Until May 31 all Berliners and visitors could see a wonderful exhibition on Latin American cultural magazines at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institüt from Berlin.
This exhibition is a milestone for a project of digitization of Latin American magazines that has been going on since 2013. Its result can be seen here.
The magazines were published between 1860 and 1930 and are transdisciplinar. The exhibition highlighted some of their topics or features: women sections, the evolution of the image throughout the years, and the international transferences: journalists collaborating in magazines from different countries, cross-national concerns, magazines from one country talking about events happening in another country…
This cross-national predisposition seems to leave a gap for Philippine magazines in Spanish, which at that time were rather immersed in a Latin American virtual (or paper) communitiy. Events such as the press repercusion of the 1905 celebrations of the third centenary of the publication of Don Quixote in Latin America or the presence of Latin American poetry in the weekly Libertas since 1899 are a proof of it.
Ricarda Musser, the leader of the project and director of the library and the exhibition, has also underlined the presence of Philippine materials within their collections, for instance, of Filipino zarzuelas/ sarswelas.