Santander (EFE).- La Vorágine opened its doors on April 24, 2013 with the aim of being more than just a bookstore. Since then it has organized 1,400 events and has published fifty titles, which have traveled to international fairs such as those in Bogotá and Guadalajara (Mexico), weaving networks from “the cultural periphery”, the Good Living neighborhood of Santander.
There, at number 69 Calle Cisneros, in a place full of light that was once a workshop and gym, is this bookstore and meeting point where everything, shelves and counters, has wheels to open space for live culture, which also comes out to the street to meet the people. Like this weekend at the tenth anniversary party, which coincides with Book Day.
“We say many times jokingly, but it is very serious, that the bookstore is a cover, that nobody imagines everything that is behind it,” Paco Gómez Nadal, one of the founders of the La Vorágine collective, told EFE. remember the skepticism with which this project was received a decade ago: “When we started, everyone told us it was impossible.”
The response from the enthusiasts who planted the seed for the project was “give us six months and we will show that it is possible, if you give us a year it will be consolidated”. And over time they have far exceeded expectations: “Not only because of the size it has acquired, but because of the impact on life in the region and beyond, because the pandemic opened us up to other places on the planet.”
“Not because we are in a peripheral place, and we are aware of what it means to be a periphery, we feel isolated, we are very connected and doing many things at many points,” he points out.
Mutual support
La Vorágine has taken the books of its editorial label to the most important fairs in Latin America and this weekend it is part of “a stop” in Sant Jordi because, as Carmen Alquegui, a bookseller and member of the collective, recalls, she works in a network with other projects.
25 years ago, he points out, initiatives such as Traficantes de Sueños arose, in Madrid, which have consolidated themselves as independent publishers. They are the “older sisters” of La Vorágine, who saw in books “a tool for transformation and critical thinking.”
“We don’t have the capacity of the commercial publishing world, we don’t want it either, or the economic muscle, but we do have the capacity for mutual support,” adds Gómez Nadal. “We are thirty in all of Spain and there is a commitment beyond what is seen.”
In his group, without going any further, there are seven people plus a dozen volunteers and only two receive a salary. “A punta de compromiso” have just carried out the “Cartography of forced disappearance in Andalusia”, together with two memory groups from this community, who found out that they had carried out a similar project in Colombia.
“We have mapped 44,300 cases of disappeared or executed people who are in 798 graves in Andalusia,” he explains. “It is these kinds of projects that give us the reason to exist.”
Crossing borders
The publishing house started in 2015 with a small essay by Antonio Orihuela, “La voz común”, also the author of one of the last published books, “Art does not make art”. One of his ‘best sellers’ is “Fascismo de baja intensidad”, by Antonio Méndez Rubio, and there are several titles that have crossed borders such as “Feminismo de cercanidad”, a collective work, or “I am black, I stay black”, by Aimé Cesaire, one of the foreign authors published by the label.
He also has translations in the works such as “El silencio de Georg” by Raúl Riebenbauer, which follows the trail of Henz Ches, executed on the same day as Salvador Puig Antich.
La Vorágine opened the neighborhood to the world when the confinement arrived. On March 18, 2020, she published the first text of her pandemic blog, “Apocaelipsis”. “We spent the hours of the day requesting, editing, correcting, translating, designing… We maintained the logic of this space, at that time when the door was closed, open to the world”, says Alquequi.
When it was possible to open but without capacity, Cantabrian groups were given the opportunity to perform, recording on video and broadcasting their concerts.
La Vorágine received help from a resistance fund to endure during the confinement and before, in December 2018, it was able to move into the space it now occupies, from the place where it started when it outgrew it but “literally didn’t have a single euro in the account”, thanks to a ‘crowfunding’.
In just one month they collected 19,000 euros with which to convert a gym into a bookstore and some twenty volunteers came to assemble shelves and place the books.
receive and return
And his logic is to return. They have just created a reading resistance fund, with contributions from the bookstore and others, so that no one has to give up taking a book home for economic reasons, a type of publication that is also difficult to find in libraries, which depend on what readers ask for and are usually best sellers. “If a book is worth 15 euros and you can put four, put four, it will go to other people,” says Gómez Nadal.
La Vorágine, which declares itself “politicized like everything in life” and proud to be so, has also forged alliances with its neighbors, on the outskirts of downtown Santander, with an initiative called the Neighborhood of Good Living, from which “a seed” has remained.
But, according to Gómez Nadal, what the neighborhood will remember them for a lifetime is its alliance with the school that is wall to wall with the bookstore, Cisneros, to transform a very deteriorated space between the two buildings into the “Espacio Freedom”. Where before there was dirt and garbage, now there are three murals and plants that have already flourished. EFE
By Lola Camús