Alex Saum-Pascual Brings Digital Poetry to the Alhambra

BCNM faculty member Alex Saum-Pascual, Associate Professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Spanish & Portuguese, recently participated in the inaugural edition of cultur_ALH, the International Meeting of Literary Culture of the Alhambra.

Alex led a workshop on digital literature and, alongside artist Mario Santamaría, presented their latest collaborative work, Traceroute Poems, segundo viaje, a site-specific poetic performance exploring the invisible infrastructures that connect physical and digital worlds.

Traceroute Poems, segundo viaje was staged on Saturday, October 4, in the Plaza de los Aljibes at the Alhambra. The project extends the pair’s earlier 2024 collaboration tracing "the path of light through fiber-optic cabling between Berkeley and Bergen." In this new iteration, their "journey of light and information" linked the Natural History Museum of Bergen with the Alhambra’s web server, creating a poetic dialogue between data transmission and the Alhambra’s historic flows of water and energy.

Through this performance, Alex and Mario examined how contemporary infrastructures, including digital networks, energy systems, and fiber-optic cables, resonate with the architectural and material networks that have sustained the Alhambra for centuries.

cultur_ALH, coordinated by Ana Gallego Cuiñas and Patricia Escalona, brought together international figures such as Salman Rushdie, Mariana Enríquez, Camila Sosa Villada, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Yung Beef for a program that merged literature, performance, and technology in Granada’s most emblematic cultural spaces.

Check out video of Alex's presentation here.