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- DIALOGS
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DIALOG WITH ANDREA GUMES
If you’re anything like us, you’re never without your trusted podcast while working or cooking, so you’ve surely heard the name Andrea Gumes. Andrea, a cultural journalist, is at the helm of Ciberlocutorio and the daily cultural current events program Tardeo from Radio Primavera Sound. What’s more, thanks to her ‘don’t stop til you drop’ personality, Andrea gifts us with weekly advice via the horoscopes she writes for Vogue.
Today we enjoy an extended chat with Andrea about culture, astrology and stress.
Just taking a glance at your CV, we get the feeling that you’re a one-woman show/jack of all trades that likes to stay active and has a hard time saying no to plans. Are we close?
Absolutely! Not only is it hard for me to say no, I’m a curious person, so my schedule fills up quickly and then I find myself thinking “what am I doing here on a Saturday, presenting a theater act at this event, when I could be at home?” It’s at those times when you realize that you don’t always have to say yes to everything, but that said, I just can’t help it.
Tardeo and Ciberlocutorio are perhaps the channels through which most people have found you. How did the opportunity to host two podcasts come about?
By chance. The opportunity to do Ciberlocutorio was through Alicia Álvarez, a music journalist. She was initially in charge of the Radio Primavera Sound project. Alicia has a good eye so she started writing to people who are active on Twitter that she thought would be a good fit for the project, even if they’d never done radio before.
That’s how she got in contact with Anna Pacheco and myself. We had worked together in college and we’re good friends, and we’d worked on joint projects before, so we set to working preparing a project and presented it to Alicia. So that’s how Ciberlocutorio was started, at a time when Podcasts didn't exist in Spain. They were all made in the U.S. and here we called them “internet programs,” how about that!
And Tardeo, well that really was by chance. I came from the marketing world, and I happened to be unemployed at the time as I’d left my job because of anxiety. At the time I worked in audiovisual production and I really liked editing videos. In that moment Radio Primavera Sound needed someone to help with video editing, so in that case I really was a jack of all trades! Everything from holding cameras, recording videos, editing, creating social media bits... And suddenly it was the summer and the person who did the afternoon show left and I my name was brought up.
I had never considered doing radio, I had interned with Cadena Ser, but I never seriously thought about it. I looked at it as a good opportunity and ever since, every afternoon!
After so many seasons, do you still get nervous for that “you’re on air” moment?
I still get nervous, I won’t deny it. Perhaps I’m most comfortable with Tardeo since I know the collaborators who visit and they’re my friends, so it’s easier. But I do get quite nervous when interviewing people I admire. I get overwhelmed thinking about interviewing a person whose book I really liked. Or, for example, the other day we had a discussion about suicide and I was so nervous wondering whether people were comfortable or if things were being misinterpreted.
We want to thank you for pioneering spaces for women that deal with topics of interest and current events for women. However, has creating so much content (and about current events) ever gotten to be too much?
Every week I have a teary moment in the office! (she laughs). It's easy to complain, but honestly, working on a professional podcast and getting paid to do it, I’m very lucky. There’s a lot of work that goes into it behind the scenes, but I’m happy. The thing is, my free time, one way or another, is always related to Tardeo and Ciberlocutorio. I read books, watch movies, go to the theater, but I’m always thinking about interview topics and future content for programs.
My day-to-day life is my work. For example, I can’t spend too much time away from Twitter, or even when I get together with friends, I’m always taking note of our topics of conversation for future programs. So yes, it is exhausting. Some Thursdays, instead of going to the theater, I just want to go out for beers with my friends and not talk about anything related to work, I do want that too.
Another side to you is that you write horoscopes for Vogue. What got you started in astrology?
I got into astrology during that same period of change, when I was jobless. I had an identity crisis, and since I’d always been curious about the topic because of horoscopes, I searched for a school that taught psychological astrology and I signed up. I ended up loving it!
At the time, in 2018, I was with the editor of Vice, and I told her I was taking a course in astrology and she suggested I write the weekly horoscopes in a laid-back millennial tone of voice. Astrology was blowing up in the United States and the horoscopes page was the most visited. It was crazy! And so, from there to Vogue!
We’re curious about the process, can you tell us more?
It’s something that’s hard to explain. Every month you have to look at how the planets are arranged and then, depending on how they are aligned with the stars or their movements, adapt them. Each sign isn’t a specific personality, it has to do with how we react in one way or another. The planets don’t have any effect on use, but rather it’s about the consequences. When something happens to Aries, they all react in a specific, similar way. It's like that with all the signs. In certain situations, there are similarities in how we act or respond.