Sabina Orozco: "Writing in Vil·la Joana has changed the way I read and create"

“In the second part of Nada, by Carmen Laforet, the protagonist says: ‘All my blood ran with me, with great strokes, in my body’. This same feeling would describe my days in Vil·la Joana”. These are the words of Sabina Orozco, Mexican narrator, poet and essayist, explaining her literary residency at the MUHBA Vil·la Joana. It was between 21 August and 12 September, and she does not hesitate to say that writing there “changed the way of reading and creating. Through a geographical change, one is able to build a map of one’s methods, obsessions and intuitions inside and outside literature”. And she adds: “The atmosphere of the residence allowed me to concentrate on working on the draft that I finished during my stay. The large working space and the view of Tibidabo were a great incentive for the archive I was working on to grow over the course of three weeks”.

Orozco had never been to Barcelona before. Her mother was about to come, but at that very moment she became pregnant and did not make the trip. In fact, the project in which she worked during the course of the residence observes this fact: “The novel is divided into two narrative lines: the first, what would have happened if, if she hadn’t had me, my mother had moved from Mexico to Barcelona thirty years ago; the second, my experience in the city while I was re-reading Nada, and I put on the pages the people and impressions that appeared over the days”, says the author, who is “impressed” by the cultural offer she encountered: “I had the opportunity to visit Refugi 307, Palau de la Virreina, MACBA, Casa Vicens, Park Güell and the Joan Miró Foundation. Each of these places offered me a different reading of the city”. And she discovered the writing of Jacint Verdaguer: “I had never read him before and having his work at hand (in Vil·la Joana) was a great discovery”.

About the stay, she also values very positively the coexistence with other authors, and sends a message to those who are considering whether or not to do a literary residency: “You should think about the writers who have lived there before. Literature is always a great driving force to create and, sometimes, to discover unsuspected links with a city”.

For more information about the literary residencies in Vil·la Joana,, click this link.