Fabián Casas and the art of transforming workshops into spaces for reflection and life

“Nomad is a concept. You can be inside your room and never come out. It is the state of availability to move, open, change your mind.” Whoever speaks, with a particular cadence, is Fabian Casaswriter, poet, journalist and, for some time, screenwriter and host of a program on a streaming channel. His literary workshop, called nomadic workshopbrings together a series of people interested not only in writing but also in discussing, reflecting and conversing about art and culture.

Meeting with Clarion in a bar in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Colegiales, he says thator I used to give workshops on Zoom until he was forced during the pandemic. Those classes were recorded, unrecorded and edited by his students. This is how it was born Asymptomatic workshopbook edited by India Ediciones.

This year he began to be in charge of Picnic extraterrestrea series of interviews that gives its name to the channel streaming homonym that are rather relaxed and dilettante talks. His role as a screenwriter reached a milestone this year with The JockeyLuis Ortega’s last filmcritically acclaimed. The writer expanded on all this and more in this talk.

–How did the book come about? It is a book-object, it looks like a notebook

–It is thought like that. We were lucky that Victoria and Eugenia, from India Ediciones, they make physical books in different ways. They put a lot of thought into the format so that it replicates the faculty notes. I wanted to include the power of the students speaking. Uncertainty also captures that spontaneity of making mistakes and collective construction.

–In the classes, topics, authors and works are linked in a constant conversation. Is that a feature of your workshops?

-Yeah. I was learning it from people. When I started, I had no fucking idea. The workshops grew, they diversified and I found ways. No day is the same. They are very unstable. They take the form of the state of availability of each one who comes.

–You usually talk more about tools for emancipation than teaching writing. This comes up a lot in these classes.

–It arises spontaneously and I am available for us to do anything in the workshop. There are no topics that we cannot talk about in class. We try to defeat it on Zoom. Because there was a kind of pressure that we were under the dogma of the pandemic. We were forced to endure that.

–Can writing be taught?

–For me you cannot teach writing. Schemes or groups of power, of tension, can be generated where people can emancipate themselves. The literature is extremely unstable. Luckily. When they ask me what the workshop is about, I say it’s about nothing. The person who still comes is in a state of availability.

–What would you say to a person who wants to write?

–I always tell them that you have to write as if your reader were not going to emerge in the time you live. That frees you. You start writing and you see literature as an end in itself, not as a means. Also don’t care about your taste. In the workshop you have to make a suspension of taste because it obscures what you want to know. What you don’t like says much more about you than what you like.

–Do you feel that the experience of the workshops contributed something to your own writing?

–It didn’t contribute to my writing, it contributed to my entire life. The people who came to the workshops, each with their uniqueness, made my life better. I’m not just a person who writes, I do a lot of things. I have been doing karate for eighteen years. It is something that I do very intensely and I would tell you that sometimes more intense than writing. It helped me be in the present state.

–You studied philosophy. What do you find there that can contribute to literature?

–It is what I study until now. Philosophy is a combination of linguistic structures like stories. I would not dare to say that there is a philosophy that can fully account for the world. In that sense it seems to me that they are fictions.

–The esoteric also appears here, you mention Castaneda, Gourdieff, these authors also summon you.

–I’m interested in everything. I think it’s good to get in and out. You have to enter and exit all things to have a certain distance and use tools but not stay stuck there.

–That movement is also in your non-fiction work, your essays and columns.

-All the time. Apart from now the practice I have of writing scripts, what I like most is that I write with people. I build teams or join in and work collectively thinking of images and ideas. The contribution of everyone else seems enriching to me.

–It is curious because writing sometimes has a lot of individuality.

–For me, literature was always collective, not individual. I always wrote with a lot of people who helped me. It was in a magazine called 18 whiskeyseveryone taught me how to write, also when I do karate I learn from my classmates in the dojo. There is nothing individual that interests me.

–Regarding screenwriting, how was the experience with The Jockey?

–I loved joining Rodolfo Palacios and Luis (Ortega). They were already writing and they let me go in there. I thought it was spectacular. They had lines, they had done the research on the racecourse. I contributed to things that they had already developed. The first production company that was going to finance it left when it read the script. He went through many failures. Luis wanted to make that film and we accompanied him. The film has a lot of freedom. It caught my attention that it had such an impact.

–Do you have other scripts written?

–I have a script written with Victoria Gagliardi, a film called The hedgehogs. Victoria is going to direct it and I love it. Also one with Viggo Mortensen, who is going to direct and record it here but he does not act. I’m starting to write a new movie. And I have script tutoring, I work with people who write and I accompany them in development…

–You are also with your interviews in Picnic ExtraterrestreHow are you with that?

–I don’t like streaming in general, it seems to me like something that engulfs itself. But what I like the most is the production team I have. When I go to record, they make my life better. At first I didn’t want to go. I had written down the idea but when I acted on it, procrastination caught me. The team got me going.

–About current events: How do you see politics and culture?

–I think that there is a hegemonic resurgence of the strong right and that we have to confront it from a place of joy, not playing the victim and trying to interpret what part of that challenges you, what part of that is yours and knowing that from a Aggressive attack towards that is not going to work. There is no revolution that is carried out without laughter. You have to try to understand to see what you can change in those people who are so bad that all they want is to take everything from you. It has to be with joy, it cannot be with seriousness, solemnity, anger. These are a bit of the patterns that this type of people have more. Many opposition politicians also have them. If you analyze the opposition, you cannot help but identify certain structures that are also on the right.

–Solemnity is a little everywhere

–I think that if you don’t build fiction, you don’t come to power. You have to build a fiction. So, the left, if it wants to come to power, has to build a fiction. What happens is that the left considers fiction as a bourgeois and moral gesture. So they never propose it and they have to do it, otherwise they will never get there. I hope they do it.

I came to the workshop because I knew him as a writer, but in reality what attracted me the most was the name: How to make poetry with a car engine? Fabian is faithful to that apothegm that you hear him say: “a technique that helps you write also helps you live.” Perhaps we think that there is something outside that needs to be discovered and yet it is inside you. Thinking about writing from a collective point of view changes you forever. and it impacts your own life.

The workshop in the pandemic It was a refuge at a very particular time. He always talks about TS Eliot: “Everyone in his prison thinks about the key.” In this case our key was that Zoom window.

I went to the workshop for five years and I am always coming back because it is a super inspiring space. It helps you think from an integrity perspective, regarding art and life. The first class I went to talked about The Ignorant Teacher de Ranciere, with the crazy idea that we would emancipate ourselves. I think we emancipated ourselves from a lot of things but not yet from the teacher.

A couple of years before the workshops were set up, I had invited Fabián to go to the Faculty of Psychology to give a talk to the chair of which I am a part. There we met. I am united to him by many things: we are from Boedo, we like Led Zeppelin, we were born the same year, we are from San Lorenzo. I am in the Nomad Workshop since its beginnings, I’ve been there for eight years now, I have the virtue of forgetting every class the moment I leave, which makes me come back to the next with the same enthusiasm as the first day.

During that time I wrote my last three books and began preparing my first novel. One of the things that Fabián says is that what happens in the workshop will be useful to us in the future and it is like this: when I sit down to write a flood of words comes to me that frees me from my bonds.

During the first months of the pandemic, time was warped. Our colleagues in the workshop were hopeless. We knew that Fabián resisted technology. We wanted to help him financially and for him to help us go through hell.

• He was born in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Boedo in 1965.

• He published, among other books, The Lemmings and others (reports, 2005, 2017), Idle (soap opera, 2006, 2017), bonsai trials (2007), Horla City et al. All poetry, 1990-2010 (2010), Tolstoy supremacy (essays, 2013), coconut titans (soap opera, 2015), Bringing it all home again. All trials (2016), Latest poems on Prozac (2019) y Vegetable wrapping paper (2020).

• He was the screenwriter of the film Jauja (2014), directed by Lisandro Alonso and starring Viggo Mortensen, which was presented at the Cannes Film Festival.

• In 2007 he won the prestigious Anna Seghers award in Germany and in 2011 he was chosen by the Guadalajara International Book Fair as one of the authors who guarantee the replacement of the great Latin American writers of the 20th century.