With Han Kang and Adriana Lisboa
Host: Guilherme Henrique is a journalist. He has reports and articles published by the main Brazilian outlets
Two writers with a critical and disseminating eye on the human universe will meet at this panel: Brazilian Adriana Lisboa, with an experience of living in the Far East, and South Korean Han Kang. Best known as a fiction writer, in her latest publication entitled O vivo [The Living], Lisboa goes back to poetry, exercised in other books, to address animals, human and non-human things – plants in particular. Among other precious things, the beautiful poem “A flor e seu protesto” [The Flower and Its Protest], which dismantles the traditional symbolism around the floral theme, literally leaps to the eyes and concludes by asking: “what is a flower / without a signifier / or meaning?”. In The Vegetarian, Han Kang narrates the terrible fable of a woman who, after dreaming about a lot of blood, decides not to eat meat anymore, becoming the recipient of her family’s violence. The refusal to accept her decision ends up leading her to a process of vital radicalization, exposing the contrast between the delicacy of a vegetal existence and the typical cannibalism of a phallocentric and carnivorous culture. Therefore, it is about two feminine approaches trying to deconstruct a still excessively masculine world, despite the sexual revolution that has been going on for at least five decades.