Reproducimos un artículo aparecido en el último BCN Week (13/11/08) y enviado por Javi.
Toca varios aspectos: el trabajo de los Martinez y el rol del graffitti, la especulación y supervivencia de tod*s en esta Barcelona, el [email protected] y el festival [email protected], el rol de niu en este festival (legitimando la masacre en el barrio), la resistencia como camino y necesidad casi moral en esta ciudad, el redescubrimiento de nosotr*s mism*s y del "otro"...
la versión en castellano: Download Los Martínez_[es]_bcnweek
G4 SUMMIT
Graffiti, Guns, Globalization and Ganas
by Simon Friel
If you ask somebody to define exactly
what "subculture" means, they will probably look at you askance for
proffering such a banal question, then promptly fail to give you
anything like a substantial and well-defined answer. If you look it up
online, you will come across a lot of waffle that ties itself up in
knots by relying excessively on the word "culture". You will find words
like subversion, Punks, ambivalent, non-domestic, Goths, negative, and tribes; and you will be a much better man than I if, from it all, you can derive any real meaning or significance.
When it's too difficult to decipher the
meanings of words, it is often easier to take solace in images. As I
walk through the streets of the city, I notice colours jumping out at
me and dragging my attention away from the grey. The walls of the city
are screaming out, looking for answers that I'm not sure I have. The
walls are talking, and I think we ought to listen.
The images on the page opposite are all
brought to you by Los Martinez, a group that lives and breathes on the
same streets you traverse. But the identity of the group is less
important than engaging with its discourse. If you look closely, you
will see that their work has real content, something you won't find in
"subcultures" defined largely by fads and pouty posturing. Interacting
with Los Martinez, you are moved uncomfortably from your previous
position of impassive alienation. The sharp nip of recognition you feel
when you look at their work, particularly their hearts, makes you an
active part of a systematic and structured opposition to the dominant
culture you were ineffectually loving to hate. You have become a true
outsider. You have moved away from subculture and joined the ranks of a
counterculture.
One hundred years ago, the city of
Barcelona and its people passed through a period of great poverty. A
poor population struggled to live and, in extreme cases, starved to
death. The ratio of food spending against housing spending was around
5:1. People lived in times of economic hardship and misery, but for the
most part they could afford to pay for the roofs over their heads. In
modern day Barcelona, the situation has been completely reversed. A
normal person, earning 1000€ a month, could survive spending only 200€
a month on food, but would be very hard pushed to cover the cost of
owning an apartment in the city with the remaining 800€. Most people
won't starve in La Millor Botiga del Mon, but if you're not
rich, you had better look for another place to rest your head at night.
It is in the reality of this environment that Los Martinez are
attempting to offer an alternative message to the people of the city.
Los Martinez are a group of like-minded
individuals who found each other by chance as they worked individually
on the streets, and who then joined together to produce work in which
we find a seamless fusion of art and social commentary. They are social
warriors, committed to reclaiming public space as our own by turning it
into a free gallery. But the artistic beauty of their message should
not fool you into taking their work lightly. This collective group of
creative friends is not only fighting to reclaim the city's public
spaces. In the barrios where speculation and big business are
displacing residents, tearing down buildings, and trying to negate the
rich history of the places they wish to reinvent in their own selfish
image, Los Martinez are also out on the front lines alongside real
people.
In Bon Pastor, Los Martinez painted
walls alongside niños gitanos del barrio, in protest of the forceful
eviction of families from the "casas baratas". In Barceloneta, they
worked with the vecinos del barrio in their fight against the
Ayuntamiento's Plan de Ascensores, a scheme that would see
elderly people and families evicted from their homes. But it is perhaps
in Los Martinez's old home of Poblenou where their fight has been the
most intense, and it is this place that best highlights the unrelenting
determination of their struggle and their continued belief in it.
Nevertheless, it is here, too, where the odds against the success of
their movement can seem largest.
In Can Ricart and Poblenou, Los
Martinez were part of the group of 3,500 vecinos and friends of the
neighbourhood that protested against the monster that is [email protected] This
privately-funded, local-government-supported venture has displaced the
majority of Poblenou's artistic community, as well as many families who
had lived for generations in what was tradit ional ly one of
Barcelona's few authentic working-class neighbourhoods. It's an ugly
thing in itself, and a pattern that's becoming all too familiar, but
[email protected] is made even uglier because many of the companies that operate out
of this new state-of-the-art business park are ones that deal directly
in, or have links to, the manufacture of arms. Indra, whose president
heads the committee of [email protected], is the world's biggest non-US supplier of
military equipment to the world's largest military machine, the Army of
the United States of America.
The protests in Poblenou, like so many
others, were to no avail, and the pain felt in this particular defeat
has been worsened recently by the attempted validation of [email protected] and its
presence in the neighbourhood through the three-day [email protected] festival,
run under the artistic direction of Niu and in direct collaboration
with the [email protected] committee. How is it possible that Niu, one of the groups
that originally fought alongside residents and other artists against
[email protected], are now actively encouraging the presence of their conquerors in a
celebration that is such an incredibly frivolous and insensitive
rewriting of history?
But wait. It is too easy to point
fingers at the speculators, propagators of war, and those who are
completely consumed by the capitalist ethos of "More". If we look
closely at the hands we point with, we might note, uncomfortably, that
they too have a red tinge. As literate people living in a powerful
Western democracy, we are all complicit in the ills of the world, and
in one way or another there is undoubtedly blood spilled in our name
every day. Maybe Niu, in the wake of [email protected]'s successful establishment,
decided, as so many of us do, that this is the way things work in the
world and there's nothing they can do about it.
Perhaps this elephant in the corner has
allowed an overriding sense of apathy to fester within all of us; an
apathy and a complacency that seem to have become the most prominent
and bitter cultural capital of the day. We have been tricked into
thinking that we are redundant and unable to offer any resistance to
the forces of the world that shape and control our shadow lives. We
have accepted our defeat and fallen out of love with the unfamiliar
faces that stare back at us blankly from the other side of the mirror.
Politicians don't listen to us. Wars are fought despite our Saturday
afternoon marches against them. Nothing we do makes a difference, so
why should we care? In discussions with members of Los Martinez, I saw
that even they feel the weight of capitalism's demand for conformity.
Though they fight for others selflessly, seeking no personal promotion
through their acts, their lifestyle choice comes with the cost of being
reminded every day that they don't own a house, or have 2.5 children,
or a job that they can put on a resume. That they have chosen an
"unconventional" life.
From what I see, Los Martinez keep
doing what they do because they care, not only about making a stand
against the violation of the city in which we live, but also about us.
They could just as easily be called Los Rodriguez, or Los Smith. A rose
by any other name would smell as sweet. Yet as we walk forward into
what may be new times of hope, it was a member of Los Martinez who told
me that, "We can't do everything". It is true: the wars won't stop
overnight. The mobile phones in our pockets will still signal violence
in Africa. The speculators and the greedy politicians won't desist from
trying to fuck us over at every turn just because we ask them not to.
In spite of this knowledge, or maybe because of it, the core message of
Los Martinez is to look a little longer at ourselves in the mirror each
day.
The feeling we are meant to
experience when we look at the bright colours of their art, standing
out against the backdrop of grey and greed that surrounds it, is that
those colours are inside us. If we want to pay anything other than lip
service to change, then it must start here: at home, in ourselves. The
hearts on the wall are our own. It is up to us to rediscover them. And
it is then our responsibility to let them sing, write, paint, shout or
cry out in any way that affirms our collective struggle to remain part
of the original and only truly abiding culture: humanity.
Que seamos más despiertos. Que seamos más conscientes.
Que seamos más vivos.
Más Amor.
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