The festival
FotoLimo (landlimo means border in Esperanto) is a cross-border festival of photography and visual arts whose main driving force is the concept of borders, understood in its broadest sense. The festival takes place between the towns of Cerbère and Portbou during the second half of September.
With a background of five consecutive editions, the objective of the festival continues to be to promote artistic creation, education, and research around the multiple manifestations of the border, approached from fields as diverse as migration, gender, body, social fractures or landscape, always from a creative and transformative perspective.
In this context, FotoLimo presents itself with the particularity of being the only European-wide cross-border photography and visual arts festival to be held simultaneously in a double location around the French-Catalan border.
Through the development of an interdisciplinary high-quality program managed by a team with both a social and an artistic background, the festival integrates exhibitions, screenings, conferences and workshops by both consolidated and emerging authors, with the aim of offering a space for reflection for all kinds of audiences, and with the objective of generating new tools and perspectives in order to conceive the border as a space of bond, not of separation.
Why at the border?
FotoLimo takes place in Cerbère and Portbou, towns with a great symbolic charge for being the closest ones to the Franco-Catalan border. Possessors of an exceptional cultural heritage, both have had, along history, well defined roles, standing out for being a source of economic wealth thanks to the railway station dedicated the transportation of goods, but also because of nowadays decrease in socioeconomic activity.
“La Retirada”, an episode that explains the massive exile of 475,000 republicans who crossed the Pyrenees after the end of the Civil War in 1939, or Walter Benjamin’s death in Portbou on September 26, 1940 when crossing the border while fleeing from Nazism, are a clear example.
Given the characteristics and the great historical and cultural symbolism of these towns, FotoLimo has found in this place the ideal framework to think about borders from a polyhedral perspective. Beyond the cultural wealth that the content of the festival generates, we want to insist on the added value that the formalization of this initiative brings in a space where the concept of border becomes an undisputed pillar in the identity of its inhabitants, both in the geographic and the emotional fields.
On the other hand, the objective of the festival is to put this value on the table, stimulating the links between both municipalities starting from the revitalization of the economy and the cultural offer of the region, and favoring dialogue between the two sides of the border.