Opening of the Gabriel García Márquez Hall at the Museum of the Caribbean

Tuesday, 27 October 2009 00:00

On November 5, 2009, the Museum of the Caribbean will inaugurate a new hall dedicated to Gabriel García Márquez. The hall will be venue for the regional launching of the Nobel Prize winner’s biography in Spanish.

These two important events, which are organized by the Museum of the Caribbean, Ramdom House Mondadori, and Ecopetrol, will be held beginning at 6:00 p.m.at Barranquilla’s Cultural Park of the Caribbean Plaza.

The first part of the event is to be a panel with the participation of:

• Gerald Martín, the biography’s author,
  
• Jaime Abello Banfi, director of the New Ibero-American Journalism Foundation;
  
• Gustavo Bell Lemus, director of Barranquilla’s El Heraldo journal;
  
• Jaime García Márquez;
  
• Heriberto Fiorillo, director of La Cueva Foundation,
  
• Ernesto McCausland, renowned journalist.

Random House Mondadori Publishing House will launch Gabriel García Márquez, Una Vida [Gabriel García Másquez: A Life] in the course of the panel. The official opening of the hall devoted to the Colombian writer will follow.

It is located on the sixth floor of the Museum of the Caribbean and its assembly was made possible with the backing of it’s sponsor, Ecopetrol. This space pays homage to the 1982 Nobel Prize winner’s strong ties to the Colombian Caribbean region.

The Gabriel García Márquez Hall

In the Gabo Hall, visitors can take a tour of magical realism and the imagination and thoughts of Gabriel García Márquez and become acquainted with the sources of his inspiration.

The hall recreates the environment where Gabriel García Márquez began his career as a journalist. Its inspiration comes from the newsroom of a Caribbean region newspaper during the fifties. The typewriter, telegraph, photos, objects, documents, articles, letters seem to be waiting for the writer to appear. The visitor enters the universe of a creator.

Beyond the archaeological reconstruction of the newsroom where the writer worked, another level of narration occurs when, all of a sudden, the window of the hall is closed, revealing a dimension of the author´s imaginary.

“It is the lyrical universe of Gabriel García Márquez, the product of the magical Caribbean culture that suddenly comes to life surprising the visitor”, points out Marcello Dantas, the hall’s museologist.

By means of interactive projections on the work table, the walls, and other objects, the characters of his work show up, giving life to the writer's imagination and to the Caribbean region that permeates his works to such a large extent.

The visitor literally enters the works of Gabo, wanders in his imagination and thoughts and gets to know his inspiration until, slowly, the hall returns to its state of contemplation, of waiting.