Dates
May 8, 2025
When?
Soon
Link
To know more

On Thursday, May 8 , at 7:00 p.m., in the Auditorium of the Palencia Public Library , the versatile artist Chema Prieto invites us to participate in his poetry performance , "The Cemetery of Poetry," which will feature poets Javier Estévez, Dudu Fernández, Luis Javier Pinar, and Sara Tovar . He will also feature painter Inés Martínez .

The name chosen by Cantabrian artist Chema Prieto for this creation may be surprising, as the word cemetery may evoke death and negativity. But the artist's intention is quite different. The word "cemetery" comes from the Greek koimenterion , meaning bedroom. In ancient times, they were called necropolis, a word of the same origin that means city of the dead. With the rise of the Christian belief that death is merely a transition, and that when a person dies, they are as if asleep, a place was needed to transition from sleep to resurrection.

For some time now, Chema Prieto, a versatile visual artist, has been developing projects related to the brevity of life and the proximity of death, creating highly expressive vanitas that represent this reality.

In some of his works, he had the idea of involving poets, even creating original poems that he presented alongside Prieto's photocompositions. It was these kinds of events that made him imagine a place where original poems could be stored and remain "dormant" until a future "resurrection."

He found an antique piece of furniture in an antique shop that could serve this purpose. It was a metal filing cabinet, with a capacity for more than 500 index cards, originally used to store the supplier and customer cards of an old drugstore in Santander. It has several truly special drawers and spaces, and they could be the ones to house these poems. He restored it, prepared it for this purpose, and christened it the "poetry cemetery," for him a bedroom where the texts would await the day they could awaken from their slumber and find the light again.

To complete his creation, he conceived a "guestbook" where people involved in culture in general could express their influence in the form of phrases, drawings, paintings, and photographs, to accompany the poems and all contribute to enriching the art container.

To participate in the deposit of a work, poets must write a text in their own handwriting, which they will place on one of the original paper cards in the filing cabinet. It is a kind of ceremonial ritual that celebrates the authors' artistic creation. It currently houses around one hundred poetic texts of different styles and generations. The guestbook lists around thirty artists who have left behind veritable micro-works that are worth seeing and admiring. Visitors will then be given a close-up look at the magnificent filing cabinet, its spaces, and the works it contains.

Address and map location

  • Postal address Biblioteca Pública de Palencia - C/ Eduardo Dato, 4. municipality of Palencia . NaN. Palencia