DIALOGUE WITH ANDREA GUMES

If, like us, you're always listening to a podcast while you work or cook, you're sure to have heard of Andrea Gumes. She's a cultural journalist and the person in charge of leading Ciberlocutorio and the daily cultural news programme, Tardeo on Radio Primavera Sound . In addition, thanks to her hyperactivity, Andrea gives us weekly advice through the horoscopes she writes for Vogue.

Today we talked at length with Andrea about culture, astrology and stress.

If we look at your CV, we can see that you are a one-woman band who likes to be active and who finds it hard to say no to a plan. Are we right?

Absolutely! Not only do I have a hard time saying no, but I'm also very curious and that's what makes my schedule fill up and then I think, what am I doing today, Saturday, at this event presenting a theatre act when I could be at home? It's in those moments that you realise that you don't always have to say yes to everything, but even so, I can't help it.

Tardeo and Ciberlocutorio are perhaps the channels through which most people have come to know you. How did the opportunity to lead two podcasts come about?

By chance. The opportunity to start Ciberlocutorio came through Alicia Álvarez, a music journalist who was initially in charge of the Radio Primavera Sound project. Alicia had a very good eye and started writing to people who were very active on Twitter and who she thought could be a good fit for the project, even though they had never done radio before.

That's how Anna Pacheco and I got in touch. We had both worked together at university and we are very good friends, and we had also had some projects together, so we prepared a project and presented it to Alicia. And that's how Ciberlocutorio was born, at a time when there were no podcasts in Spain. They were made in the United States and here they were called "internet programs", imagine!

And then Tardeo , yes, it was by chance. I came from the world of advertising, and I was unemployed at that time, because I had left work due to anxiety. At that time I was doing audiovisual production and I really liked editing videos and right at that time Radio Primavera Sound needed someone to help them with video editing. So I was a one-woman band! From carrying cameras, recording videos, editing, making pieces for social networks... And then summer came and the person in charge of the afternoon programme left and they proposed it to me.

I had never thought about doing radio, I had done internships at Cadena Ser, but I had never thought about it. I saw it as an opportunity and since then, every afternoon!

After so many seasons, does the moment of being “on air” still impress you?

I still get nervous, I won't lie to you. Maybe Tardeo is the one I'm most comfortable with, because when I have collaborators who I know and are friends, it's easier. But I get very nervous when it comes to interviews with people I admire. I'm impressed when I think that I'm going to interview a person whose book I really liked. Or for example, the other day we had a discussion about suicide and I was really nervous thinking that everyone would be comfortable or that nothing would be misinterpreted.

We can only thank you for leading spaces for women that deal with current issues of interest to us. But, has creating so much (and current) content ever led you to collapse?

Every week there is a tearful moment in the office! (laughs) It's easy to complain, but the truth is that working on a professional podcast and getting paid for it is already a lot. There's a lot of work behind it, but I'm happy. The thing is that my free time, in some way, is focused on Tardeo and Ciberlocutorio . I read books, watch movies or go to the theater, always thinking about interviewable topics and future content for the programs.

My day-to-day life is all about work. For example, I can't afford to spend too much time away from Twitter, or even when I meet up with my friends, I'm always thinking about what we're going to talk about for future shows. But yes, that's exhausting. There are Thursdays when instead of going to the theatre I feel like hanging out with my friends without talking about anything work-related, which I also feel like doing.

Another of your careers is writing horoscopes for Vogue. What led you to choose astrology?

Astrology also came to me at this time of change, when I was unemployed. I had an identity crisis and as I had always been curious about the subject of horoscopes, I looked for a school where they did psychological astrology and signed up. I loved it!

At that very moment, in 2018, I met the editor of Vice, and I told her that I was taking an astrology course and she suggested that I write weekly horoscopes with a more casual and millennial tone, since in the United States there was a boom in astrology and the horoscopes page was the most visited. That was crazy! And lo and behold, from there, to Vogue !

We are very curious, can you tell us more about this process?

It's something that I find very difficult to do. You have to look at the planets each month and how they are positioned and, based on the alignments of the stars or the movements, adapt them. It's not that each sign is a specific personality, but that we react in one way or another. The planets don't have an effect on us, but rather they are consequences. If something happens to Aries, they react in a certain, similar way. And so it is with all the signs. In certain situations, there are similarities in the ways in which you face or respond to them.