Faced with the current epidemiological situation, the Buenos Aires International Book Fair, that every year takes place between April and May, está pensando “en un plan B” de cara a la inminente postergación de su edición presencial.

As it transpired and despite permanent dialogue with the authorities of the La Rural property, los organizadores están ajustándose a las “pequeñas certezas que vayamos teniendo” para que este 2021 el evento pueda realizarse “de manera presencial en el segundo semestre”, held Alejandro Vaccaro, interim president of the El Libro Foundation.

In a scenario dominated by the pandemic and distancing measures, the announcement of the cancellation of the face-to-face edition of the Buenos Aires International Book Fair originally scheduled for April was an expected event.

“Las autoridades de salud no autorizarían una feria de estas características”, the interim president of the Fundación el Libro tells Télam, Alejandro Vaccaro, after the expired term of María Teresa Carbano. “Nosotros tampoco expondríamos a los lectores en esta situación sanitaria que está viviendo el mundo”, holds.

Used to having 50.000 visits in a day, the organizers of the Buenos Aires Book Fair find it impossible to apply restrictions on entry: “el aforo para ingresar a la feria se descarta, nos parece imposible”, assures Vaccaro, who also chairs the Argentine Society of Writers (SADE), he is a writer, collector and one of the biographers of Jorge Luis Borges.

Every year, like other great fairs in the world, FIL has invited a delegation of writers of one nationality who arrive to show a geographical clipping of what is being written. This year the guest city is Havana. From the cultural delegation of the Cuban capital, they assured that they will be 60 the writers they would bring to FIL, which would imply a great logistical work that would not be solved in just a couple of months to mobilize that amount of people.

To the Cuban delegation should be added the movement of 100 invited professionals from abroad, which implies the hiring of hotels, transfers and other aspects for which the Foundation works for a whole year, a logistics that in this case would have to be resolved in a shorter time frame and with the additional restrictions imposed by the pandemic.

Last year, due to the health emergency that forced these major events to reconfigure in record times, the Fair had to cancel its face-to-face edition and chose to hold a reduced virtual edition that included courses and conferences (even a program on Public TV) and that experience was very good, “sobre todo los cursos tuvieron mucho éxito”, says the acting president.

A Vaccaro le parece que la modalidad “híbrida” (word he doesn't like to use, because it does not fit reality) it could work, but provided that the strong is the face-to-face and that the virtual is only a complement. And in that sense, holds: “Estamos abiertos a cualquier modalidad, while uncertainty continues to challenge us: we think of a plan B, a plan C… We are attentive to all the possibilities of overcoming this pandemic and the Rural authorities know, without discrediting the others, que nuestra Feria es la más importante del país”. (TELAM)