The rector of the UB, Joan Guàrdia, and the director of the Joan Brossa UB Chair Glòria Bordons, together with the Dean of the Faculty of Education Roser Boix and the president of the Joan Brossa Foundation, Vicenç Altaió, have presented, on Monday, September 5 at 5 p.m., in the Aula Magna of the University of Barcelona, the Joan Brossa Chair, launched by the Joan Brossa Foundation.

This chair is affiliated at the Faculty of Education, and led by the professor of Catalan Philology Glòria Bordons, member of the Department of Linguistic and Literary Education, and Teaching and Learning of Experimental Sciences and Mathematics, and also the vice-president for Studies at the Joan Brossa Foundation and sponsor of the entity.  Furthermore, and due to the interdisciplinarity of the poet to whom the chair is dedicated, the monitoring committee will feature Eva Figueras, lecturer at the Department of Visual Arts and Design of the Faculty of Fine Arts, and Jordi Marrugat, lecturer at the Department of Catalan Philology and General Linguistics of the Faculty of Philology and Communication. On behalf of the Joan Brossa Foundation will be Maria Canelles, director of visual arts at the Joan Brossa Foundation’s Free Arts Centre, and March Chronet, director of performing arts at Matrix Centre.

Bordons noted that “the existence of a university chair under the name of Joan Brossa would be a way to give prestige to everything we have done to date in the Foundation; and it will enable having communication for research and dissemination in the several fields related to Brossa”.

The Chair’s objectives are to promote research, using the Brossa archive at MACBA as a source; to disseminate Brossa’s works and stimulate new editions that provoke new perspectives on his work; to make his work known in all professional fields as a tool for reflection and empowerment, and to advise on the works of his poetry stage that can be performed at the Joan Brossa Foundation’s theatre.

Joan Brossa (Barcelona, 1919-1998), poet in the broadest sense of the word, wrote poetry in traditional stanzas, daily poetry (also called antipoetry, due to its themes and prosaic form), prose, plays and film scripts. He also experimented with visual poetry, objects, installations and corporeal poems. For Brossa, there were neither genders nor frontiers in the arts.  

He began his career in the 1940s with Josep Vicenç Foix, Joan Miró and Joan Prats. He co-founded the magazines Algol, in 1947, and Dau al Set, in 1948, and collaborated assiduously with other artists. Despite his intense activity from the outset, it was not until 1970 that he began to be known from a literary point of view thanks to the publication of Poesia rasa.

In 1986 the first anthological exhibition of his work was inaugurated at the Joan Miró Foundation, "Joan Brossa o les paraules són les coses". From that moment on, he established himself as one of the leading figures in contemporary Catalan literature and art.