Establishing a Relational Fraternity

In 2026, the Trobades & Premis Mediterranis Albert Camus will return to Menorca, staying true to our calling to be a space where critical thought and contemporary creation come together.

This season revolves around a concept we believe must urgently be reclaimed –and at the same time reimagined: fraternity. Rather than approaching it as a personal, abstract or rhetorical value, we want to activate it as an ethical, collective and everyday bond—one capable of bringing us together in an age defined by individuality and fragmentation.

We will explore this idea and redefine it together as we celebrate our tenth edition. Ten years in which all of us—team, guests, audiences and institutions—have built this Camusian home. Ten years spent weaving bonds and nurturing a spirit of community. Ten years guided by Camus’s light: to understand ourselves more deeply, to see others more clearly, and to forge a stronger sense of “us,” embracing the essence of Camus’s rebellion: “I rebel, therefore we are.”

We are aware that the term fraternity carries the weight of colonial history, nationalism and patriarchy. This is why it feels essential to reframe it for the 21st century, explicitly embracing sorority and other forms of connection that unite us. We therefore propose envisioning, instead of an exclusive fraternity, an ethic of responsibility towards the other. We wish to awaken in ourselves a form of fraternity that is not universalist but relational, shaped by differences and frictions—as Édouard Glissant envisioned. Only then can we rewrite our worlds and relearn how to live with the world in its broadest sense: not only with other human beings, but also with nature, with dead languages, with those who are no longer here.

The quiet solidarity Camus called for invites us to imagine a poetics of connection, of care, of recognizing each other’s vulnerability—to restore fraternity as an ethical commitment to see and support the other, whoever they may be, in their dignity and fragility. This is a bond without a shared identity but grounded in a shared responsibility: to stand together against injustice, to create meaning together without erasing difference.

In this tenth edition, we invoke a fraternity that no longer needs nations or flags. A fraternity without borders, without uniforms, without exclusions. A fraternity that welcomes silenced voices, absent bodies, broken languages. A fraternity as a commitment to hold together what has been separated, torn apart, so that our longing may endure, both to take flight anew and to return, once again, here, to Menorca.

This conversation focuses on the thought of Édouard Glissant, and above all on how to articulate and redefine fraternity in postcolonial and contemporary terms.