La Jornada: El Aleph Festival seeks to build bridges between science, art and humanities

In a world marked by fragmentation, violence, inequality and misinformation, the tenth edition of El Aleph. Art and Science Festival, which will take place from May 7 to 17, seeks to build bridges between science, art and humanities to confront contemporary complexity from narratives capable of integrating knowledge and opening new forms of perception.

“As never before, we have the need for a different vision, for different narratives, which imply new paradigms and the development of new knowledge in science, but also in the arts, where complementary visions open up,” said José Gordon, science popularizer and curator of El Aleph.

The meeting will bring together 154 activities: 76 are academic and 78 are artistic, through which a key question is posed: how do we tell the world today?, where the question and its multiple answers constitute the axis of this year’s theme: New narratives.

From science, María Soledad Funes, coordinator of Scientific Research at UNAM, pointed out that new narratives are constantly constructed. “Each of the research questions that we think we answer actually opens up many more, and that also implies a constant challenge to the knowledge we have at the moment in which it corresponds and to the technological capabilities.”

Among the themes that are intertwined in the festival are memory, longevity and artificial intelligence. “Many of the activities lead us to think that we are not the center of the universe, and to place ourselves in a correct dimension,” he added.

The program includes the inaugural lecture titled “Music in the Universe and the Dance of Neurons,” by neuroscientist, pathologist and composer Elaine Bearer, as well as the talk “Science and Poetry: The World Illuminated by Wonder,” by poet and essayist Diane Ackerman.

Also notable is the participation of demographer Michel Poulain, who will give the conference “The new narrative of longevity”, and the presence of Gayle Chong Kwan, who will speak about The great establishment (2026), a large-scale sculpture installation and graphic work presented in the Grand Gallery of the National Museum of Scotland.

Other activities include: music, medicine, entropy, which will be taught by Héctor Rasgado Flores; The tango of memory, by researcher and neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, and the multimedia experience The universe on pianoby the musician Abdiel Vázquez and the astrophotographer José Francisco Salgado.

For Rosa Beltrán, coordinator of UNAM Culture, one of the greatest successes of El Aleph is the approach it takes from interconnection and inter-institutionality: “This is the way in which we already have to understand the world, there is no other way.”

In this edition, for the first time, there will be the Aleph Village, which will be set up on the Esplanade de la Espiga, which will be an interactive, centralized and thematic space that will bring together people from the field of science, artistic groups and various publishers who will participate in a mini scientific and humanistic book fair.

Music will be felt with groups such as Ensamble del Mundo, the Mexican Balkan Orkestar, the Ensamble Basasa and the Jazz Orchestra of the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory of Turin. In addition to the multimedia show Sinestesia.

In this tenth edition of ElAleph, its director, Juan Ayala, expressed that the project has shown that science and art “are not opposite poles, they are two languages ​​that intersect to generate more complex, more human and more necessary narratives.”