Prince of Asturias Awards 1981–2014. Speeches

8 O viedo | C ampoamor T heatre | management models in consonance with the concept of personal development, participation and the well-being of employees, harmonising the manifold interests of the entrepreneurial world. He regards his work as being directed toward serving others; challenges must be overcome without losing heart; all of which fits together in an often-expressed idea of his, namely that “culture must be promoted if living in peace is what we want”. Photography, which has acquired such great importance in today’s world of communication and which was for so long considered as painting’s poorer relative, is also, for those who feel its calling or participate as spectators, a true art, and by no means a minor one. For this reason, it is only right that the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts be granted, for the first time, to a photographer, the Brazilian Sebastião Salgado. His camera captures and holds fast the patina of time with aesthetic perfection and deep sensitivity, and presents us with a beautiful blue planet that is lacerated by injustice. In this way, he makes us more aware of reality and increases our feeling of human solidarity with humble peasants, miners, sailors, children and old people of the most forgotten races and peoples and from the most diverse countries, who are portrayed in his photographs. Sebastião Salgado has made the entire world his homeland. His expressive silence has the strength of authenticity, and manages to transform what he humbly calls “social photography” into heart-rending poetry that moves and cries out to us. In that endless adventure to discover the secrets of Creation, physics plays a particularly important role today, because of technological needs and spectacular industrial development, which needs to delve further into research about the non-visible world, the elementary particles in which life is rooted, if it is to continue advancing. Focused on one of these so-called “building blocks of the universe”, the electron, which is the basis for many advances we enjoy today, is the work of two important Spanish physicists, Pedro Miguel Echenique Landiríbar, Professor of Condensed Matter Physics at the University of the Basque Country, and Emilio Méndez Pérez, Professor of the same subject at New York University. The capacity for work of these two scientists and the enthusiasm with which they apply themselves to their careers each day inspire admiration for their intellectual curiosity, whose results have practical applications for actual progress and eloquently express the indispensable interplay between basic and applied science. We join in their concern for the need to improve grant programmes for research and to encourage society to put its best resources toward backing the talents that venture out onto the paths of creativity and innovation. This is especially true for our younger scientists, with their rigorous training and growing prestige, who guarantee our future in an increasingly specialised and competitive world, since, as Jovellanos put it, “only the peoples who study Nature can be free, and, by looking out at the world, they become wiser and more prosperous.” The Prince of Asturias Award for Literature has been granted this year to the writer Francisco Ayala, for his liberal and critical spirit, his independence and his sound mastery, his attempts to delve deeper into the human condition and his love of freedom, all of which he has generously moulded into innumerable essays, works of fiction, articles and memoirs. Standing out in Ayala’s valuable body of work is his lucid personality, restless and young in spite of an admirable maturity, and covering such varied topics as exile and the cinema, Don Quixote and the social sciences, dreams and technology, up-to-the-minute journalism and timeless reflections, and his ever-present personal and subtle vision of Spain and the Spanish. We also find in his work a rare balance between tradition and modernity, a felicitous harmony “Our Laureates invite us to continue believing in the noblest values of humanity, because, as one of them has pointed out, without unity among persons, without shared passion —that is to say, without compassion— humanity would have no reason to exist.” 23 rd O ctober 1998