damn, Oscar. We have to be able, he said in the presentation during the Gabo Festival, to respect the journalistic tradition by rethinking it to the end and to the end. And when you look over that precipice where you no longer know what or how to think, that’s when true thought arises. And for me that is the point. What are we going to think? How are we going to think about it?
So far you have written a beautiful book, what is the next step?
Develop a project of workshops, seminars. I am very interested in the contact with the generations of young students. Something that I already do in my usual professional activity in the master’s degrees at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where I am a professor of innovation and new narrative techniques. When I am with my students and they begin to work on conventional information news through the connection between their brain and their hands and then they see it through After Effects Photoshop put on a website, their eyes light up. Because when I talk about Dada journalism I am not saying that we are analogical against technology. I love technology. What I am saying is that this connection that is lost between the pixel and the feeling of the body, what feminists and trans movements call new corporalities, seems super important to me and I think it is necessary to apply it in practice.
Does this have any inspiration or relationship with fanzines?
I come from there; I am 54 years old, I am from a town in Valencia, I lived through the end of the dictatorship, the fanzines, the free radio stations, that Radio 3 that was just beginning. That is the world that I suckled as a child and adolescent. I owe everything to my parents. For example, every Friday, with my sister, when we left school we went to the only bookstore in Sagunto, my town. My parents paid for any book that my sister and I wanted to buy to read on the weekends. And we were a working family, there was not enough money. My father and mother were left-wing workers, on Saturdays they took me to craft workshops that were held in the CNT, they had that concern that perhaps I inherited.
And this journalism that you are inventing can be expressed through any genre?
In fact, it is expressing itself through other genres. There are colleagues who are doing embroidery journalism in Mexico, working with indigenous communities through plants, traditional knowledge. Another of the things that I would like us to begin to reflect on and make a profound critique of is modernity and all its children, including journalism and Western reason. When we talk about sources, narration, history, culture, we do so from the point of view of Western reason, which represents 400, 500, 600 million human beings who educated us with Aristotle, Plato, etc. But it is that there are more than seven billion inhabitants on Earth who do not think like this and who do not have reason as a central element in their vital narrative. All Eastern civilizations do not even care about reason and truth, African civilizations and cultures even less.
And the West imposes its vision.
Which is that of reason, that of the gringos, that of hypothesis, approach, method and results.
It is an imposition.
In fact even Felwyne Sarr, the Senegalese philosopher, speaks of epistemicide. It is the idea that Western knowledge kills the other knowledge that exists on earth. And one of those epistemicidal knowledges is conventional journalism, because it imposes a vision on the world and sometimes what happens is that people rebel against that vision, a bit Anglo-Saxon, a bit Calvinist of truth, reason. And that affects journalists of all stripes and ideological conditions. Because sometimes those of us who consider ourselves more or less progressive think that we are better than the others, but in some specific matters, in moralism, for example, we are the same.
Dada Journalism can be downloaded for free in PDF at this link.
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