Puchi Award announces its first edition winners
| Duration: | 2 hours |
The jury has selected 2 titles from a total of 600 submissions presented to the open call.
Last March, a jury composed of Manuel Borrás (founder member and publisher at Pre-Textos), Nick Currie (a.k.a. Momus, Scottish singer, composer and writer), and representatives from La Casa Encendida and Fulgencio Pimentel has chosen the winning project amongst more than 600 submissions. After months of hard work making the projects into actual books, the winners of the first edition of the I Puchi Award can be announced.
The winner of the I Puchi Award is J+K, by John Pham (Saigon, 1974). J+K is a comic enhanced with many extra contents and aimed to readers of all ages. Halfway between Peanuts and Seinfeld, J+K is also an art object itself that celebrates pop culture and its physical expressions —magazines, vinyl, videogames— and narrates the anticlimatic adventures of two orphan little girls in a shopping mall. Born by the conjunction of contemporary anxiety and a society too focused in consumerism, J+K celebrates values as friendship and leads to empathy, laughter and existential reflection, not renouncing to joy and lightness. John Pham started experimenting with the limits of printed object in 2000 in his magazine Epoxy, kind of a fanzine-inside-a-fanzine, a fractal artifact risographed and assembled by hand. In 2006, he was featured in the cover of Kramers Ergot, the most relevant comics anthology in the last two decades. Besides his own magazine, Pham has drawn two volumes of the series Sublife, published in the USA by Fantagraphics Books. For the second volume he was nominated to the Ignatz Awards as best artist, best series and best comic.
Extraordinarily, the jury decided to award also a Special Prize of the Jury to Setras, by the artist Berio Molina (A Fonsagrada, 1979). Halfway into poetry and scientific assay, Setras is a study on the sound of caligraphy from points of view apparently so far from each other as physics, action art, absurd and free association of ideas. Berio Molina works in the field of sound art. He has been member of different collectives as Colectivo de performances Flexo, Colectivo de paisajes sonoros y auralidad aumentada Escoitar.org, Colectivo de creación escénica áIntemperie and Fato bicéfalo Ohn. Together with Isaac Cordal coordinates Netlabel Alg-a, an online label that publishes experimental audio, and was part of the orgazination of IFI festival. Since 1999 he has exhibited his work all around the world: Tehran, Sarajevo, Lima, Montevideo... Setras is his first work.
This extraordinary prize will be possible thanks to the support of Fundación Mayeusis, a non profit organization declared to be of Galician and cultural interest, revitalizing the artistic and musical scene of cities as Vigo and Pontevedra during the last 30 years.
Both books will be presented to the audience next October 25th in La Casa Encendida, in a meeting with the artists. The band Elías e Ignacio will perform on stage to conclude the meeting. As they say: “Elías e Ignacio are Elías and Ignacio. They do Spanish music. The like the latest by Joaquín Sabina and get the most out of the good times with their friends. Next year they will release their first album, but the truth is that they said the same last year. They die into purity and art”.
The call for submissions for the Puchi Awards 2018 will be open on October 25th.
