The passion for culture and its ability to establish intellectual relations led Victoria Ocampo in 1916 to start a friendship with the Spanish philosopher Ortega and Gasset visiting Argentina.
Victoria Ocampo was perhaps the most important woman in Argentine culture. He was born on April 7, 1890 in the city of Buenos Aires, in the cradle of an aristocratic family of the time, and probably lived the maximum splendor stage of Argentina, in which the most raised protagonists of our national literature began to appear. But this era with which it is associated and in which he lived does not define it, does not represent it; Victoria always lived several decades advanced.
Juan José Sebreli He once said: “At a time when women wove, they embroidered, they went to Mass with their eyes looking at the ground, Victoria Ocampo wanted to be an actress, wrote plays, bathed on the beaches of Mar del Plata, rode on horseback, danced tangos, smoked, drove cars and, of course, declared atheist.”
Her passion for culture and her ability to establish intellectual relationships took her in 1916 to start a friendship with the Spanish philosopher Ortega and Gasset visiting Argentina. She was shocked and surprised by her eloquence and a link that she always remembered with great admiration was generated, and that remained until the death of the philosopher in 1955.
Ortega, who had founded in 1923 the Magazine of the West in Spain, oriented her for the foundation of the mythical south magazine In 1931, one of the great cultural vehicles of the twentieth century, which gave space for American creators and essayists and was an irreplaceable cultural reference.
This friendship of Ortega with Victoria Ocampo was inherited by her daughter Soledad Ortega who, as Victoria with her projects in Argentina, found another challenge in Spain that was to consolidate her father’s work and institutionalize her intellectual heritage. It was she who founded the Ortega y Gasset Foundation in Spain and Argentina, and enabled the relaunch of the Western magazine that had stopped appearing and she insisted that she was edited again.
Both women walked on parallel trails but on different banks of the Atlantic. His shy initial friendship later carried them to deepen their experiences and to consult each other to continue their cultural projects and not give up. With different temperamental nuances both were avant -garde, bold, maker, innovative, and led size projects in a time not willing to give them leading roles, but they knew how to gain spaces, convinced that their projects deserved to be developed.
Both figures will be addressed on Thursday at the first meeting of the year of the cycle Transatlantic pioneers in men’s time 1930-1970. The magnificent house that Ocampo had been built, today of the National Arts Fund will house this conversation organized by the Ortega y Gasset Argentina Foundation and the Spain Cultural Center in Buenos Aires.
With the aim of publicizing their trajectory as makers of culture and being a source of inspiration, the cycle travels the path of 8 Argentine and Spanish women with an incidence on both banks of the Atlantic.
This meeting will take place April 3 at 6:00 p.m. at Casa Victoria Ocampo (Rufino de Elizalde 2831).
Director of the Ortega y Gasset Argentina Foundation
Source: Ambito
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