On Thursday, June 23, the last verdict of the jury of the Princess of Asturias Awards 2022. Shigeru Ban was recognized with the Concord Award for providing rapid responses in the form of shelters and temporary housing in extreme situations. Along with him, there will be 10 men and women awarded at the award ceremony that, like every year, will take place in the fall in Oviedo. Meet them!
Fine Arts
Carmen Linares and Maria Pages
Converted both into two of the most important figures of flamenco of recent decades, in Carmen Linares and María Pagés converges the spirit of several generations that, from the respect for tradition and the depth of the roots of flamenco, have known how to modernize and adapt its essence to the contemporary world, elevating it, even more if fits, to the category of universal art.
With their work, both have opened paths of repercussion not only artistic but also social and have become example of work, talent and dedication for future generations. This has been considered by the jury of the Princess of Asturias Awards.
Communication and Humanities
adam micnik
Born in Warsaw, Adam Michnik studied history at the university in the Polish capital, where he had problems for participating in protests. imprisoned several times from the XNUMXs, he was one of the founders of the KOR movement and a member of the Solidarity union. A few years later, he became a deputy and founded the independent newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, of which he remains editor-in-chief.
Michnik is one of the best known and most prominent human rights defenders in Poland. He is considered one of the key figures in the recovery of democracy in the country. His fight for human rights and dialogue landed him in the prisons of the Polish communist regime. But this did not stop him from giving up his firm opposition to the dictatorship or seeking reconciliation among his fellow citizens.
Social sciences
Eduardo Matos Moctezuma
Born in Mexico City, Eduardo Matos Moctezuma graduated in Archeology at the National School of Anthropology and History. He also obtained a master's degree in Anthropological Sciences with a specialty in Archeology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
scholar and promoter of the Mexican pre-Hispanic world, as well as a great promoter of this field of knowledge, has developed his fieldwork in archaeological sites such as Comalcalco, Tepeapulco, Bonampak, Teotihuacán, Cholula, Tula, Tlatelolco and Tenochtitlán, among others. Among the most relevant projects that he has directed are the comprehensive investigation of pre-Hispanic, colonial and modern Tula, which he directed in the 1978s; Teotihuacán, where he excavated the Pyramid of the Sun and founded the Museum of Teotihuacan Culture and the Center for Teotihuacan Studies, and the city of Tenochtitlán, its sacred precinct and the Great Temple, whose discovery and project he coordinated from its beginnings in XNUMX.
Letters
Juan Antonio Mayorga Ruano
Recognized as one of the most outstanding playwrights of the current theater scene, In 1993, Juan Antonio Mayorga, from Madrid, founded the theater writing group El Astillero. A year later, the first adaptation of one of his texts, Másash, directed by Adolfo Simón, was premiered in the Cuarta Pared theater in Madrid. In 2011 he founded the company La Loca de la Casa, with which he staged in 2012 his play La lengua en pieces.
With his creations, in which critics have found references to the theater of Tom Stoppard, David Hare or Harold Pinter, he seeks to confront the public with reality through conflict, challenging the convictions, sensitivity and point of view of the spectator, without evading the affairs of the political and social news.
Sports
Refugee Olympic Foundation and Refugee Olympic Team
The Refugee Olympic Foundation and the Refugee Olympic Team, created by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), aim to be "a symbol of hope for all refugees of the world', to raise awareness of one of the most important crises facing the international community and to use the sport as a way for humanitarian aid, cooperation and development of people affected by conflicts at the international level.
International cooperation
Ellen Patricia MacArthur
Professional sailor, the English Ellen Patricia MacArthur made history by completing the around the world solo fastest made by any sailor. Since 2003, he has been helping young people with cancer to overcome their problems through navigation. And in 2010 she created the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a non-profit organization that aims to change the production and consumption habits of the world economy.
The Foundation works to change the current paradigm of production and consumption through the use of resources based on the reduction, reuse and recycling of materials in a sustainable way. Its ability to promote alliances with governments, companies, scientific institutions and civil society has contributed to forging the first major international agreement that will be legally binding against plastic pollution.
Scientific and technical research
Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Demis Hassabis
Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio are considered the fathers of an essential technique of artificial intelligence, the deep learning or deep learning. This is based on the use of neural networks that aim to mimic the functioning of the human brain. How? Using algorithms that convert the biological process of learning into mathematical sequences.
Demis Hassabis is CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, one of the world's largest AI research companies. Hassabis has created with DeepMind a neural network model that combines the capabilities of an artificial neural network with the algorithmic power of a programmable computer.
Concord
Shigeru Ban
Shigeru Ban spent his childhood and adolescence in his native Japan, convinced that carpentry would be his trade. Soon, however, he awakened his vocation for architecture and moved to the United States to train as a designer. In 1995 he was appointed adviser to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and founded Voluntary Architect's Network (VAN), an NGO to transform the concept of temporary housing for emergency situations.
Considered the great activist of architecture by the specialized press, Shigeru Ban has achieved international prestige for being able to provide quick and effective responses in the form of shelters and temporary housing to extreme and devastating situations caused mostly by natural disasters.
Do you like to meet the winners of the Princess of Asturias Awards? Do you usually follow the delivery ceremony?