Publications

Teresa Lanceta. Weaving As Open Source

MACBA/IVAM. Curated by Nuria Enguita Mayo and Laura Vallés Vilches.
2022-2023
Design: Hermanos Berenguer
Writings: Elvira Dyangani Ose, Nuria Enguita, Teresa Lanceta, Laura Vallés Vílchez, Miguel Morey, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Bert Flint, Pedro G. Romero, Olga Diego, Leire Vergara, Xabier Salaberria, IES Miquel Tarradell and Nicolas Malavé.

This catalogue, co-published by the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona and the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, is published on the occasion of the Teresa Lanceta exhibition. Teresa Lanceta. Weaving As Open Source, co-produced by MACBA (from April 8 to September 11, 2022) and IVAM (from October 6, 2022 to February 12, 2023).

Monographic
Exhibition: Tejer como código abierto

Writings

Waiting for the future - Nuria Enguita, Laura Vallés Vílchez & Teresa Lanceta
Conversation between Teresa Lanceta, Nuria Enguita and Laura Valles Vilchez

NE-LV From 1969 to 1985 you lived in Barcelona’s Raval district, then known as the Barrio Chino, specifically in Plaça Reial and on the Carrer Obradors and Carrer Jerusalem. In 1969 you enrolled at the Faculty of Philosophy and Educational Sciences at the University of Barcelona and began weaving. The Raval at that time was a mix of seaport, working class, migrant, gitano and Andalusian ambiances, and it permeates your entire work, nowhere so eloquently as in Life, and Now Too, Life, a collection of stories reproduced on p. 77 of this publication. Decades later, while living in Alicante, you went back there on a weekly basis, from 2013 to 2020, to teach at the Escola Massana, and returned again in 2021 for The Trades in the Raval (p. 305), a collaboration with Miquel Tarradell Secondary School, and to prepare your exhibition at the MACBA and the IVAM.

TL The Raval is a mosaic of diverse ways of living, cultures and even religions. Odours and features vary from street to street, and the neighbourhood has evolved with the times without losing its identity, which essentially has been and still is that of accommodating people from foreign parts, no questions asked. During the great exodus from the rural areas of Spain, many of those who came and settled in the Raval, or the Barrio Chino as it was known then, ended up working in the docks or nearby factories. Today, the incomers are from Pakistan, the Philippines... It’s one great human melting pot, with its day trippers and characteristic shops which, when I lived there, were largely devoted to sex. I can still recall the men in suits and ties who would come looking for women, transvestites and parties. No doubt at work they feigned disgust at this part of town! In Life, and Now Too, Life I chose the words to convey the memory of my experiences there very carefully – maybe that’s why it took me years to write it.

NE-LV You have sometimes said that the Raval has given you so much more than you have ever given back. But to us it’s obvious from reading your accounts ‘La Charo’ (p. 85), ‘Marina’ (p. 86) and ‘Rocío’ (p. 87) that through your relationships with these gitanas you shared a lot, a real mutual affection; you see this too in the stitched cloths and textiles that carry their names. In the ‘tiny home which had no bedrooms and no bathroom, and where curtains doubled as walls’, you say Rocío and her children endured ‘great hardship’. From the Patio Andaluz to the Tronío, through this exhibition we revisit some of these streets whose walls have now become fragmented or patched up pieces of cloth.

TL Of all the places I have lived in, the Raval is the least comparable to any other. Nowhere has given me so much, and nowhere have I felt so relaxed. The experiences the gitano community and I shared inspired reciprocated feelings, especially with those women, who saw in me a devoted paya (non-gypsy). In the early nineties, after living in Seville and then Marrakesh, I moved to Madrid, still carrying with me the memory of the Raval. I felt I wanted to talk about things that are broken, damaged, and mended. Waiting for the Future arose out of this feeling. It’s a series of drawings and stitched cloths painted over with pigments and scraped and rinsed to alter the textures. Then I mended or stitched over the damaged areas. The suffering poverty causes and the destruction it leaves are sometimes impossible to overcome. These cloths were painted and deliberately deteriorated again and again until the pigment was but a trace of colour. While making this series I felt a desire to make something direct and immediate that had nothing to do with the loom, which requires a lot of time to produce anything.

NE-LV You have indeed lived through many Ravals. The first you talked about just now was in the mid-seventies, when you moved there and lived with a gitano family. It was a conscious move, because you wanted to cut ties with academia and keep well clear of a regular job with a salary and a boss, etcetera. This idea of community and collaboration, would you say it has anything to do with the gitano way of life, their big families, how they look out for each other and are more used to moving around, leading a nomadic life? With living each day as it comes and ‘waiting for the future’, to borrow that phrase from a tango and the title of one of your series. In short, is there any connection with what Pastori Filigrana considers to be one of the reasons why gypsies are persecuted – they don’t adapt to the capitalist system of exploitation?¹

TL This neighbourhood brought back memories of my father’s family. My father was from Seville, and his family was from Cadiz. The fiestas we had when I was a girl were generally very happy times. But I feel Catalan, and I think it is interesting to point out that what happened to me will happen to many others in twenty years’ time: they will feel Catalan or Valencian even though their parents came from a village in Morocco or Pakistan, and it will be plain to see. One of the pupils at Miquel Tarradell Secondary School (where Nicolas Malevé and I worked on a ‘co-authorship project’) told me that his father has two brothers in Britain, one in Canada and another in Italy. Will they ever be all together again? Diasporas have settled on both sides of the Ramblas: in the past they were from Andalusia, Extremadura and Galicia, and today they are from Pakistan, India and the Philippines. Nomads? Nowadays, you are a nomad by choice, and gitanos and gitanas certainly are. The others are displaced, banished. This is the neo-colonialism that’s happening in our streets.

NE-LV In 2019 and 2020 you produced a series of canvases, again on the theme of the Raval, but this time they replicate the colours of anarchism: red and black. It was the experiences of those years that informed them, mixed with issues we would like to pursue in the conversation weaving through the pages of this book: technique, memory and shared experience. Can you talk to us about these new canvases?

TL The more I worked on them, the more colours and shapes began to impose themselves. At first, there were blacks and browns or very dark blues with the odd dot of colour, but either because of lockdown or because of the type of black I was using, I felt increasingly drawn to reds. This is how I arrived at the red and black joined diagonally, which brought back memories as these colours carry a very specific ideological connotation; but colour and form brought me here. The CNT²-style diagonal correlates both colours without diminishing their chromatic intensity: it is sewn, stitched together. It’s not so much the tone that matters, but the saturation. Red fills everything when it spills over, and even more when it is contained. Red holds life and vies with black. It’s the opposite of black, not of white, as those who came up with the idea of pitching red against black for the CNT flag understood very well. They’re opposites, not because black denotes death (it does not), but because black is a lightless arcanum we feel compelled to penetrate. The same thing happens in the Raval. I remember the blackness of the corners I’d pass late at night as I went looking for strong colours like the ones we see in these canvases. Red was the blood that soaked his shirt because of jealousy and a knife. Black is the despair of nights spent sleeping rough. Red are the days of hunger. And red and black are the colours of lockdown.

¹ Pastori Filigrana, ‘El ejemplo de los gitanos. Panfleto o discurso sobre cómo las resistencias al capitalismo del pueblo gitano están en el origen de su persecución’, Concreta, 14. Valencia: Editorial Concreta, 2019, pp. 40–53.

² CNT. Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores, the Spanish confederation of anarcho-syndicalist labour unions.
Vibrations - Miguel Morey
‘If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when the horse’s neck and head would be already gone.’¹

1

That writing and weaving are of the same family is clear from the word ‘text’, which comes from the Latin textus, participle of the verb texo, meaning to weave, plait, interlace. The gesture of writing, like that of weaving, consists of carrying the line to its end before continuing on to the next line. In writing, it is this feature that differentiates the movement of verse from that of prose, the latter having to go to the end of the line while verse breaks this continuity, often leaving a sentence in ‘midair’ only to conclude it in the following line, in what is known as enjambment. In weaving, too, the weft moves to the next line in pursuit of the pattern, the vertical. In Idea of Prose (1987), Giorgio Agamben locates the difference between prose and verse precisely in this particularity and establishes a connection with agricultural lexicon. Versura, in Latin, means the point at which the plough, reaching the end of the furrow, turns back.

I was reminded of this association between writing and weaving when I read Teresa’s texts about the Raval when it was still called the Barrio Chino. I realised that texts are woven too, for as we read them, we follow their ‘weft’...

Cervantes was aware of this too, as can be seen from the comparison he draws towards the end of Don Quixote (part two, chapter LXII) between literary translation and the back of a tapestry: ‘Still it seems to me that translation from one language into another, if it be not from the queens of languages, the Greek and the Latin, is like looking at Flemish tapestries on the wrong side; for though the figures are visible, they are full of threads that make them indistinct, and they do not show with the smoothness and the brightness of the right side.’

2

On the gesture of weaving, I remember something Teresa said to Marta González in 2000: ‘Weaving is a hypnotic technique, based on a repetitive movement, the results of which are not immediately apparent. The physical impossibility of seeing the whole piece as it is being woven, since it is rolled up as it progresses, enriches the fragment and gives it autonomy, while at the same time demands one has a global understanding of the composition that must be kept in mind for the time it takes to finish it. It’s a technique that encourages a peculiar and gratifying sort of concentration, although – as with any artistic activity, whatever the medium – nothing alleviates the strong tension and deep apprehension that accompany the creative process.’²

Furthermore, and especially, is the idea that weaving does not allow for any corrections of mistakes or any deviations from the initial compositional plan, which can be elevated to the category of a moral lesson one must not forget: ‘I see working a loom like life itself: what is done is done, and one has to live with it’.

3

Teresa and I first met as students while studying Filosofía y Letras (as it was called then) at the University of Barcelona (La Central). I began my studies in 1967, the year after the Caputxinada, when the Democratic Students’ Union of the University of Barcelona called the first elections. In the spring of my first year, we began to feel the impact of May ’68, after which nothing would ever be the same again. It was at about that time that we met. Chroniclers refer to those times (from 1969 to 1975) as ‘the years of student radicalism’. And so it was, and not just in Europe: in the United States, there were protest movements against the Vietnam War, hippy deserters, and the emergence of the underground culture – the counterculture. The Woodstock Festival took place in August 1969, as did the Harlem Cultural Festival (the subject of Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson’s recent film The Summer of Soul). At the University of Barcelona, 1969 began with a student assault on the rector’s office in an attempt to remove him. He was replaced by a bust of Franco but that ended up being sent flying through the air. On the same day as that event – 17 January – a student and member of FELIPE (the Popular Liberation Front) called Enrique Ruano was arrested in Madrid, but unlike the rector, he did die, three days later, at the hands of the police’s Political and Social Brigade. A state of emergency was declared throughout Spain soon after. From then on, university activities were regularly suspended, either on the decision of the academic authorities or by government order, because of the prevailing ‘situation of general ungovernability’, which is how our insurrectionary efforts were officially described. In December 1970, street protests (or ‘riots’ as the official reports called them) were sparked by the Burgos trials by military tribunal of sixteen ETA militants, resulting in nine death sentences being handed out (later commuted thanks to international pressure). Needless to say, this led to a new state of emergency being declared, first in the Basque Country and then throughout the rest of Spain. The following year, it started all over again: this time the trigger was the passing of the General Education Law, promoted by the then minister Villar Palasí (a member of Opus Dei). Fury raged for a long time. That was the way things were back then...

I don’t think we got through a full year of studies.

But I know that, as repression mounted, our desire for freedom was unleashed and somehow clandestinity became a way of life.

I also recall how in the early seventies heroin began to make an appearance at the University. ‘It was offered to anyone who was up for it, and practically all of us are at that age’, Teresa writes, adding: ‘The first time my generation looked out onto the world, they saw a poisoned chimera.’³ Take a walk on the wild side, sang Lou Reed in 1972.

4

For Teresa, the music that touched her heart was flamenco: el cante. ‘Flamenco thrilled me, and I learnt there that exception is the rule that makes us possible’, she writes.⁴ ‘El Tronío, El Camarote, La Macarena, El Patio Andaluz...’ These were all venues of fiesta y cante; of ‘parties, booze-ups, weddings and christenings...’⁵

‘When you get to know gitanos, live with them and delight in their art... when you discover their car pets, woven on mobile looms, the world becomes a bigger place. Your country is the ground on which you tread, and your home is always where you’re heading and not where you’re from because returning is not a going back but a perpetual moving forward. This is the rhombus. The rhombus isn’t made up of horizontals or verticals but of diagonals forming endless lines. In its reiterative expansion, the rhomboid lattice reveals no coordinates, no centre and no frame, but rather a network of equal parts. Repetition is not an enemy, but a value holding variations and transgressions. The rhombus is a horizon.’⁶

5

When things began to normalise in this country, following Franco’s death and the promulgation of the Constitution, Teresa and I lost touch and it wasn’t until many years later that we met again. Occasionally, though, and with increasing frequency, I would get news of her or her work. I thought I recognised in some of the things she said in interviews certain gestures, intimations of her personality I knew from our youth. Reading these interviews helped me to understand how to approach her work, to capture its ‘vibrations’ – to borrow a pet word from our student days. I actually think this word is quite fitting to talk about my experience of her work and to express what I feel vibrates in it and how; because whenever I look at a piece of hers the first thing I see, in rhythmic repetition, is that original moment of discovery of the cotton thread, the sudden fascination for the material:⁷ a love that found artistic expression in traditional handiwork, which shares this love of material and demands it be given adequate form. I see this same vibration when I realise that Teresa does not usually discuss how spellbound she is by tapestries (made in Morocco, for example) without also including the artistic ornamentation of everyday objects. Here, the vibration modulates: referring to the tapestry as a domestic object brings into view the house, and with it the working woman.⁸ Cue the Barrio Chino and its gitano vibe, where Teresa chose to live when she first started weaving. I remember the answer she gave when asked whether she was happy in those days: ‘Was I happy? I don’t remember now. Happiness wasn’t in my plans... although if I wasn’t happy, it wasn’t because of the biting cold or the sweltering heat or the cramped living quarters or the lack of money! And if I was, it would have had something to do with the flamenco way of life. To live and to be was what I wanted, to live like a gitana and to be – just that, nothing more.’⁹ Like a vibration in tune with something atavistic, powerful and elemental like cotton thread, which can still make its way through a multitude of labyrinths; a vibration that repeats itself, I think I see – infused by the constant presence of the working woman, by her dignity and her pain, her tragic knowledge of the way things are, her courage and her charm. And once again I recognise the vibration of when we were students that helped us to believe that reason had to come down on the side of the victims. And again when, in El paso del Ebro, she speaks of the girl who ‘wanted to know where her father was – like her fellow pupil who shared her desk, who knew that his father was buried in the ditch that forks on the way to the threshing floor’.¹⁰And again in the dedication of that text (a diary she kept of the weekly train journey she made between Alicante and Barcelona from September 2013 to July 2015): ‘To the Italian brigadista who, while awaiting his execution, carved wood... And to my great-aunt Teresina who would tell me these stories’. On 9 January 2014, the entry reads: ‘As the train passes Sagunto, I notice a CNT and IWA office and a red and black flag flapping around a short mast’. A happy sight, which is not repeated (7 February: ‘I couldn’t see the CNT flag on the premises’) until 20 February: ‘This time the CNT office is open, the red and black flag is on the right of the door and the windows are covered with posters’. She ends with a question: ‘How many members are there?’ And all too clearly, I understand – the reader understands – what prompted this question.

Looking at the series of five tapestries that are the premise of this text, I confess I cannot help seeing the railway as it crosses the Ebro River. I have tried, but it’s impossible. I imagine an old steam locomotive puffing out smoke, I hear the rattling and the clinking of the hammer as it knocks the wheels to check for damage whilst stopped at a station. I feel the powerful, swollen vibration of the river... A date comes to mind: 25 July 1938 – people say there was no moon that night.¹¹

6

Between Franco’s death and the promulgation of the Constitution many things happened and with an intensity that has never since been repeated. I returned to Barcelona shortly before Franco’s demise and the following year joined the Faculty of Philosophy and Educational Sciences, as it was called then, as an assistant lecturer in its new location in Pedralbes. The city was humming with a tension that is characteristic of the creative process, as Teresa mentioned earlier. A profound sense of unease (the attempted coup d’état, known in Spain as the ‘23-F’, was only five years away) was offset by boundless joy: the joy of at last being able to breathe! The area where Teresa lived was now known under its new name, ‘the Raval’ and, without losing any of its distinctive vibrancy, began to feel a little like Manhattan’s Soho, which Pasqual Maragall would propose as a model in 1992. By way of an illustration, I will give just one example which I experienced at close quarters thanks to my friendship with Pepe Rubianes, who had been a class-mate of mine at university. In 1976, the Assemblea d’Actors i Directors de Teatre de Catalunya (AADTC) had designed a theatre festival, considered ground-breaking at the time, called the Teatre Grec, which has gone on to enjoy a very long and distinguished trajectory. A few months later, a splinter group of the AADTC formed the Assemblea de Treballadors de l’Espectacle and, for its first performance, put on several simultaneous performances of Don Juan Tenorio in the Born neighbourhood, which at the time was being claimed as the Ateneu Popular (a few weeks earlier the first libertarian Ateneu had just opened in Sants). And it was precisely this group – some 150 professionals at first – that took over the old Salón Diana cinema, with its 876 seats, on Carrer Sant Pau, and converted it into a place of first-class theatrical and civic experimentation. The Salón Diana opened its doors on Holy Saturday 1977 with The Living Theater (Seven Meditations on Political Sadomasochism), Les Troubadours and Dagoll Dagom (I Won’t Speak in Class) – and that was only as far as theatre was concerned, because the programme also included children’s matinees, late-night rock, zarzuela, dance, circus, cinema... You could just as easily find the clown Jango Edwards skidding across the stage on a powerful motorbike as a group of Yaqui Indians performing the ritual Peyote dance. The Salón Diana soon became a favourite meeting place, so much so that when La torna, for example, by Els Joglars (dedicated to Heinz Chez, the enigmatic Polish petty criminal who was executed on 2 March 1974, the same day as Puig Antich, in a manoeuvre by Franco’s regime to discredit him in public opinion) became a target in the notorious witch-hunt, it was turned into a permanent assembly. For a time, it seemed as if the city had found somewhere to exercise its right to assembly, not to mention all that was going on behind the scenes and in the bar La Piedra across the street. I don’t recall the moments Teresa and I shared in that adventure, or whether we came across each other at what turned out to be the culmination of all that turmoil: the International Libertarian Conference (Jornades Llibertàries del Parc Güell) the following summer. This conference was convened a few days after the CNT had managed to amass some hundred thousand people at the famous Montjuïc rally, from 22 to 25 July: three days and nights of non-stop meetings and debates, music and partying, with no one to answer to but the security guards deployed for the event.¹² When I think back to those days, I can’t remember if Teresa and I met up then or not, but I have no doubt she was there.

I leaf through the pages of all the catalogues I have of her exhibitions, pausing here and there as if to double check something I already know and feel: that vibration I am beginning to recognise so well. Just as one can feel vicarious embarrassment, I feel vicarious pride when contemplating Teresa’s work, if only because of how she has sustained over time the gesture of honouring what one owes oneself just for being who one is. There is, furthermore, poetic justice in the fact that this work has been welcomed by the MACBA, that white ship ‘moored’ in the renovated Raval, with the skateboarders practising their moves alongside its flanks. It couldn’t be any other way, I tell myself, that we, friends from so very long ago, should be the first to be congratulated.

Miguel Morey
L’Escala, September 2021

Miguel Morey is a philosopher. His last publication is Monólogos de la bella durmiente: Sobre María Zambrano (2021).

¹ Franz Kafka: Wunsch, Indianer zu warden. Versuche über einen Satzvon Frank Kafka. Götingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2019. English version: ‘The Wish to be a Red Indian’ [trans. by Willa and Edwin Muir], in Complete Stories (Vintage Classics). New York: Penguin Random House, 1992.

²‘ Si vivo, será mejor. Conversation between Marta González and Teresa Lanceta’ in Tejidos marroquíes. Teresa Lanceta. Madrid and Casablanca: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and Ville des Arts, 2000.

³ Teresa Lanceta: ‘Early seventies: heroin and company’, on p. 79 of this publication.

⁴ Teresa Lanceta: ‘Lugubrious’, on p. 78 of this publication.

⁵ Teresa Lanceta: ‘La Charo’, on p. 85 of this publication

⁶ ‘El rombo es un horizonte. Conversación entre Teresa Lanceta y Nuria Enguita Mayo’, in Teresa Lanceta. Adiós al rombo. Madrid: La Casa Encendida, 2016.

⁷ Teresa describes it thus (in ‘El rombo es un horizonte’, op. cit.): ‘I lived in Barcelona in the seventies. All around me were these great conceptual proposals laced with political denunciation and I could see that what they were doing was really powerful, but something crossed my path, something I had never seen before: a skein of natural cotton thread (in those days acrylic was everywhere) and from there I went on to discover fabrics, especially the “popular” ones.’

⁸ Ibid.: ‘Part of the artistic/feminist practice in the seventies was about critically and satirically decontextualising textiles. But I was more interested in discussing – in a positive way – the work of women that generated language and art through their own techniques and tools; women who, because of their doubly subservient condition – of being women and from poor rural areas – were ignored; women who defined and transmitted through their weaving the culture they belonged to; creators and masters of an artistic language that allowed them to explore the inherited canons and create objects that were undeniably art.’

⁹ Teresa Lanceta: ‘Jerusalem, 8’, on p. 85 of this publication.

¹⁰ Teresa Lanceta: El paso del Ebro (‘28th of April, 2014. Out- 11 bound’), 2016.

¹¹ Lanceta’s commemoration of the Battle of the Ebro, the project El paso del Ebro, which incorporates recycled objects belonging to the Centre d’Investigació de la Trinxera (Corbera d’Ebre), was presented as part of the group exhibition La réplica infiel (Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid, 2016).

¹² Barcelona Libertaria was a daily newspaper set up to cover all the events in detail. Downloadable on www.cedall.org (Documentació).
Life, and Now Too, Life - Teresa Lanceta
Life, and Now Too, Life

Because we live in homes…

A narrow street, a slender and steep staircase, a small building with negligible lightwells. An elongated flat with a constricted corridor where the light was always on; the third floor of a five-storey building. Seven tiny rooms, three of which were bedrooms holding not much more than a bed and a minute wardrobe each. One was occupied by Ch. and J.; the other by the grandfather (Ch.’s father) and the grandchildren; and the third by L. and me. Ours had to be entered sideways because the walls were covered in shelves stuffed full of our belongings, some of which also hung from the ceiling.

The communal areas: a small space with a balcony, where L. painted and the children played when he wasn’t there, so the painting utensils were always kept in our bedroom. This space, like the grandfather’s and the children’s bedroom, was adjacent to the living room and at the far end of the flat overlooking the street. Before reaching the other end, where the third – and windowless – bedroom was, you had to pass by a minuscule bathroom. Actually, there wasn’t anything you could wash in – no basin or shower – only a toilet with a high chain and newspaper which was used as toilet paper. To wash, you had to go to the kitchen and wait your turn!

In those days you went to the shops daily. Ch. would prepare gitano-style stews and cod and chips, but I didn’t eat them because I worked in a nearby restaurant. On Sundays we would buy several spit-roasted chickens and eat them straight out of the packaging. What a feast!

I would go straight from La Central university to the restaurant where I worked. My afternoons and evenings were free and we would wander about, tempted by the flagstones and the tarmac. We would move diagonally, expanding the narrow streets and squares. We lived in the streets.

One night, Ch. dropped a pan of chips on her belly. We went to A&E, where she was given an ointment, antibiotics and painkillers. Back to work she went, all wrapped in bandages. There was no way she would miss work and forgo pay. She also feared being replaced.

Now that I have become obsessed with the idea of changing where I live, I think back to those meagre needs we had then which, perhaps because they were so meagre, were easily satisfied. We had very few belongings and our furniture was minimal: just a chair each, two tables, beds... We had no sofa, no armchair, no ornaments; only a television for V., who would thump it each time the picture acted up. The flat was old and hadn’t been touched since it was built more than a century ago. The floor tiles, wall tiles, woodwork and lights were all original. There were no decorations or photos on the walls. The few photographs Ch. and her family had were kept in a box with other papers, and I have always been loath to keep personal photographs.

The walls were green in the dining area: the lower section was a hard- wearing gloss paint, and the upper part tempera. I have no memory of that house that is not tinted green.

The grandfather had interlaced the deep sadness caused by the death of his wife with the ‘loss’ of his only daughter, Ch., then a young and beautiful fifteen-year-old, at the hands of the elder gitano whom he had entrusted with her protection during their tours along the Costa Brava, a charge he failed to honour when one night on a train the old guitarist and the young dancer were up and on the lookout for love. The two men never spoke a word to each other again, and the guitarist, who was now father to his three grandchildren, shared a bed with his daughter while keeping up visits to his other family too. Home is where happiness comes to settle, although not always.

Lugubrious

How a lugubrious place can appeal to so many, and how I felt so at home in one.
In the early seventies, home for me was the Barrio Chino in Barcelona – and not just the four walls around my bed, bathroom and kitchen. The streets and everything they entailed were my home. We would bundle down the zigzagging alleyways on our way through life – some of us more surefooted than others – meeting up with friends, gitanos and gitanas along the way, many of whom – the women – became my friends too. We didn’t just run into each other; we tracked each other down, hunted each other out: they looked for and found in me what I looked for and found in them. My surroundings ended up being part of me.

That shoddy district, home to the down-and-outs, the wretched, the ailing, the ragged and the humiliated, was a haven of joy and fantasy washed down with copious amounts of manzanilla sherry, gin and tonic and White Label. The beer came later... to which some people would add other substances too.

Completing the picture were the day-trippers and punters. Some came because here they felt good, they felt respected, unlike in their work-places or everyday lives where, if they showed their true colours, they were singled out. Others came looking for darker ambiences or fluorescent sensations they could dilute in hopeless joy. Certain very powerful people came too, attracted by the bitter smells, the merriment and the pain inflicted on streets strewn with rubbish and bags of dubious contents.

In the Barrio Chino, known today as the Raval and Gòtic Sud, neon lights lit up the nights. I would have been no more than twenty years old when I first arrived. My younger self surprises me: shy as I was, I would perch myself on a stool in a flamenco bar or in a tablao and defend my square foot of space, feeling present yet absent, and listen to Charo sing and dance or to Juan or El Gato play the guitar... I ‘found myself’ in the glory of El Tronío, El Camarote, La Macarena, El Patio Andaluz, in these places of fiesta y cante.

I didn’t find there anything I already knew; I didn’t discover that dark mystery glimpsed in childhood or adolescence – I just felt good. Flamenco thrilled me, and I learnt there that exception is the rule that makes us possible.

It’s not that I didn’t see what was going on around me or that I wasn’t conflicted by it at times. I did have clashes and run-ins, particularly with a pimp who was a gitano, a relative or close friend of Juan’s, who often used to come with us to parties, christenings and bars. We were wired very differently and although for obvious reasons we tried to Cripples keep out of each other’s way, it wasn’t always possible. Sometimes we would end up shouting and hurling insults at each other, but there was always someone who would step in and try to calm things down. His women avoided me and I them, so I don’t remember much about them, except that they worked a lot and he made them work even harder.

Cripples

‘It always surprised me that when we were sitting there on the terrace of some bar, we did not feel our hearts break at the sight of so many invalids, many of whom were operable. No, Jemaa el-Fna, the square to beat all squares, absorbs you into its circle and you end up seeing only an expanse of people whose struggles extol life. The pain never goes away, it is anaesthetised.’

Night came before sleep. Fallen light is very beautiful.
There were lots of cripples back then. The definition of the term ‘cripple’ given in the dictionary describes most of them well: ‘as having lost movement of the body or of any one of its parts’. I am not talking about the handicapped or the disabled looked after by ONCE, Caritas or church parishes, no: these were Barrio Chino cripples, with very visible and clunky iron contraptions propping up their legs. The pain these things caused them must surely have taken some getting used to! There were others, too, with poorly simulated artificial hands or arms.

They all moved in Frankenstein fashion. It wasn’t as bad as what I saw in Morocco years later, but not far off. Others moved about in manual wheelchairs. These invalids distinguished themselves from cripples by their need for a companion, a kind of walking guide that would often double as an extra mischief-making hand.

In the Barrio Chino nobody hid their misfortunes; maybe because, although natural or inflicted cruelty happened all the time, luck dealt a very mixed hand when it came to how the blows were suffered, even amongst those who were blessed.

Lifestyles were pursued in a variety of ways, but all had one thing in common: the need to survive – and by whatever means possible. This meant running errands and favours against a backdrop of precariousness that bordered on skulduggery. Survivors’ ideology. The blind ruled, for they saw without the use of their eyes.

Extreme privation was particularly evident in relation to the police, who were distrusted and secretly despised. But they were also admired, and people would cooperate readily enough, especially if the officer made himself part of the fabric of the Barrio Chino. Embodying authority and power, he was both feared and accepted.

In pursuit of oblivion, the cripples and the alcoholics (later outnum-bered by drug addicts) would congregate around bar counters in daily communion. Sustained by the idea of possibility, some came in seeking refuge from their daily struggles while others seemed to have been blown in by the wind.

Floating was an art, and it’s how the barrio kept itself going. The gitano ambiance drew in the crowds: art and violence as survival... So here was one selling lottery tickets ‘con arte’, another there singing ‘con arte’, another swindling with guile and another using con tricks to get brass.

Amid such masters of chicanery was the occasional murderer, like the newly wed policeman, who shot his pregnant wife with his firearm. He wasn’t a cripple though: he was young and strong and in receipt of a monthly paycheque.

(Teresa Lanceta: ’Lived Cities’, Luis Claramunt. El viatge vertical. Barcelona: MACBA, 2012, p. 265.)

Early seventies: heroin and company

It was at university and not in my neighbourhood where I first came into contact with heroin. But had I been working in a warehouse, a factory or an office instead, I would have encountered it there too, because its happy aura meant it infiltrated everywhere. In it came, stealthily; and by the time we realised, it was already in our streets and in our lives. We didn’t see it for what it was because in those dictatorship years we were rough, untravelled, frightened and inexperienced; and the glamour around the drug offered us a glimpse of cosmopolitan life, nirvana and elegance.

It was at university where I was given it, along with a fair amount of sweet-talking. It was offered to anyone who was up for it, and practically all of us are at that age. Fellow students from well-to-do families would bring it back from long exotic trips to Afghanistan or India, dressed in robes embellished with tiny mirrors and coats, like the one Janis Joplin wore in that famous photo. They brought that thing that was only ever talked about in hushed tones. It was the title of a song we listened to but didn’t understand.

These ‘dealer’ classmates were apprentices in the clutches of adventurers who were not averse to lining their pockets. On the contrary, they hoped to become rich, surround themselves with beautiful women and surpass the lacklustre bourgeoisie of their parents. Crafting false and harmful illusions is the same sort of tactics that wolves use to overcome lambs. And we were all lambs, including many of those novice dealers who went from fantasising about mafia power to experiencing first-hand the horror described in the Midnight Express and so many other films on the subject.

In my case, I was approached by classmates accompanied by a very young couple, like us, but much more worldly. They wore expensive Italian designer brands that we had never heard of while we went about in our cheap nondescript clothes. Boasting about trips to Italy and transits through airports we hadn’t a clue about, with their refined manners they would express how keen they were to have a tapestry of mine or a painting by Luis. I remember we got all excited about it; and then it dawned on us that they had no intention of giving us in anything in exchange but a few grams of powder. I didn’t really understand this until much later, but I remember being rather peeved. And I wasn’t much impressed by one of the substances they gave us, although it was good to be able to fling open the underground doors which were normally a little stiff!

It all ended badly, very badly, for my classmates: Take the bag. No, you. You. Noxious suspicions and eleventh-hour forebodings in an Italian customs office and before long they were taken away and locked up for many years. And as for that ‘high-class’ couple that had circled us like birds of prey, a mixture of violent recriminations and measured caution put paid to them.

A friend of mine was related to a certain piano-playing minister who years later was caught at the centre of a corruption scandal. It doesn’t look like this connection was of much use to him because he got put in the clink for years and after his release he died, either out of choice or out of despair. He wasn’t the only one in my circle to have gone down the same disastrous path or the only one to have paid for it with their life. Trips that end in tragedy. The first time my generation looked out onto the world, they saw a poisoned chimera.

Meanwhile, in the streets more than in the university, the ravages spread, and the young gitanos in my neighbourhood got sucked in. But that’s a story for another day.

U

For some, the letter U represents a dead end, but for me it was the shape of the route I took of an evening: a line, a couple of ninety-degree turns, again a line. Two parallel lines. U for the ubiquity of conflicting desires.

After dinner and sometimes after studying a little, I would set off on the U that began at my doorway and ended where Charo worked. I would start at Obradors, turn onto Carrer d’en Rull, then again onto Carrer Nou de Sant Francesc, and continue until I got to El Patio Andaluz, which is now a warehouse. Opposite is an alternative rock venue but back then it was the tablao La Macarena.

And such is the path of life: a U. There’s a beginning, a journey and an end, like the one I traced, following the course of my own thoughts from my front door to the flamenco ‘pick-up joint’ – although what people came to find wasn’t so much female company as singing, guitars and dancing, because El Patio Andaluz was not exactly a tablao (although there was a small stage for performances), but a place where the artists would mingle with the clientele and get them to drink as much as possible to prolong the performances. Afterwards, clients would be charged according to how the night had gone. This intimate and direct way of doing things was an early flamenco tradition, but by the 1970s it had been replaced by the tablao show.

Like the U, a beginning: sharing a flat and my life with a gitano family. And an end: Juan’s murder. A beginning: flamenco understood as live art; and an end: that of a world and a way of making a living.

The route through those three narrow streets was more than a mere act of passing through: it was the channel that directed my longing to listen to a cante and see people I loved.

Pressing desires

When the night ends, desires become pressing, desperate. The dawning day burns them and then disenchants them.

They were having a last drink at one of those little market counters that opened at sunrise. Daylight revealed the ferocity of the desire for the transvestite. At that hour, there was no concealing it – the craving was urgent and it maddened them: they didn’t want to prolong the fierceness of the moment any further. Men in suits, apparently quite collected, would start to unravel at dawn – the hour at which their families would give up hope as work beckoned.

The Rambles, Barri Gòtic and Plaça Catalunya make the Raval possible, just as the Barrio Chino once had. They serve as glamorous boundaries containing the poverty, dirt and desolation, and allow the outsider to dip in and out. Tourists feel comfortable in these places because they know they won’t be staying forever; but for the residents these boundaries are barriers they are unlikely to cross. In the Barrio Chino, youngsters would drop like flies, and children showed early signs of following in their footsteps. Many came from La Mina or El Camp de la Bota. Today they come from the East, both near and far.

The street belongs to those who claim it – sometimes – because nothing generates greater submission than power. It’s understandable. There aren’t enough trees. But what can you expect from a neighbourhood of hidden desires?

I do not remember his name and I will not say where he came from. He had been ‘banished’ by his father, a high-ranking military officer who had sent him to Barcelona after the secondary school where he had taught expelled him for inappropriate and abusive behaviour, he told me one night, as the two of us sat on a bench in Plaça Reial. He was there to keep a low profile.

On his TV, but in my flat, every week (I think it was on Mondays) we would watch Rito y geografía del cante flamenco, which brought us closer together than the fact of living next door to each other. He wasn’t particularly interested in flamenco, but for him this was a moment of relaxed neighbourly relations.

How would he have been judged today? It’s hard to say. I don’t know if what happened was prompted by a shared desire that was punished in those days or an abusive situation. He was weird, really weird: his flat was carpeted in fine black lingerie. When walking on that soft, slippery floor of bras, garters, corsets and panties became impractical, he had a mezzanine floor built to hold his bed, which also filled up quite quickly. I left without knowing where fate would take him and his lingerie collection. That flat next to mine has been home for many years now to a well-known comic artist whose work I like very much.

You grab your freedom with a degree of guile, at least when civil rights are scarce and your determination is strong. Others adopt a low profile and go unnoticed, although at any moment one risks being torn to pieces by someone in a better position. Ocaña, Nazario and some of their friends saw it for themselves when they were sent to prison in application of the Law of Vagrants and Thugs which locked up gays and ‘weirdos’.

Oblique streets

Oblique were the streets, glances and youth that squandered their vital energy and wore themselves out before their time. Oblique were the sentiments, magnified by the pressing need to make a living, prolonging the precariousness of the post-war period. Children grew up amidst these adult vicissitudes, getting ahead however they could, barely aware of the meagre sun that filtered obliquely through the balconies.

In this coded world, one practised the art of seeing without looking, or without appearing to pay attention; furtively, as the Pakistanis still do. Given the extreme closeness of our streets and lives, it was better to get wind of things and avoid unwanted revelations and intentions; in other words, it was better to keep out of the way of gossips. It was a world in which a sideways glance was enough to allow you to size up the other side or give a wide berth to snobs and bores; but it was also a world in which you didn’t take your eyes off the fictitious horizon.

The streets of the old Barrio Chino would be teeming with people on the go, people lying low, and curious individuals slipping into bars or leaning against a wall in guarded anticipation. You recognised people by their side profile or by the gesture they made as they lifted the glass from the counter to their lips. Over time, these profiles have softened: nowadays, you rarely see aquiline noses or marked cheekbones – signs of dire need, old age or missing molars. There were many bad men among them, but their kind of evil was driven more by necessity than nature. Even in that respect they were poor.

An empty gaze; seeing without looking, looking into the distance... oblique like the death that befell Juan, with a direct and well-aimed stab. An evasive look, a squint, a sideways look. What distrust!

Crooked hearts... always so hopeless, what has become of you?

The slanting streets of Escudellers, La Riera Baixa, La Cera and so many others... Their finest hour: the oblique night.

I was never afraid of those streets, the seedy joints, the people; but that was then: now I am overcome by fear.

31 August 2016: the Investiture

Leaving the Barrio Chino was quite an event for its residents, and still is today. Having made it my stomping ground and considering anything beyond its boundaries almost a foreign land, my daily foray to La Central university, where student life carried on as normal, was something of an intrepid exception. All the way from Obradors to Plaça Universitat, all I saw was how wide the streets were and how much sky there was above the buildings, and my short walk was transformed into a dreamlike voyage.

Whilst at university, every week I would go to the Llum de la Selva, one of the first places to do Gandhian-vegan-raw food anarchism in Spain, and at night I would go out partying – but I kept the two worlds separate and neither knew of the other. I practised a sort of intimate compartmentalisation built on omissions, even lies. It was a fairly common thing to do then and meant keeping things under your hat or keeping a low profile. A split personality helped you navigate your way around situations which, if you had to confront them face on, would require a renunciation of some kind. Sometimes, choosing means sacrificing something you love. So, with as much audacity as spontaneity, we would juggle discord to avoid upsetting the whole structure of our lives. Already as children we learn to pretend and keep up a deceit for as long as it takes to avoid being found out... or to escape punishment.

Living like this is complicated, contradictory, and sometimes painful, but it helps to reconcile desires with puritanical impositions, unfair persecutions and truly incompatible situations. It is not reprehensible, not strictly speaking, for it is part of our makeup, our freedom and our right to it. Squaring certain experiences would be impossible otherwise. It is a ploy we use in situations we find hard to cope with, if also and ultimately but a vain attempt to escape misfortune or a tight corner.

On the flip side, though, hiding behind the same veil are malicious and unscrupulous people who do immense harm to individuals and society. Instances of this abound, ranging from the banal (adultery, kleptomania) to serious cases of corruption, fraud and undiscovered crimes. I don’t include spies or clandestine resistance fighters because, although their tactics are similar, their motivations are different.

The Barrio Chino is well versed in split identities. Founded on the frustrated desires and secret yearnings of its inhabitants and sustained by prostitution, alcohol and drugs, it is torn apart by exploitation, iniquity and injustice, and any glimmer of joy is buried therein.

Now, as I listen to the radio covering the most depressing investiture I can recall, I reflect on this intimate dismemberment that began when I was a child, and a dismal dreary emptiness fills the space.

Patrons of the night

Patrons of the night, the movers and shakers of surplus... those for whom no expense was too great. With them we would wind up the night, in the beach bars of Barceloneta, just before dawn, like vampires, before the light of day hurt our eyes and our dreams.

Awaiting us were early morning paellas, comforting mussels and prawns that come in a sauce that stains the serviettes red, plus the odd more distinguished shellfish... With these offerings the night held out and desire grew. The owners would sit with us, and through banter and laughter we masked our tiredness and warded off the daylight and with it, the sadness, the melancholy. I was young and shy, so I never asked for – or was given – anything fancy lest the bill went up but not the portions! There were no cash machines or bank cards back then, so wads of banknotes were counted by hand: whatever was in the old man’s pocket had to reach the flamenco artists whole. We never bathed in the sea, and we kept the sun at an angle for it pierced our senses.

Between the patrons of the night and the artists was a long-standing bond based on generosity and acceptance; a certain give and take, a mutual respect. The trust and friendship were real, even if they were arbitrated by economic transaction. Earning a living entailed drinking, living the art with abandon, and overseeing and sharing out the money among all the guitarists, palmeros, cantaores and bailaoras. The more the needs, the smaller the shares. Making a living requires caution and restraint. And alcohol should not be allowed to distort either the situation or the distance.

We would occasionally be invited to parties in uptown Barcelona, where we’d find ourselves in empty white spaces surrounded by lots of money and glamour. White kitchen, white bathroom, white walls and white furniture... The flamencos didn’t appreciate this at all, much preferring the dark green and blue walls of our red-floored homes and our rickety fake wood furniture rescued from street corners. How many maids did they need to keep those surfaces as white as the powder that filled their lungs? The colour of absence... which you could see in the scant attention they paid us. Flamenco nights spent in passing.

I try to imagine dawn in Barceloneta today after a night of fiesta flamenca, and suddenly I hear Rocío’s laughter.

The neighbours

On the corner of Plaça Reial and Carrer del Vidre stood a huge, dilapidated building, the third floor of which had been divided into lots of small rooms. All of the following at some point lived there and had been neighbours of ours:

Adulterers. In the seventies divorce didn’t exist, so one solution around illicit encounters and marital disharmony was adultery, which is what we believed a well dressed middle-aged couple were doing when they dropped by of an evening, keeping a very low profile. We never saw them up close and only caught glimpses of them when the door opened or closed, which also revealed an oriental rug and a sofa that contrasted boldly with our paltry belongings, and only fed our fantasies, poor curious neighbours that we were... We did, after all, share a wall, a staircase and a main door.

The Diogenes of lingerie. As I have already said in another story, this man was really weird, though very discreet. For us, peculiarities were something normal – not only his but those of others too. He wasn’t a queer that had to be accommodated; he was simply a neighbour, like the spirited and effusive Ocaña.

The one who was always shouting and arguing. He had occasional lovers with whom he would quarrel. He was a pilot or worked at the airport or something like that. I tried not to have anything to do with him and kept out of his way.

Mariona and Toni. Mariona fled to some Nordic country (Sweden?) to escape prison when the political-social police got wind of her. When she came back she set up the puppet company Malic. I was very fond of her: she was warm and affectionate and helped me understand life and art. Her words gave me strength. She was deeply feminist, although we didn’t speak in such terms, and the antithesis of the pally artistic banter of our partners. The way she understood time and things generally contrasted sharply with the anxiety felt by the male artists. She died young, in 2007, and I miss her.

Ocaña. I remember him exactly as he went down in history: funny, clever, brave, always inventing and creating things. His life was one continu- ous ‘performance’. We didn’t remain in contact for long.

Nazario lives there now. He is the only one that remains from that era. I’m glad he is still there because no one else has managed to stand up to the onslaught of tourist flats: one by one, everyone has left. Nazario has joined together two rooms: the adulterers’ one and the one L. and I had. He has made the most of the high ceilings and has had a loft-bedroom put in. It is very nice, especially because of the views it has of the Vidre alleyway and Plaça Reial. A large ‘room with a view’, kitchen, and a bathroom, which is now inside the flat and not in the communal corridor as it was when we were there.

One day I went to say hello. It was nice to see the place again. I didn’t feel nostalgic so much as honoured to have lived in this magical place that is Plaça Reial.

El Tronío

Engulfed in the darkness on a deteriorated road, like the Barrio Chino.

El Tronío was a tavern run by an old lesbian couple who spoke and acted like gitanas straight out of a time and a place where el tronío (a certain flamboyance of style) was the thing, hence its name. Well-groomed and poised, they were more Pastora Imperio than Lola Flores – more enigmatic than frisky – and they kept their customers at a haughty distance, barely even looking at them at all.

The place had a high wide bar of gleaming white marble and a few tables. Flamenco played, and on certain occasions there was also singing and dancing. It looked more like a pick-up joint than a tablao – and perhaps it had been that. The clientele was a bit decrepit, flamenco (of course) and of generally modest means. The lavatory doors didn’t close properly and there was no toilet paper, at most a scrap of newspaper, as was the norm in the bars of the Barrio Chino that weren’t frequented by outsiders.

I liked it there.

Jerusalem, 8

Barcelona, 2017

It is amazing to think that some thirty-five square metres could hold two studios: L.’s, which also contained our bed and a cupboard, and mine, which had my loom (1.60 m wide) and a guest bed; plus a corridor-storage space, a toilet, the kitchen and a dining room with a drawing table. All this under a roof patched up with uralite and tiles! Home for us was a dovecote on a thirty-degree sloping rooftop terrace for about eight years, which is quite a long time compared to the other places I’ve lived in. Light and sky... That’s what it was.

Was I happy? I don’t remember now. Happiness wasn’t in my plans... although if I wasn’t happy, it wasn’t because of the biting cold or the sweltering heat or the cramped living quarters or the lack of money! And if I was, it would have had something to do with the flamenco way of life. To live and to be was what I wanted, to live like a gitana and to be – just that, nothing more.

La Charo

Knowing Charo, to think that the ‘Dr Mabuse’ Nazis chose Romani people for their experiments on account of their physical strength and tremendous resilience sends a shudder down my spine. For Charo is the perfect example of these qualities, capable as she was of adapting to and surviving the most terrible adversities. She belongs to that caste of female survivors who have seen all their men die in dramatic circumstances and yet remain unbroken and powerful perpetuators of the species.

She was big, beautiful, dark, very gitana and very loud. She was related to Carmen Amaya. She sang well and danced amazingly. She earned her living in a tablao. As she was paid by the day and had to support her family, she never missed work, not even for reasons that any other mortal would consider grounds for sick leave or force majeure. In this she demonstrated her strength. During the time we lived together she had several abortions but never considered this justification for losing a day’s earnings.

It took me more than three months to make her understand that the Pill had to be taken daily, as part of a cycle, and that the reason why she was constantly getting pregnant and having abortions was not because she was fertile and other women were not, but that her method was faulty because she only took the Pill when she slept with her husband. Correct information didn’t improve things much because she was so temperamental and so clueless that there was no convincing her to keep taking it, even if that meant arguing with her husband, just in case... and her ‘just in cases’ were indeed exalted affairs.

To say she lived each day as it came isn’t quite correct. She lived each moment, and my memory of that time is full of fluorescent colours. He was a tocaor and she was a bailaora, so life for this couple was a string of parties, booze-ups, weddings and christenings. I was only twenty years old when I started living with them, and seeing them so cheerful, I could not have imagined the tragedies and dramas that continually befell them. But it wasn’t long before I learnt of the terrible fatality that tyrannised their existence.

Charo went through a terrible time when, in the space of a month, she lost her father and husband in unfortunate circumstances. She then fell into the arms of an evil man who treated her terribly. The tablao where she was employed went out of business and she was forced to take up work in a brothel.

Her long years of suffering came to an end when a young and handsome Galician man with a thriving business entered her life. He gave her children employment, thereby taking them off the streets, which were already beginning to fill up with heroin.

I went to Barcelona a few years ago and paid her a visit. She told me that the ‘Galician’ loves them very much, her and her children, and that he is crazy about the daughter they have had. She tells me that the ‘Galician’s’ family is a good to her. And on she goes, without ever mentioning the ‘Galician’s’ actual name. As I look at her speak, I remember how her father and husband used to abuse her, and I can’t help thinking how little suffering and adversities matter when it is passion and blood that drag us into them.

Marina

An ocean, many miles of land, sea and air separate us, but I swore to her that I would accompany her to the doctor.

Marina is still beautiful, but she’s bloated and anxious. She goes from one doctor to another, swallowing pill after pill, most of them incompatible with one another, and in crazy doses. She doesn’t understand the instructions and gets overcome by ignorance and despair.

She is a Giotto virgin, big, motherly, a refuge. As a child she was an expert at climbing trees and hunting birds. Now she has six men in her care: a husband, four sons and an unmarried brother. She washes, irons and takes care of them all. When she serves the stew at mealtime – her husband first, always – she appears transfigured, she glows. Active and cheerful, she laughs constantly, but to me she seemed bitter and tired.

She loved her husband and when they married it was for love. The problem was that masculine anxiety that made her husband jealous when he saw she was happy, and he would fly into a rage and hit her.

Now, we are a long way away from each other, but I still remember those walks we used to take together, talking and laughing – her always with a child in her arms, and me happy to be by her side. I remember so many weddings and christenings where we danced and sang. And I realise that all that is now in the past, because the last time I saw her in that pristine village where she lives, we had both lost some of our old sparkle. I looked at her and saw how she had been affected by all that gratuitous violence which she accepted with an ancestral resignation while her heart had eroded, as mine has too for having witnessed this, for having loved and respected her husband and shared with him the stew she prepared, though it pains me now.

Maybe this is why I remember my promise to her that I would come back and accompany her to the doctor, and I have not kept it.

Rocío

Rocío wasn’t hired by venues or tablaos. She was only ever called when someone needed a full private flamenco setup. Charo would call her because her style of singing was great for dancing, she was cheerful and good at rousing the crowd. She scraped a living by singing, which she supplemented with poorly paid jobs she kept under cover. In her tiny home which had no bedrooms and no bathroom, and where curtains doubled as walls, she and her children suffered great hardship.

This blond gitana from Granada had several children by men who were either long-gone or dead, but all had been abusive. The evil had rubbed off on one or other of her offspring and ruined her life, destroying her ability to keep the family together.

Rocío did not sing the cante of Jerez or Utrera with its deep tragic ayes, but I am still moved when I recall her deep sense of rhythm and the expressive intonation with which she sang: ‘Tú vienes vendiendo flores, tú vienes vendiendo flores, las tuyas son amarillas, las mías de mil colores’ (You come selling flowers, you come selling flowers, yours are yellow, mine are a thousand colours).

Recently I heard her sing on a corner of Carrer Escudellers: there she was, my friend, sitting on a low wicker chair, but she wasn’t singing tangos. She was chanting out lottery numbers!

Juan

Juan was known as El Perro. By his own account, he was given the nickname as a child by some gitano neighbours who saw him eating bones. It was used by friend and foe alike as it was a good representation of what each saw in him. For a few years I shared a home, my life and friendship with Juan and one of his families.

Like many gitanos, Juan looked rather like a Native American warrior from Arizona: strong, on constant alert, tense, distant and stiff, his skin more coppery than dark, his hair long and shiny and slicked back. He played guitar at tablaos and fiestas. His playing style was terse, no frills. He could be found at El Patio Andaluz, El Camarote or El Tronío, in the streets off Escudellers, right in the heart of Barcelona’s Barrio Chino. These places weren’t popular with tourists or especially varied in clientele; only devotees – Catalan or not – of the purest flamenco came to these venues.

Juan was a solitary figure and well respected. The first time I saw him he was sitting outside a bar in Plaça Reial. It was summer and he was wearing a very tight, see-through red lace shirt. He was in his forties and he had two families. It was with his second wife, Charo, her father, Valentín, and their three children that we went to live. A distant cousin of Carmen Amaya, Charo, was as young as we were. She danced and sang with great intensity and I went along with her to many parties. Juan never defaulted on either of his two homes: with Charo he would have dinner, they would go to work and come back together, and he would leave her at dawn. He would go to a poblado on the outskirts where his other family lived and return to the Barrio Chino again at night. All this caused him a great many complications and much ducking and diving. With no salary and no security, he depended entirely on customers to make a living, so off he would go with his guitar, seeking a living from venue to venue in one long non-stop party.

But joy in the Barrio Chino is fickle, and fortune wreaks havoc with people’s destinies. Juan died an absurd and tragic death: he was stabbed in the heart. Caught in a scuffle, he was held back by friends in an attempt to appease him, but this only cleared the way for the knife to go straight in. His death was deeply mourned because he was loved. The assailant served a two-year prison sentence, claiming in his defence that Juan had a pistol in his guitar case, even though he knew – as we all did – that it was a toy gun and hadn’t been taken out of the case that night. No-one at the trial contradicted the version of the aggressor, a gitano too, who had a previous conviction for something similar.

The cante gitano, with its heart-rending beauty, eases the cruelty of life and the pain it brings. Luis must have understood this when years later he painted a portrait of Juan with his guitar.

El Gato made a living through singing and, in summer, he would tour the Costa Brava as part of a flamenco group accompanying Singla, a barefoot bailaora. He was also the driver of the van that took them from one place to another. As soon as these summer gigs were over, he would return to his base in the Barrio Chino and go out every night in search of new earnings. He had many children. We named one of them: he was one of us. When hardship hit, El Gato went to France, like many gitano families, lured by a law designed to raise the birth rate through financial incentives.

(Teresa Lanceta: ’Lived Cities’, Luis Claramunt. El viatge vertical. Barcelona: MACBA, 2012, p. 235.)

The seducer

It was an era of cheap wine and insatiable hunger. Food was costly and junkies had mothers and families to keep.

When J. died, passions were ignited, and everyone, young and old, married and single, tried their luck with the young widow, who complained of the ignominy of the situation: that she, a gitana, should be harassed by other gitanos whose wives she knew. She was especially narked by the attentions of those who were last on the list of possible candidates – for she too had felt the stirrings of desire, and why not? Now that J. and her father were dead, she was free and wanted to choose for herself.

She’d had three children in eight years with a man her father’s age, a man who had had two families: the one they had created together and the one he’d had before and never abandoned. And he had had lovers, as everybody knew. And for the love of one he had been killed.

She chose Joselito. I wasn’t surprised: they worked together, and he was especially tender and seductive with her. He loved her, he really did, but the fragility of his wife – a first cousin – and children, two of whom were disabled, prevented them from ever living together. Still, tending to their passion must have been fun. They loved each other.

Valentín

Some people wallow in the gloom of their unlucky star and only rarely step outside it, perhaps during the fleeting years of their halcyon youth, when the splendour blinds them to the ugliness and meanness and despondency that later on snuff out any glimmer of hope. So it was for Valentín. With his black hair, spit curls and chain-smoking, he camouflaged the alcoholism that a life of vexation had led him to.

As his wife sold flowers and his only daughter had quickly flown the nest, Valentín didn’t have to work too hard. As a young man, when he had felt strong enough, he’d worked down at the port unloading sacks. In those days, men were picked from a crowd of hopefuls that would form daily in search of work (as is happening again now in village squares during the fruit picking seasons; and on our doorstep, in Atocha, where cheap labour is sought for work on illegal construction sites). Once, a group of men were offloading cans of tinned meat covered in foreign lettering. Some of them opened them and ate. Valentín did not, because, like many others, food that wasn’t prepared in the gitano style disgusted him, and thus he was spared the unpleasant experience of eating dog food.

When his sister died, Valentín mourned her as tradition dictated. How long this lasted I don’t remember, but I know it was for a lot longer than his spirits could bear. It was pitiful to see him all dressed in black and holed up at home, deprived of alcohol and tobacco, with no other palliative than the conviction of his mourning.

Julián

I didn’t recognise him, but he did, of course – that’s how he made his living: remembering everything and everyone. I ran into him in Seville in 1985. He was carrying himself like a Castilian nobleman trying to conceal his inner marrano (converted Jew) that his erudition and aquiline nose suggested. But then when he relaxed, he would drop the character of the squire in Lazarillo de Tormes and reveal the Jean Genet in him, the Julián of Barcelona, who was more a rascal than the university literature student he also was.

But he hadn’t fled the cold of Ávila to spend all day in the university library, but rather in the warmth of the environs of the Plaça Reial, home to so many others who found in the bustle of those streets a bewildering place that radiated light in the darkness. It is not that there was freedom in Barcelona – some homosexuals were in prison for being openly gay thanks to the Law of Vagrants and Thugs – but they had what freedom they had and they defended it with pride.

In the seventies, Julián lived in the Barrio Chino because it had stopped being a refuge for sinners and had become home to all those who wanted to live with joy and honesty. From there he moved to Seville, where he turned his ‘non-work’ into conscientious employment. Wiry, upright, not very tall, a somewhat priestly head, he cut quite a stiff figure, except for his arms, which moved constantly and sedately, as if he were about to wrap himself in the cloak of Lazaro’s squire.

He was a cultural activist. His non-work was extensive and required a lot of attention and effort. It consisted in creating a network of communication among strangers with whom he ‘democratised’ – that is, shared – the burden of his livelihood. He would turn up at my place, usually just before lunch, with a book or two under his arm: one that he would be returning and the other, borrowed from another house, would be for me to read. Later, he would leave with a book of mine. He was quite good about borrowing and returning, and in fact provided a kind of socio-cultural service, for as a reader he had exquisite taste.

We would spend many afternoons strolling along the river or through the city before winding up in a bar. I would sometimes pay for him to come with me to the cinema or to musical shows or to a bullfight, but not always as he would occasionally obtain tickets by his own means. He was an excellent conversationalist and we talked about many things, especially literature and art. That was the nexus.

He even brought into his network a member of a prominent Sevillian aristocratic family. He didn’t boast about that particular friendship, perhaps because he didn’t get out of it as much as he did from some of his regular benefactors. But he wasn’t a gossip either. He shared some of his friends with me, like Jesús and Cristo. The other way around, however, was not possible: my friends didn’t see his funny side and they didn’t value his gift of the gab or his talent for living on air enough to buy him drinks or lunch. Perhaps they hadn’t read Lazarillo de Tormes as many times as I had.

Pretending to be a sparrow in a den of vampires is not such a bad thing with people and places being what they are. When he dies he won’t leave any polluting traces: an ecological sparrow, he lived off the surplus of others and he recycled: his clothes, his books, his hat – even his exquisite leather shoes, stolen from him one night as he slept out in the open on the banks of the Guadalquivir.

White roses in the Rubió i Lluch Gardens

Beauty is the sublimation of horror: that is made clear by both art and photojournalism.

The Rubió i Lluch Gardens, inside the old Hospital de la Santa Creu, are a large courtyard with trees and flowerbeds that opens onto several streets. The gardens are closed at night, but during the day fill with a motley crew of people: students from the nearby Escola Massana, users of the Biblioteca de Catalunya, tourists and locals, who come to play chess, walk the dog or read at the small tables of this sunlit open-air library. Others can be found hidden away in recesses drinking cheap alcohol, using drugs or sleeping off their misfortune. Arguments, loud voices and unpleasant odours are smothered by the intoxicating smell of marijuana. Orange trees and jacarandas, and white roses in flower- beds; wild roses with scant petals in symmetry with their surroundings, their delicate petals dropping at the slightest breeze. Not long ago, the flowerbeds near Carrer Hospital were removed, leaving these gardens all but mutilated. Gone are the reflection of my joy or my heavy heart that used to comfort me at the beginning and end of my day at the school where I work.

In the seventies, I used to live near those fluffy white roses that so caught my attention. The relevance of whether or not their stems had thorns was blurred by so many needles pricking arms. But then, as now, I would see in those white roses the image of human fragility, of our frustrated desires and inherited injustices.

Dog roses, wild rose bushes, girls, boys, women and men, humiliated and downtrodden. White roses that laid bare the red of the blood.

Rain

There are some places where rainfall does not clean. I am really not sure that it does in the Raval, for example. There, the balconies double as storage space for ambiguous-looking objects left exposed to the elements, to pigeons and to grimy pollution. They are even used as space for leaving rubbish when it is not taken down to the bin, which is why, whilst waiting, I tried to avoid the rainwater that dripped from above. The café where we had arranged to meet was still closed, so I stood in the shelter of a tiny doorway, wary of the murky raindrops falling around me.

And if you stepped on a broken or loose paving stone (and there are plenty of them), your leg would get spurted with a dark filthy liquid – ugh! I moved to one side. Two youths scurried past, oblivious to the rain and to me. They oozed energy – and violence: they embodied it and they irradiated it.Though they didn’t touch me, I sensed the vigour in their steps, their single-mindedness, their strength and their youth all offered up to life. And I said to myself: Look at you, waiting here, lost in thought. You think that because we all breathe this foul air we all belong to this hostile place; but no, be in no doubt: fortune looks different depending on where you stand.
‘Are they off to the metro to pick pockets?’ But my question was misguided because wherever it was they were going, that moment, as they walked and chatted and laughed, was entirely theirs: it belonged to them – and they hadn’t stolen it from anyone.

Winter

The same dark alleys, the same filthy corners. Overcrowded families? Yes. Abandoned? Also. A patch of sky at the top of a well that throws down a grey light onto the people living below: this is the Raval. Pockets of enduring deprivation and tourist flats, side by side. Poverty has always appealed to tourists with its characteristic colours and patterns – and because it shows a frightening truth that doesn’t affect them. Kernels of misery exist alongside splendid buildings and transparent occupants. But at certain times these same streets also turn into the natural habitat of clients on the hunt for all sorts of goods and services.

No daylight, pinched electricity and no toilets. No running water either? Presumably not. Why are youngsters filling plastic jerry cans with water from the fountain in Plaça del Pedró at sunrise if there is? Is water so expensive? Or is it that it doesn’t reach the squats, which offer only the shelter of walls and a roof?

Every morning you see wheelbarrows and big jerry cans being carted around by sleepy youngsters. Why would they do that if their homes had water? Pulleys hang from these tall buildings to raise and lower items and thus get around the problem of the narrow streets and steep stairs. But the dead – how do they come down? Whenever is convenient and under the cover of night. Rubbish continues to pile up in every corner, and in the early hours, you see cockroaches scuttling back into their hiding places. They don’t like the light – nor do rats.

We rush to work, feeling winter drawing in. Dawn brings despair to those who have slept outside and have nothing to eat for breakfast. For the rest of us, the day begins. Half asleep, the cold hits you as you head to work, having left your warm bed only moments before. You get asked if you can spare a coin for a coffee. Whether you give them one or not, nothing alleviates their distress, or yours. It’s worse than dodging cockroaches and mice: with those you don’t get involved, but walking past someone in winter who has slept badly and is asking for a hot drink is heart-breaking. Meanwhile, youngsters collect disappointments.

It wasn’t yet eight in the morning and the pavement was strewn with earth from a shattered flowerpot and several broken household items, which had fallen from a third floor: two men were fighting and shouting in what sounded like a domestic dispute, motivated perhaps by jealousy, nocturnal excess or force of habit. In the street there were some people wandering back home after a night out, and others heading to work, lamenting our warm beds while above us the quarrelling raged on and the police were arriving. In this neighbourhood this was a familiar scene.

The Raval remains closed and isolated yet permeable at the same time – it’s the survivor instinct that makes its success possible. The presence of tourists gives the impression that all is well – young, beautiful people who have a choice, who snack on those benches that stink of piss and shit as soon as the sun goes down. Can’t they smell it? No matter: it’s an experience that ends with a shower at the hotel. Water for everyone?

One beggar here, his trousers dirtied by daily incontinence; another there, his shirt stained with blood, gesturing vaguely... And mingling in between are backpackers and tourists on a shoestring, who face no greater risk than an untimely run to the toilet, their anti-diarrhoea pills at the ready and a warm shower and clean towels at their disposal back at the hotel.

Our school is now in Plaça de la Gardunya. I look up gardunya in the dictionary: ‘prison’. Bloody hell, before we were in a hospital and now we’re in a prison! If they move us again, we’d better be careful in case there’s a pattern here!

Life, and now too, life.
And Ch. without teeth

The front door is open, no bells, no buzzers. What front door is left open these days? Letterboxes hang open, the few letters inside callous bearers of threatening news. The staircase is small, shabby, even more than I remembered. The lightwell looks neglected, the windows are broken. I looked out, I could see some lights on: was that Gòtic Sud or still the Barrio Chino? On the second floor, in a room with the lightbulb permanently switched on, Ch. is sitting on a sofa in front of a television, her arms crossed. Life goes on. The Barrio Chino, a synonym of curiosity, posturing and an appetite for seeing abject poverty peppered with irritating voices and pungent smells.

‘How’s your fella?’
‘Died of lung cancer.’
‘Same here. My daughter’s dad...’

She was at home, in the house where we had lived together, where she had been queen, all might and splendour. I remember her thick, shiny, slicked-back hair, black as coal. And her high forehead. I remember her eyes: joyful, fiery; her fleshy red mouth and her perfect, snow-white teeth. I remember those mother-of-pearls breaking into a smile that ignited men.

I didn’t stay long. It was too much for us both. I felt I had invaded her privacy, even though there’d been a time when this wouldn’t have been a problem. ‘We’ll see each other again’, we said, and it’s true, we might.

For a while I thought about the welfare state. Who does it serve? Sitting there was poverty, of the kind you can no longer hide: her teeth were missing.

LIFE it was called then, and LIFE it is called now. Life, and now too, life.
Fabrics - Nuria Enguita, Laura Vallés Vílchez & Teresa Lanceta
Fabrics

Conversation between Teresa Lanceta, Nuria Enguita and Laura Vallés Vílchez

NE-LV You have talked about the idea of ‘open source’ in the context of weaving. Weaving is a binary code – warp and weft – which implies integrating an experience into an expanded conversation. It is also a universal code that records multiple happenings, develops ideas and conveys stories and moods, permitting both intimate and collective moments. The act of weaving is continually renewed and expanded, thereby generating other stories, landscapes and memories. The code is at the service of the collective, in which techne shows its importance. It is not about following the code, but about exploring its possibilities while integrating and broadening its limits.

TL I am interested in weaving as a technique, an ancestral technique that magnificently simplifies binary code, a system through which we recognise the world and shape our thoughts. I don’t know enough to be able to say whether the discovery of binary code was inevitable or whether it was a human decision that structured thought, and it could have developed differently. Does it reflect what already exists or does it create it? I have always been interested in human creation, which is why I’m so fascinated by binary code which is, ultimately, an open-source code. I fell captive to weaving too because of its hypnotic motion and its hold on time, and I did so totally and utterly, beyond results and consequences. In return, it has helped me penetrate unitary time, an expanded time that suffuses life and daily routines – a complete time, if you will. Weaving is a structural process that enables the simultaneous creation of language and object. It is a form of ‘speech’, but, above all, it is the human revelation of an arcanum.

NE-LV This constant work on the woven cloth as a universal code produces a split intimacy: ‘personal’ on the one hand, because of its connection to a living tradition that identifies with certain ways of thinking, living, loving and dying; and ‘cosmic’ on the other, because, as the philosopher Yuk Hui observes, every technique implies a cosmotechnics, understood as ‘the unification of the cosmos and the moral through technical activities, whether craft-making or art-making’.¹ Beyond a necessary functional aesthetic, weavings have a symbolic-expressive purpose and are therefore also carriers of memory. As you have often said, exploring primeval techniques connects us with the universe. It is the opposite of the notion of progress, which connects different historical eras and ways of life on a single spatio-temporal axis.

TL Weaving turned my attention away from the more groundbreaking art forms that dominated the early seventies, such as Conceptual Art. I appreciated how far-reaching the proposals of Conceptual Art were, especially in Catalonia, but I wanted to be elsewhere. Weaving raised other issues. And it was something people did all over the world and across all eras; it was collective and popular. I was quite sure I wouldn’t find any answers in the art of those years.

I talked about this in my first-ever piece of writing, La alfombra rusa, in 1982: the so-called ‘international art’ didn’t belong to everyone – at least it didn’t belong in the Barrio Chino, it didn’t belong to the beggars or to El Vaquilla. I’ve been in homes of the gauche divine – I would go with the gitanos when they’d been invited to sing – now that was truly international.

NE-LV Landscape is the first thing one recognises on a formal level in the works presented in this chapter. But, as you were saying, you also appear to incorporate a geometry that crosses different geographies and ways of doing: from British Op Art to the anonymous art of Berber women. It’s as if by just looking at the technique and materials you use in your structures of repetition – wool, cotton, viscose, jute and taffeta – one could almost put together a brief biography. Of course, paper is also an element of editing and assemblage. How did these materials make their way into your biography, into your life experience?

TL I didn’t focus on landscapes at first, only technique – pure, undiluted technique: one thread yes, one thread no. That’s the easiest way to weave without forcing a result. Horizontals and diagonals are easy to do. I began with this and then moved on to triangles. Triangles are familiar, universal shapes and immediately recognised as ornamentation. That’s why Bridget Riley triumphed with her geometries in the sixties: because everyone saw themselves in them. I went on to weave landscapes because I wanted the technique to respond as a medium and not serve itself, but that didn’t last long because when I focused on technique – in Marina (1983), Bonaire 46 (1983) and Bigna Kouni (1984), for example – I felt free. My contribution consisted in reaffirming what already existed: materials, traditions and techniques.

NE-LV The philosopher Isabelle Stengers talks of the ‘art of paying attention’, and indeed the type of gaze you describe is certainly attentive: it transcends the regime of judgement and accommodates the ‘other’ in quite a rare way, especially in the eighties when, as you say, the focus was elsewhere. This gaze, in contrast, sees weaving as a way of inhabiting the world and expanding time. We would like to reflect on this economy of attention of Stengers, as well as on the poetic economy defended by Jean-François Chevrier, which, like Filigrana’s observation, rejects the accumulation-capital binomial.² We find echoes of this deceleration in your approach to collaboration and teaching, two key aspects of your work. How do you think your attention has changed over the years, especially when screens seem to absorb all forms of curiosity?

TL A long time ago, in La Palma, I wrote that ‘life is rather like staring at something you can barely see’. Weaving permits a hypnotic gaze. Time is dilated, suspended, ecstatic. I compare it to prayer. We have lost prayer; we have ceased to believe. When I see someone deep in prayer, I feel a certain yearning. But I’m not a believer, and since I don’t believe, I can’t pray, practise yoga or meditate, but repetitive actions like weaving do come close to prayer.

Weaving is a form of meditation because it is a repetitive technique. And progress is so slow it frees up space in your head. I think that’s where the difference lies with respect to the economies of attention we get with technology. The act of weaving allows our thoughts to wander away from the specific and become diluted.

NE-LV We might say that it’s this dilution that opens up the imagination, whereas with the sort of concentration we get from screens, the path to imagination is in danger of narrowing. Apart from the suffixes, ‘ritual’ and ‘virtual’ share an ability to hone the senses.

¹ Yuk Hui, ‘Cosmotecnics as Cosmopolitics’, e-flux, no.86, November2 017.

² Jean-François Chevrier: ‘Intimidad territorial y espacio público’, Concreta, 02. Valencia: Editorial Concreta, 2013, pp. 4–22. English version: https:// archive-magazine.jeudepaume.org/2014/11/jean-francois-chevrier-territorial-intimacy-and-public-space-33/index.html
All That Magic. All that Magic: Teresa Lanceta Through the Radical Sonic Prism of Lester Bowie’s All the Magic. - Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
All That Magic. All that Magic: Teresa Lanceta Through the Radical Sonic Prism of Lester Bowie’s All the Magic.

‘Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps – because their footprints had been swept away. He explained to them that history was like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit.

And ancestors whispering inside. “To understand history,” Chacko said, “we have to go inside and listen to what they’re saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.”’¹

It’s a familiar scene, one in which we have all played a role at some point; but it’s also a scene that reflects a larger history of things, spaces and people. Taken from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, the passage recounts the visit by Miss Mitten, Baby Kochamma’s Australian born-again missionary friend, to Ayemenem, during which Miss Mitten ‘generously’ gifts Estha and Rahel a baby book – The Adventures of Susie Squirrel – which unfortunately rather offends the twins. To show their offence, and to Miss Mitten’s dissatisfaction and displeasure, the twins read the book forwards and then backwards: ‘ehT serutnevdA fo eisuS lerriuqS. enO gnirps gninrom eisuS lerriuqS ekow pu.’ When Miss Mitten complains to Baby Kochamma about the twins reading backwards, saying she has seen Satan in their eyes, the twins are punished with writing a hundred times: ‘In future we will not read backwards.’ So, when Miss Mitten is killed in a milk van accident some months later, the twins are convinced of the poetic justice of the accident, as the milk van was reversing when it knocked Miss Mitten down.

As children, if we spoke backwards, it was because we wanted to create a world that was inaccessible to the adults around us – a world only the initiated could enter; a world that chose language as a means not only of escape but also of rebellion against the too-often violent and oppressive world of adults. Beyond its role as a medium of communication, language is a space of belonging. We inhabit our languages as they inhabit us. When we are deprived of language, we create other-, sub-, proto-, subaltern-, pseudo-languages to exist in. The phenomenon of speaking backwards can be seen as a codified way of speaking back: speaking back to authority, back to the oppressor. And, paradoxically, this speaking back is all the more valuable because it is unintelligible to the majority society or the oppressors.

In France, for example, children living in the banlieue – the children and grand- and great grandchildren of migrants – whose parents were met with violence upon immigration, and who themselves were born into oppression, have found escape, resistance, and resilience in verlan, a kind of reverse language (a ‘vers langue’ or more literally l’envers – the inverse) which has strength, aesthetics and form. It has been noted that already in the nineteenth century, certain citizens considered criminals, social misfits, pariah, the subaltern, had adopted a kind of verlan to wrong-foot the authorities. But it wasn’t until the mid-1970s that these children of the banlieue really institutionalised verlan for their own purposes. With some gymnastics of the brain and tongue, they could, in real time, twist and reverse syllables of words and add extra letters. Verlan is not just great art, it’s also a marronage of sorts: an escape from the banality of normativity; an escape from the normativity of violence; an escape from the violence of the quotidian. And as soon as the majority society, the oppressor, learns verlan, i.e., as soon as the plantation owner finds the hide-out, it is time to escape again. Which is an inversion of an inversion. Verlan as a form of break-out. Speaking backwards as a multiple coding. This is how ‘femme’ became meuf in verlan and later, in a double cascade, feumeu – the verlan of the verlan, a re-vernalisation, or second reversal.

It is this space of coding and even double coding that interests me when I look at, or rather, listen to Teresa Lanceta’s work. Much has been written about the various types of weaving and about tapestry as a language. There is surely truth in that. But what interests me particularly is the space that the reversal of language, coding, double coding, weaving, and tapestry can be – literally and metaphorically. Weaving as verlan, as speaking backwards, and speaking back. But more on that in a moment.

When studying Teresa Lanceta’s work, I felt as if Lester Bowie’s sound had been invoked. Constantly. In particular, the album All the Magic. But it was not a sonic invocation like a soundtrack (Lester Bowie’s sonic sphere didn’t seem like a soundscape for Teresa Lanceta’s tapestry), but of something weirder: it seemed as if some of Lanceta’s works were notations or scores for All the Magic. Not just because of the magic in Lanceta’s work, but because of certain phrases, idioms, narrations, mind spaces and landscapes that both the sound and the tapestry evoked, in sync, as if interwoven. It seemed as if Lanceta were writing the score of Bowie’s music after the music had been made, or writing a musical notation that already existed in the noosphere. A kind of writing backwards. A kind of writing back.

One could even go so far as to say that besides weaving, many other art forms, like the blues and jazz are a kind of verlan too. As Amiri Baraka points out in Blues, Poetry, and the New Music, blues is ‘the basic national voice of the African American people. It is the fundamental verse form of the African/American slave going through successive transformations. Blues is African-American. The verse form of African American culture and language’. It follows, therefore, that the blues and its radical and more cryptic offspring jazz are spaces in which history is coded. Spaces where the word is more than the word, where every word potentially carries a world, and where every tone and every note is either a doorway to the vastness of the sea or a key that unlocks the immensely layered depths of African history – provided one finds the right lock. So, if blues is the first grade of reversal that makes the coding of the verlan possible, then jazz must be the secondary reversal that makes the further coding of the coded possible.

The prism through which I like to read, ehem, listen to the work of Teresa Lanceta in proximity to, and in juxtaposition with Lester Bowie, is one that considers the verlanisation in textiles and music in general, and in jazz in particular, via atonality and pluriversality, as stretched harmonies, as polyrhythmic and even arrhythmic, polysyllabic and melismatic structures – that is, tools through which histories have been written and coded, and devices that allow the decoding and articulation of these histories. This is a call to see and listen to music in the lines, curves, waves, dots, stars, crosses, arrows and many other signs and symbols that figure in Lanceta’s tapestries. This is a call to hear the rumours, gossip, stories, kongossa, plots, joys and furies that manifest themselves as colour patches and spectra in Lanceta’s tapestries. This is a call to eavesdrop on the pluriversal epistemologies that Berber women have woven into their creations since time immemorial, and that Lanceta has, through her own practice of listening over the decades, adopted and further incorporated into her own tapestries. This is a call to listen in to the voices of generations, absorb the manifestations of civilisations, the embodiment of sciences and technologies, and the politics of societies and their cosmogonies in music and in tapestry. Every thread interlaced with another is a fibre of history woven into another; and this connection produces a sonic spark.

There is music
sometimes
in lonely
shadows
blue music
sometimes
purple music
black music
red music
but these are left from crowds
of people
listening and singing
from generation
to generation

All the civilizations humans have built
(speed us up we look like ants)
our whole lives lived in an inch
or two. And those few seconds
that we breathe

in that incredible speed
blurs of sight and sound
the wind’s theories.²

Act I: ‘For Louie’. La red de San Luis

Louis Armstrong’s 1956 visit to Ghana on American journalist Edward R. Murrow’s instigation can be considered as one of the most spectacular visits to Ghana anyone has ever made. If the term homecoming ever signified anything, then that visit surely epitomized the term. When Satchmo landed, he was greeted by the sound of legendary Highlife musician E.T. Mensah’s All for You, and women, men, children and people of all walks of life flocked to see their long-lost cousin return home. From the airport to Accra city centre, crowds jam-packed the streets, singing and escorting the great and charismatic Satchmo & His All-Stars and his wife Lucille on their very first visit to Africa. Louis Armstrong played to a crowd of more than 100,000 people, among whom was the Ghanaian Prime Minister and independence leader Kwame Nkrumah, and to him he dedicated the Fats Waller classic Black and Blue: ‘Cold empty bed, springs hard as lead / Feel like old Ned, wished I was dead / What did I do to be so black and blue? / Even the mouse ran from my house / They laugh at you, and scorn you too / What did I do to be so black and blue?’ The history of the world of the past 500 years compressed into a song only a few minutes long. And in tones of black and blue it criss-crosses through Lanceta’s La red de San Luis (1991, p. 140).

Some memories cannot be locked up within the space of the intangible. Some memories must take the form of landscapes, rivers, hills and mountain ranges, especially if they are of larger-than-life figures, of gigantic beings like Satchmo, St. Louis, Louie, Louis Armstrong, or if they are of distinctive places like Plaza Red de San Luis.

Lanceta’s La red de San Luis could be the sound waves coming out of Bowie’s or even Satchmo’s horn. But if we stay true to the notion of reversal, to the notation that is written independently of and subsequently to the music, then La red de San Luis could be the score from which Bowie had unconsciously played the tribute to Louie. The gentle and subtle blowing at the beginning of For Louie announces the coming and being of majesty. Sometimes rusty and cautious like some of the sky blue waves flowing longitudinally in La red de San Luis, the guiding waves of the horn, in contrast, are the oxblood red undulations that boldly carve their way through the landscape, only interjected by the beats of the drum, and the keys must also find their way latitudinally across that same landscape. But it is this crossing that informs and marks this portrait. The magic is in Lanceta’s disruption of the sinuous wave patterns and in Bowie doing gymnastics with his breath. In the regulation of air, but also in the tapping of air from deep within the bowels only to press it out through the funnel of his horn. In the middle of this sonic journey, this praise song, this sonic weaving of memories, Fontella Bass and David Peaston sing out loud as if to remind us ‘there was a man. Great man from New Orleans. Some call him Satchmo. Or just plain Louie. Maaaaaan could he blow some horn. I still feel it, feel it, feel it all around. I say Louie you lay deep in our heart. And this song is for you. When he played his music, you could hear it all over town, in smoke filled places, his sound is still right there.’ And it is this ‘still thereness,’ this ability of people, their energies and their sounds, to occupy and mark spaces that makes major crossroads – smoked filled spaces or otherwise – what they are.

Crossroads are where spirits intersect and interact with each other, and it’s no wonder that in Yoruba cosmogony, the trickster god Eshu (Elegba) is not only the mediator of life’s transitions, the messenger between humans and orishas, but also the guardian of crossroads. This is no different from the Plaza Red de San Luis in Madrid, for example, or any other red (literally translated from Spanish as ‘network’ or, in this case, confluence of many streets). In Lanceta’s La red de San Luis the streets fluctuate across each other to create a mesh of networks, like a fishing net, a captor of spirits afloat.

Act II: ‘Spacehead’. Jacob soñó. ‘Down Home’

‘And Jacob went out from Beersheba, and went toward Haran.

And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep.

And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.

And, behold, the Lord stood above it, and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed;

And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.

And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.

And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.

And he was afraid, and said, how dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.

And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it.

And he called the name of that place Bethel: but the name of that city was called Luz at the first.’³

The questions of why we dream, why we dream what we dream, and what our dreams mean have intrigued humankind since the beginning. Dreams are the stuff of some of the greatest mysteries on which religions and societies have been built, and the grounds on which wars and peace treaties have germinated. Dreams have also provided some of the most important raw material for scientists of all disciplines and artists of all generations and times, mediums and denominations. In the Abrahamic religions, one of the most widely known dreams is the dream of Jacob, dating from the genesis of time. For almost 3,000 years, philosophers and theologians have tried to unpack, signify, interpret, and create associations between the dream of Jacob and the ladder at the centre of the narrative. If one believes Philo of Alexandria’s (c. 20 BCE – c. 50 CE) deliberations and varying interpretations in De somniis, the ladder in the dream is the human soul, the souls ascending from and descending into bodies, and the dream might reveal virtues/ups and sins/downs in life; or the angels might signify human beings’ changing relations.⁴ But this is just one of countless other readings. The history of art is awash with paintings of Jacob, his dream, the ladder, the angels and stone, with each generation projecting its notions of love, place, spirituality and even anxiety into them. From Giorgio Vasari’s Jacob’s Dream for the Florentine Marsilio degli Albizi in 1558, to Domenico

Feti’s Jacob’s Dream (1613), Jusepe de Ribera’s Jacob’s Dream (1639), Ary de Vois’ Jacob’s Dream (1660‒1680) and William Blake’s Jacob’s Ladder (1799‒1806), it is as if to qualify as an artist one had to re-imagine Jacob’s dream, and even dream it again with Jacob!

Teresa Lanceta’s own interpretation of Jacob’s dream is the piece Jacob soñó (1984, p. 106). If ever a tapestry was a painting, then it is this – and it is an abstract painting too. But there is a twist in the tale in Lanceta’s Jacob soñó in the use of the tenses: Jacob doesn’t dream, he dreamt. What seems to be a relegation to the past is more an arching of the bow of time to make the past continuous. In the symbol-laden tapestry, the ladder is in the centre and stretches up from the earth into a place unknown, and we see universal symbols, like the key and the triangle (which, depending on its shape and direction in alchemy could be a signifier for air, water or fire); and Amazigh Berber symbols, like the eye and the various stars, the meanings of which lie deep in the ‘archives’ of Berber women, the bearers and transmitters of knowledge. As with verlan, if you are not initiated, the words you hear might lead you down false paths. So a symbol that looks like a house in Lanceta’s Jacob soñó could actually represent the house of God and the gateway to heaven as dreamt by Jacob in the sense of the Abrahamic religions; or it could represent any other spiritual or occultist understanding held by any of the world’s peoples.

But what if one could translate Lanceta’s interpretation of Jacob’s dream into the sonic? Wouldn’t it sound like Lester Bowie’s Spacehead? The flashes of the keys and steel at the beginning could be the readings of the stars, and the horn and organ could be the slow then hectic ascension of the stairs. The percussive interjections might be the angels’ doubts as they make their way up and down the ladder, wondering where it is taking them. But Space- head is also as magnificent an exposé of the mind in a state of wild dreaming as that dream of Jacob’s in Genesis. It is topsy-turvy. There are moments of despair, with Jacob wondering why he and the angels are endlessly climbing this ladder. The piano conveys the repetitiveness of this ceaseless climb, and Bowie on his horn lays bare the exhaustion, the desire to quit, the fear of giving up, the long- ing to see the light at the end of the tunnel or the top of the ladder. Then with much gentility he brings us down at the end to the moment of awakening in which we realise it was all just a dream. But one with a longlasting impact.

Act III: ‘Ghosts’. Magdalena. Magdalena (multiplicada). Domingo. Última copa

In 2004, Teresa Lanceta embarks on a series of coloured pencil drawings on paper that capture the ghostly beauty of the apparitional experience. In Vodou cosmogony, the ghost is often likened to a lwa, a spirit that serves as an intermediary between humans and the Bondyé. It is said that there are more than a thousand different apparitions or manifestations of the lwa, each of them with their own personality and purpose. It is when humans are dreaming or participating in rituals and divinations that the lwa work their magic, healing, alleviating worries and offering advice. Vodou, practised in Haiti and beyond, is a weave of spiritual practices that originated under Spanish enslavement when people and their religions were brought to the so-called New World from the west coast of Central Africa and the Bight of Benin, and ethnic groups such as the Yoruba, Fon and Ewe were forcibly baptised into the Christian faith by Roman Catholic missionaries.⁵

In this series of drawings by Lanceta – which in- cludes Magdalena (2004, p. 232), Magdalena (multiplicada) (2004, p. 230), Domingo (2004, p. 234), and Última copa (2004, p. 235), among many others – one is tempted to ask which of the lwa has possessed the people portrayed? What is the lwa channelling into these people and through Teresa Lanceta? And what about these ritual spaces they occupy, with their signs and symbols that only the initi- ated can comprehend?

‘A Vodou ceremony involves song and dance for hours and is used to serve and offer the lwa food and drink, receive council from them and keep the social fab- ric functional. It may take hours for an initiate to dance him- or herself into trance,⁶ a prerequisite for a lwa to appear in the head of a serviteur by possession. Whenever a lwa rises up through the feet of a serviteur, the person being ridden by the lwa will change cadence and speech pattern, the style of dance, gestures and countenance to the appearance linked to the lwa. The serviteur will also ask for clothes, food, drink and luxuries ascribed to the lwa according to its ascribed nationality.’⁷ ⁸

Lester Bowie’s Ghosts could just be one of those songs that accompany this ritual; that invite the lwa to take possession of the body. Bowie begins with something like a summoning of the spirits with his horn. It is an alluring, seductive and captivating displacement of air from the player’s body through the lwa into the ears and body of the listener. It is a familiar sound, for it is a sound of the wind and the birds. It is a familiar sound, for it is the sound of the jinn leaving the bottle. Then, Bowie guides you with his horn into the dancing as the prerequisite of the transition. It is here that all the valves open up to let the lwa in.

The spaces that Lanceta has created in this series of drawings are reminiscent of Mudejar carpets and floor, wall and ceiling gardens; and of silos in which not grains, but symbols, are stored along with the secrets of the world. It is in such spaces that the lwa gain access and that Magdalena and Domingo have been ideally placed to have a last drink before the transition.

Act IV: ‘Trans Traditional Suite’. Navajo I

The spiritual wellbeing of the Navajo people is said to be informed by practices that offer vitality and healing. Examples of this are the Night ceremony, the Blessing Way ceremony, the Enemy Way Ceremony, the Girl’s Dance (the Squaw Dance), the Navajo House Blessing Ceremony and the First Laugh Ceremony, amongst others.⁹ A core element of many of these ceremonies is the notion of transformation: the possibility of migrating spiritually, physically, emotionally, psychologically from one state to another. In the Night Chant (Yeibitchai Dance), for example, as Washington Matthews describes in his 1902 book The Night Chant,¹⁰ a ritual lasting nine nights is performed to cure the community of its ills and restore balance among the people and among humans and the universe. Over the course of the nine nights, four rites are performed – In the Rocks (Tseh’nn-jihHatal’), from the Timber (Tsin-tzahn’jihHatal’), Danced Across the River (Klay-chah’jihHatal’), Big God Chant (Hash’jaytso’hihHatal’) – and by implementing shock and arousal techniques, through sand painting, singing and praying, diseases are eliminated, transformation takes place, and balance within and without is restored.

There are many transformations in Teresa Lanceta’s Navajo I (1990, p. 142). Small waves become large waves, then small squares making chequered patterns (this chessboard-like Amazigh symbol is associated with celestial experiences and religious trances) become larger, then become hills and mountains, a cross, and ultimately straight lines to infinity. There is also a transition in terms of density, with the left half of the fabric dense, frenzied and with a ‘thinking’ rhythm, while the right is spacious, quieter, pensive and less intense.

Deep within Lester Bowie’s Trans Traditional Suite, a voice emerges, chanting ‘everything must change, nothing stays the same, everything must change, nothing stays the same [...], mysteries do unfold, never much too soon, nothing stays the same, there are not many things in life you can be sure of, except rainfall from the sky, the sunlight of the sky, and hummingbirds just fly, everything must change, nothing, no one remains the same, everyone must change, nothing stays the same, there are not many things in life you can be sure of, except rainfall from the sky, the sunlight of the skies and hummingbirds just fly.’ The transformation in Bowie’s piece is spiritual but essentially political too. Every note, every sound made, every drop of air squeezed through the horn, every drum beat, and piano key hit is political. And like Lanceta’s Navajo I, Bowie’s Trans Traditional Suite exudes the spirit of change. No one will oppress or be oppressed ever again. Change is imminent. Change is constant. Change is the only religion. And as Octavia Butler writes through Lauren Oya Olamina’s religion Earthseed in her novel Parable of the Sower:

Consider: Whether you’re a human being, an insect, a microbe, or a stone, this verse is true.
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.¹¹

Act V: ‘Organic Echo 1, 2’. Subían y bajaban

Subían y bajaban (1987, p. 110) is another of those wellcomposed confluences of Amazigh symbols. Before digging deep into a reading of this particular verlan, one can immediately see hints of the most organic elements around us: water, sky, sunlight and, in the middle, the human being, almost suppliant, with so many other organic forces around. The fabric is a narrational piece told in the language of abstraction, and while we can understand some of the signs and symbols, the general narrative stays within that space of double coding.

The title of the fabric, Subían y bajaban, literally translates as ‘They went up and down’, which invites speculation as to who ‘they’ are here and what the context is. With the reappearance of the ladder, one is tempted to think again of Jacob’s dream. Is ‘they’ in ‘They went up and down’ a metaphor for the rise and fall of Christianity? Or is it a metaphor for the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula – Hispania – by the Umayyad in 711 and the Reconquista of Granada by the Christians in 1492? Or is it a metaphor for Spanish colonisation and the active expansion of the Spanish empire between 1493 and 1898 and the loss, much later, of the Spanish Sahara in 1976? Or is it a metaphor for the rise and fall of the dictator Francisco Franco, between 1939 and 1975? Indeed, the ‘they’ could be a metaphor for everything and nothing.

On the other hand, the Amazigh symbols in this abstract-narrative composition speak loud and clear. Obviously, there is more than meets the eye, but one can see the Finger, which is said to be a symbol of protection; the Scissors, a symbol of ghost-fearing metalworkers; the Chessboard, symbol of celestial experiences; the Snake, symbol of holiness as well as healing, and the Lozenge, which symbolises womanhood and fertility. With these pillars, the reader of the work can construct a universe.

The universe that Lester Bowie conjures for us is the universe of the Organic Echo. As they say, ‘As you make your bed, so shall you lie in it.’ That might be the organic echo. The karma. What goes up must come down. Bowie’s Organic Echo is a kind of a dirge. A solemn and beautiful, hearty and at the same time vast – vast like the Sahara – companionate exposé. It is deeply melancholic but also celebratory: it celebrates life beyond human life and the profundity of the lives that enable our own – the many other beings in this universe whose presence and activity allow humans to live on, despite all odds. The sounds of Bowie’s horn are as capacious as the spaces they accommodate and the emotions they evoke. Towards the end of Organic Echo 1 the temperament changes to a warning, a caution, as if to say: They went up and down. Organic Echo 2 is a continuation of the voluminousness of Subían y bajaban. Bowie’s trumpet seems to caress the surfaces and curves of each wave in Lanceta’s work. The sound seems to produce even more ripples and suddenly the blue bubbles in the fabric acquire new meanings. At intervals, Organic Echo 2 is punctuated with despair and struggles to find faith and solace, as the burden of history is sometimes too much even for the piano keys to carry.

For more than four decades, Lanceta has used the medium of weaving to pack histories into symbols and unpack histories from crevices and vaults of the past. For history is not of the past but of the present. If history is like an old house at night, with all the lamps lit and the ancestors whispering inside, as Arundhati Roy reveals to us via Chacko; and if to understand history we have to go inside and listen to what they’re saying and look at the books and the pictures on the wall, and smell the smells, then Teresa Lanceta’s work has shown us the way into that old house, given us the tools and sensibilities to see, smell, listen to the props of history. And even more especially, Lanceta’s work has given us the means, like the many Berber women weavers before her, to encode histories, so that those who have historically banalised and perverted histories will have difficulty accessing this knowledge, as they can only understand forward language, while we have learned to communicate backwards through the process of verlanisation and double verlanisation.

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung is writer, curator, and the director at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt‒HKW in Berlin.

¹ Arundhati Roy: The God of Small Things. London: Harper Collins, 1997.

² Amiri Baraka: ‘Ballade Air and Fire’, S O S: Poems 1961–2013.New York: Grove Press, 2016, p. 527.

³ Genesis28:10–19. King James Version (KJV). https://www.biblegateway.com.

⁴ Mark Verman: ‘Reincarnation in Jewish Mysticism and Gnosticism (review)’, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 173–75, 2005.

⁵ Julia Pfeifer: ‘The Loa as Ghosts in Haitian Vodou’, Ghosts – or the (Nearly) Invisible. Spectral Phenomena in Literature and the Media by Maria Fleischhack and Elmar Schenkel (eds.). Bristol: Peter Lang, 2016.

⁶ Alfred Metraux: Voodoo in Haiti (Merlin’s Bibliothek der Geheimen Wissenschaften und Magischen Künste), vol. 9 [trad. Isotta Meyer]. Gifkendorf: Merlin Verlag, 1998.

⁷ Maya Deren: Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. New York: McPherson & Company, 2004.

⁸ Julia Pfeifer, op. cit.

⁹ https://native-americans-navajo.fandom.com/wiki/Ceremonies.

¹⁰ Washington Matthews: The Night Chant: A Navaho ceremony. New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1902.

¹¹ Octavia E. Butler: Parable of the Sower. New York: Four Walls. Eight Windows, 1993.
Don’t buy the hours - Nuria Enguita, Laura Vallés Vílchez & Teresa Lanceta
Don’t buy the hours

Conversation between Teresa Lanceta, Nuria Enguita and Laura Vallés Vílchez.

NE-LV In your work two ideas stand out in particular. One is that of labour: of approaching work from the perspective of a technique and a time traditionally associated with women and in direct opposition to Fordism. In other words, more than productivity, it’s about how to turn working time into a space for enjoyment, into an intimate space of one’s own. And the other idea, inspired by the anonymous lineages of women weavers, is that performativity is durational – and you felt this at a time, the seventies, when happenings and performances were leading to the dematerialisation of art. Nonetheless, you defined your relationship with action and performativity through flamenco, tours and street life. Working and performative experiences transcend the materiality of an object, which is why we can consider weaving from a choreographic point of view too.

TL All action is subject to time. Weaving requires a time that extends into everyday life. In this sense, I think that a beautiful rug should be considered as a unit of time and not reduced to a tally of the hours it took to make or a commodity. A rug is conceived and experienced well beyond the hours it has been on the loom. To buy hours is to steal a time that belongs to us, and this is especially so now that tourism has caught the consumerist bug. Weaving means a slowness of action, a recognition by the conscious body of learnt motions that happen by themselves: a repetition of gestures by a choreographic body that leads to a state of introspection and cogitation that doesn’t have to be productive.

I discovered a counterpoint to this activity in the voice: in the late nineties I produced short spontaneous oral pieces that gave rise to the text Adiós al rombo. Rosas blancas (Farewell to the Rhombus. White Roses). And I recently recorded some audios based on stories about the Raval.

NE-LV The subject of creative technique leads us to the woven fabrics of the Middle Atlas, which you discovered though books and via the Dutch traveller Bert Flint, a great admirer of Moroccan culture. It was during this long initiation that your idea of weaving as an open code intensified, as did your criticism of the West’s unfair treatment of the ornamental arts as lesser arts, which opened your eyes to the impossibility of maintaining an ancestral art within the capitalist system, where the abstraction of money, the measurement of time, the exploitation of resources, cheap labour and the extraction of raw materials have combined to bring about the disappearance of so many cosmotechnics. You began what we might call, with the perspective of time, an investigation into the weavings of the Berber women of the Middle Atlas.

TL I met Bert in 1982. I was interested in his rug collection, so I sent him a letter with photographs of my weavings, and he immediately responded with a telegram: ‘Letter coming.’ In it he said that he wasn’t so familiar with the technical aspects and invited me to be his travel mate, but it had to be just us, as he feared we would be distracted by other people with other interests. I had no idea who he was or what he did for a living, and he didn’t know me. We travelled extensively and it was great fun. We realised we were made for each other: we had the same obsessions and fears, the same passions. Bert wanted to know who made these objects he loved so much and so, with him, many doors were opened. People would laugh at us because when we asked who had made such and such a piece, the men would say, ‘Women’, and so Bert would say, ‘Well, let’s get the women here, and we will pay them!’ Happenings and laughter combined. He wouldn’t pay the men, although I suspect the money changed hands once we’d left. I recount some of these experiences in White Roses (p. 181) and Estampas marruecas, and he wrote a text too (p. 161), in which his love for this land really comes through.

NE-LV What especially drew you to weaving was its materiality, its structure, and its ability to narrate something, more than its feminist connection. Bert Flint was interested by how it translated ancestral forms. As Europeans, you both found a way of exploring a class of beauty that was not recognised as such, as an ornamental beauty. In general, Europeans didn’t think weaving was on a par with painting, and locals didn’t claim the legacy of a tradition they considered outdated.

TL Bert’s museum in Marrakesh, Tiskiwin, arose precisely out of the desire to make this legacy visible. Bert’s entire collection is in it, the work of a lifetime spent in pursuit of an idea outside the canon, which was to show the art in the craftsmanship, tradition and ornamentation of the territories bordering the Sahara. His museum shows the Saharan diaspora and Morocco’s ‘African root’, aspects highlighted today by authorities such as Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (who writes in this publication, p. 111), Grada Kilomba, and Ibrahim Mahama, who spread these roots into other continents and cultures – like those who arrive apparently with nothing.

NE-LV After those trips and still in the Middle Atlas, you began work on various pieces that would later form a corpus of work and be shown in three exhibitions: La alfombra roja (1989), Tejidos marroquíes (2000) and Adiós al rombo (2016). In acknowledgement of an incredibly rich tradition, you always take as your starting point an original Middle Atlas weave. The women weavers already translated the technique – what you set out to do is to show, as they did, that it is possible to expand a tradition and create a language of one’s own.

TL In the mid-1980s I started my project on the Middle Atlas weavings. I decided intuitively that I was going to develop it in three phases and that the original fabric would be the guide and nexus to the textile tradition. In other words, a traditional weaving of my choice would direct my work, and both pieces would be shown together in exhibitions and in publications. These intuitive ideas have produced a theoretical development far more fruitful than I could ever have imagined: immersion into an uninherited textile tradition.

The first exhibition, La alfombra roja, was held at the Museu Tèxtil i d’Indumentària in Barcelona in 1989. I focused on void as opposed to complex ornamentation. Void allows motifs to be seen in isolation, in contrast with the originals where what prevails are the relationships established by the net-like pattern. I chose eminently textile drawings. The second exhibition, Tejidos marroquíes, was held at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, and at the Ville des Arts in Rabat, in 2000. The originals, loaned from the Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, the Louvre and the Bert Flint collection, were exhibited in the same museum as Guernica – after all, they are extraordinary and contemporaneous with Picasso. My work mirrored the format of the handiras, cushions and hanbels. In the third, Adiós al rombo, shown at La Casa Encendida in Madrid and at Azkuna Zentroa in Bilbao, in 2016, and at the Venice Biennale in 2017, I said goodbye to the image... but then people appeared, and with them invitations and collaborations that have given rise to several shared authorship projects.

Bert Flint and Teresa Lanceta, Marrakech, 1999.
The Aït Ouarherda Weavers - Bert Flint
The Aït Ouarherda Weavers

Bert Flint writes about textile pieces made in 1999 in a village in the southern foothills of the Mount Siroua massif by two women members of the Aït Ouarherda tribe, belonging to the old confederation of Berber tribes known as Aït Ouaouzguite.

I

The Aït Ouaouzguite are part of the sedentary Berber peoples, the Masmuda, who in Roman times still occupied the whole of present-day Morocco before the entry of the nomadic Zenete and Sanhaja tribes, also Berber, in the third and sixth centuries, and of the nomadic Arab Banu Hilal and Banu Maqil tribes from the twelfth century onwards.

The lambs of the Aït Ouaouzguite give a rich wool to which the women of the tribe add value by producing fabrics and carpets, the sale of which supplements the meagre income supplied by farming. We can imagine that the Aït Ouaouzguite have a long tradition of making carpets, cereal sacks and other textile items which they then barter for food at annual markets, particularly for the dates produced by the villages of the pre-Saharan oases. The most important of these markets was organised by the descendants of the patron saint Sidi Mhando Yacoub in Imi n’Tatelt.

The incorporation in the late nineteenth century of the Aït Ouaouzguite lands into the governorship of the Marrakesh pasha provided a new outlet for the tribe’s production in the city’s carpet and textile market. The fact that this was an all-year market also helped, undoubtedly, to rationalise and enlarge their output.

This ongoing contact with the Marrakesh market enlightened the weavers to customer preferences for symmetrical designs, particular sizes, etc. The application of double symmetry without cartoons or stand ard motifs, along the lines of Oriental carpets, requires enormous mental discipline on the part of the weaver, but does not necessarily impose any change in sensibility. How else can we explain the ability of the Siroua weavers to break so radically with the decorative model of the Taznakht rugs in Marrakesh and other urban markets?

We might wonder what part of their tradition has inspired such a complex language of forms, and how they have developed the expressiveness needed to so skilfully execute compositions combining technical complexity with stunning creativity.

The answer becomes clearer if we shift this question to the linguistic sphere. In the south-west area of Souss, the learning of Arabic, however perfectly accomplished, has never truly displaced the region’s cultural heritage, which is based on the Berber tradition. It seems rather that learning Arabic has enriched this heritage without affecting its character and spirit, defined as always by the practice of traditional agriculture and cattle farming, combined with the enterprising spirit developed through trade and artistic activities.

While Moroccan city dwellers have never shown the slightest interest in the art of the rural world, the traders and antiquarians of the country’s tourist centres have long been aware of the attraction it holds for an international public. In the case of Siroua, the weavers themselves have a large say in commercialisation because traders depend on their creativity to keep the market buoyant.

This creativity draws on the wealth of the Berber artistic legacy, but is also reinforced and stimulated by the free market forces at work in Marrakesh, where traders are so well attuned to an increasingly sophisticated international audience, that they eagerly seize on anything innovative or startling.

The first-time appearance of an old carpet style or some original new creation meeting with large bids in the Marrakesh auction sends buyers flocking to the distant mountains in search of similar pieces of work. Or else the Siroua men transporting the goods to Marrakesh later report back to the village weavers on the carpets that have sold the best.

The weavers, attentive to this market feedback, have learned that certain aspects of their domestic production are held in particularly high esteem. And this encourages them to approach the market showing their own peasant roots, rather than in urban guise as in the past, when Marrakesh trading was geared to a national clientele.

Like the mother tongue of the region, the carpets and textiles made for household use conserve the ancestral Berber tradition. International recognition of this heritage has given weavers the confidence to include it in their commercial output.

At this stage, it may be worth looking at the aspects of traditional Siroua home fabrics manufacture that have allowed the makers of these two works to blur the dividing line between tradition and modernity. Firstly, in the most appreciated textiles made solely for family or village consumption, we can detect an almost systematic use of dissymmetry.

This dissymmetry, frequently set in a tripartite framework, could well reflect a collective mindset. This seems all the more plausible given that the door decorations found in the Nfis Valley in the High Atlas show the same kind of arrangement. Fatima applies this dissymmetry to remarkably forceful effect.

Secondly, other textiles for strictly personal use, notably the blankets exhibited here, display an equally intense and individual sensibility. As these blankets were not made to be ceremonially presented at a wedding, like the Zemmour pieces for instance, their decoration is not drawn from the alphabet of collective forms. We can imagine, rather, that their makers have given full vent to a dreamlike state in which tender or sensual feelings are expressed through gestures and caresses, rather than an articulated language.

Reduced to using undyed yarns, probably for economic reasons, the weavers have had to observe and exploit the subtle hues of the natural wool. And these hues have proved a more expressive vehicle for their feelings and sentiments than the brighter dyed wool colours, more appropriate, it seems, for the art of seduction and the commercial side. Although budgetary constraints (the prohibition on wasting dyes) and the resources available (environment and ways of life) are what have mainly dictated these fabrics’ materials, the weaver’s hand brings to them, amid these unyielding mountains, the expression of a personal sensibility one might think the exclusive domain of fiercely individualistic societies.

II

One piece remains to be discussed among the items made for personal use or local sale: the traditional cape or burnous (here termed ‘akhnif’) still worn today by Ourika Valley shepherds on the High Atlas’s northern slopes. The decoration, woven onto the lower part of the cloak, was interpreted at the start of the twentieth century (Westmarck) as an eye to ward off the evil eye. The Aït Ouarherda from the southern slopes of the Siroua massif have made exquisite decorative play of this motif, and their akhnifs are eagerly sought after by collectors and antiquarians.

As older specimens soon became thin on the ground, the Aït Ouarherda weavers decided fifty years ago to resume their production for the tourist market. The high sales brought by their flamboyant design has undoubtedly encouraged today’s weavers to overload the akhnif with hastily executed embroidery far removed from the delicacy and proportion of the original capes. The public’s fondness for this embroidering, on a red or orange dyed background, persuaded some weavers to repeat its use in the pieces known as ‘Glaoua’ (combining knotting and plain weave in a single carpet or fabric). So successful was this formula that the name ‘akhnif’ is now given to this new type of embroidered carpet rather than the traditional man’s cape.

Our two exhibits are called akhnif because of this embroidering. But their connection with the cape is not restricted to a few embroidered motifs. In the work of Bahma, the oval shape of the original eye is conserved as a leitmotiv, giving unity to a composition traversed in the middle by a curious horizontal wave.

The piece by Fatima is a complex work enshrining a synthesis, at once masterly and moving, between the elements found in private or household output: dissymmetry, personal expression and the formal and technical language of the traditional akhnif.

Neither of these textiles can be described as a carpet or bed covering, i.e. as utilitarian items. Undoubtedly, contact with the Marrakesh market has released the two weavers from the at times constrictive demands of functionality. Perhaps it is precisely through this move away from the utilitarian that our weavers have been able to fold traditional styles so harmoniously into distinctively modern works.

Might we be seeing the simultaneous emergence of the work of art and the individual in a still largely traditional world?

Bert Flint is a self-taught cultural anthropologist. Founder of the Tiskiwin Museum in Marrakesh.

This essay was first published in the catalogue Tejidos marroquíes. Teresa Lanceta. The exhibition was held in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, in Madrid, from 1 February to 3 May 2000.
White roses - Teresa Lanceta
White roses

These writings are recollections of the trips Teresa Lanceta made from 2009 to 2015 in search of women weavers, including those she came to know only through the textiles they had made. They are records that stem from oral accounts of the times, places and people that welcomed her in and of the things she experienced, heard and felt.

THE BENI OUARAIN HANDIRA

Capes or handiras in the Middle Atlas

In the Middle Atlas mountains, Aït Ouarain women inherit a zealously guarded textile tradition that, when mastered, allows them to make decisions that render each of their fabrics unique.

Handiras are lengths of woven wool that women wrap about themselves like a cape. These garments protect them from the harshness of winter, and their patterns, composition and colours identify the wearers as members of a particular social and ethnic group. The visual language of handiras is astonishing: from a distance, a handira may seem like a monotonous succession of stripes, but a close and careful inspection reveals a vibrant geometry in constant motion, as the fine, intricate patterns contain a wealth of barely perceptible variations that create shifting points of interest and endless interrelations.

I own three handiras. They are not antiques or collector’s items. Even so, I hold them in high esteem. As commodities, these handiras were subject to an undeniably inequitable economic exchange. I paid what the market stipulated, knowing that the market is a convention that does not take into account the fair value of labour and that commercial transactions are not usually conducted with honest scales: what for some is an advantage they are unwilling (or unable) to decline is for others an imposition from which they are unable to escape. In exchange for very little money, woven fabrics and all kinds of valuable items travel far from where they were made, and when they change hands, their function and meaning change as well. Heritage and youth: the most precious assets are constantly being absorbed by the dominant world.

The ermine cape, a symbol of royalty. The body as a usurped, vacant public space

In a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, a young woman holds an ermine in her arms.¹ It is the last living ermine, at least in the history of art. Thereafter it merely served to frame the faces of various ladies, as in the portrait by El Greco that inspired the Spanish film La dama del armiño,² the title and plot of which were then taken up by Ernst Lubitsch.³ Thus, since Leonardo, all ermines have been skinned to flaunt the power and prestige of their wearers, as is also the case in fairy tales involving evil stepmothers and paunchy and unscrupulous versions of King Midas.

Furs are still used today, even in mild winter climates, although ermines have been replaced by farmed mink. But lo and behold, on 30 April 2013 we received reports of the coronation of the king and queen of Holland and the return of the ermine, this time in the form of a cape – again, a fairy tale. Oh, Holland, you who are so admired for your social progress, for your defence of human rights, your respect for the environment, your bicycles and canals! Now you offer us a monarch cloaked in ermine! Holland, seat of the United Nations International Court of Justice, you who have efficiently separated the marijuana market from that of hard drugs! Oh, Holland, you who turned flowers into currency and Amsterdam into the city of everyone’s dreams, you crown your king with ermine capes!

Online we see a static image of that event. In it, the new monarchs, accompanied by a host of international royal guests, pose suspended in a fictitious instant, so long it cannot possibly exist, freezing the moment as only photography and blue blood heirs – who have made the act of inheriting eternal – can do. In that photograph the royals, like so many wax figures, exhibit an active immobility that guarantees their current status. One by one, the portrayed faces clearly say, ‘We are the ones who avoid the battlefield of yore’. Power and wealth radiate from the symbols, the stances, the garments, the jewels, the tiara of Kashmir sapphires and South African diamonds worn by the newly-crowned queen. But nothing can compare to the ermine cape in which the king finds himself doubly vested with authority.

The internet, which sometimes lifts the veil and reveals the truth, says that the ermine cape is an imitation, a replica of the genuine article used by a forebear at her coronation, but the king doesn’t seem to mind. Royalty isn’t real either, it is a lifeless body. Something is missing from the photographs: the hieratic self-containment with which the tsars, emperors and kings of old displayed their power. The undisguised cheerfulness of these Dutch royals makes them look more like lottery winners than monarchs. We are and yet are not if we do not hold command. Cate Blanchett had it in Elizabeth;⁴ the command conferred by the authority of her art.

The ermine cape is accompanied by a sword, insignias and a sash, as well as a woman in a tiara of undeniable opulence, a sumptuousness questioned in Holland and in the woman’s country of origin. The lady in Leonardo’s portrait holds a domestic animal which, at the time, was used to exterminate mice and rats.

Online we read: ‘The little princesses are very well-mannered, and the youngest, who we must remember is only six years old, is adorable.’

WEAVING WOMAN, WOMAN WEAVER. IN THE HIGH MOUNTAINS

Life passes by in a profoundly forgetful interval.

The handira

In its modesty, this cape alerts me to the wisdom stored up in textile abstraction and the culture it embodies. It lacks the subtlety of more valuable pieces; its abstraction is not as rich and its technique is less sophisticated, but it exudes freshness and joy. Perhaps it was intended to be sold quickly, or maybe there were other more pressing demands on the maker’s time, or it may just be the work of a very young girl. Whatever the case, I have now owned this handira for more than twenty years, and it still has the power to move me, for it makes me feel, not the style or the period, but the person, the woman who wove it and with whom, though we may not belong to the same place, time or religion, I have much in common. I think of that young woman weaving while she cares for her family, chats with her friends and watches the flock under the wide-open sky, amid pastures and flowers, in her quest for happiness. I feel it is a person – a woman who lives, shares a sky with me and is there, just as I am here. That person has been revealed as a particular person, a particular woman with a particular life. And she is like me. She was born as I was, and we have the same profound rights. Deep down, we are pretty much the same. We are all the same despite our uniqueness, our differences, and that is something handiras make me feel deeply.

Through the handira, I received an unexpected gift, a concise assertion: it opened my eyes to the presence of another. It informed me of the existence of a real, unique, flesh-and-blood person, not an anonymous, anodyne, interchangeable being. The handira does not reveal a name or specify a precise place, but it does point to a real living being and highlights the fact that collective art is neither a uniform magma nor an enormous hand that is present in everything. These are concrete persons, individuals, unique and singular. The handira taught me that the artistic object is not indifferent; it connects people above all other considerations. Oh, the cultural, cognitive and emotional back and forth that human beings unknown to each other create among themselves thanks to artistic objects!

Skin

The wind is harsh, strong and relentless, giving them tough skin. When they touch mine, I think they find it soft, immature... And I can’t think of a reason why they should like that.

Yesterday I had a dream. Bob Marley was walking down the aisle of the Campoamor Theatre in Oviedo: he had received the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts. He was not alone. His fellow band members and some Jamaican children accompanied him. With their bulging hats and the musicality and cadence of their gait, the Rastafarians reminded me of the aliens in Mars Attacks!⁵ But here music didn’t splatter any brains. On the contrary, it brought happiness to all those present, sending them into raptures of joy. As the Rastafarians made their way to the front of the hall, people swayed in time and the colours grew more intense. The doors were opened to the curious onlookers outside, who entered unimpeded. Queen Sofia, whose pale pink dress had morphed into a bright fluorescent red, danced with carefree sweetness and, thanks to television, the joy travelled to the most remote corners of the world, leaving no doubt that Bob Marley is actually an angel come to Earth to tell us that love is the only thing.

Whether you are hearing ‘One Love’ for the first or the umpteenth time, the sensation is always joyous. Bob Marley and his songs strike me as a globalisation of goodness. They speak of the fullness of humility and of love. Listening to him, people know that the plain little room he offers his beloved in song is the place where happiness dwells.

His ballads are heard and imitated on every continent, but not all forms of artistic expression achieve this kind of universality. Some refer to a particular setting, to a specific culture, a history or a need, they are attached to a certain place or time, like handiras and ahidous, the Berber songs and dances. And this is no reason to denigrate them.

Although the cosmetic industry experiments constantly, even on animals, to find recipes for smooth, soft, raw skin, some people may be fonder of skin toughened and cracked by the blazing sun and relentless wind.

Curiosity

There were two humorous questions. One was about uncircumcised men – what are they like? –and the other about night clubs – what are they like? Now these questions have lost all interest. No, I can’t forget all the things that have happened, nor that the situation is becoming utterly unbearable. That former curiosity about an alien world has been replaced by the need to survive in an alien world, which is always painful.

Innocence has two definitions: the lack of malice in intentions; and the absence of guilt in wrongdoing. Innocence, in the sense of guilelessness, naiveté or inexperience, is part of the growth and learning process, and for that reason it is protected and cherished in childhood. The innocence of children is radiant, opening the doors to knowledge and emotions. But in adults, when it implies the absence of accountability and a disregard for consequences, innocence is a form of unjustifiable violence because knowing is an inherent obligation of human beings.

In the 1980s, ‘low cost’ tourism was still a thing of the future, and places like the Ramblas in Barcelona and the Santa Cruz district in Seville had not yet been turned into theme parks, into remakes of themselves. Tourists flocked to Marrakesh in droves, but that perverse practice of making reality more real had not extended beyond a handful of bazaars and restaurants and had not even come close to reaching rural areas. In those days, I travelled to places where the loom was the heart of the home. We were interested in and curious about one another, while we each occupied our rightful place. It was a time of innocence, an innocence in which everything seems right.

‘We, who were foreigners, had only positive experiences and did not have to suffer anything beyond a few anecdotal mishaps, which afterwards were a source of amusement.’⁶

Face to face

‘No’ would be the answer to the first question. ‘No’ would be the answer to the second question. ‘No’ to the third and fourth, and so on until a ‘yes’ is reached, more devastating and despairing than the negatives that preceded it.

The colour black

I vividly recall a specific night. The darkness was so intense that I can truly say I saw the colour black; not darkness but black itself. From afar everything verged on black. It was impossible to see anything at all. I have never seen anything like it. Up close there was a bit of silver, but from a distance there was nothing.

In the south, chiaroscuro marks the day. The sun burns and blinds, forcing us into the shade, where we can see.

After rolling along the stony rubble of non-existent roads for several days, our car broke down. It was quite late when a family of shepherds, who lived high up on the mountain, gave us shelter. We had supper and bedded down in a traditional long room. At midnight I awoke and felt an urge to go outside. The darkness was so complete that I didn’t dare move. I remained standing. A few seconds later, I felt a slight movement. A hand took me by the arm and silently guided me to a small level area opposite the house, where the corral stood. Though heavy clouds covered the sky, a few stars peeked out, bathing the objects around me in their silver gleam.

I was moved. I had seen the colour black. Not gloom or shadows, but the real colour black. Not murky darkness or the absence of light. The colour black. I was in it.

TEXTILE TRADITIONS

‘You shall be called Fontaine, and you shall be art’, he said.

Talking about textile traditions inevitably entails a discussion of endangered traditions and societies in grave difficulties. It is true that textile work is an important supplement to household income and a financial, cultural and vital mainstay for many, but it is also little more than a prop in a world on the verge of collapse.

The model or the beauty of difference

It is not always necessary to be explicit. Those who accept this know when order and symmetry can be flouted without being destroyed. Tradition grants the possibility of altering, of making a unique creation that transforms the legacy. The exceptionality that is part of our lives enriches these geometric patterns. That is the beauty of difference.

The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition was created as an instrument of repression and persecution. During the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, the political and ecclesiastical powers worked in concert, and patriotism became synonymous with the defence of spiritual purity. Hounding and harassment were rife, and punishments were numerous and harsh. Absolutist power was the road chosen by both the Church and the Catholic Monarchs, both feared that the lengthy coexistence with Jews and Muslims and the lack of cohesion among Spain’s scattered territories threatened their plans to build a modern, unified, homogenised state.

Auto-da-fé⁷ is an oil painting commissioned by Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada for the seat of the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The panel succeeded in meeting Torquemada’s demand for a ‘propagandistic’ illustration of the unswerving determination with which all heterodoxy would be persecuted. The message is clear and unequivocal: a just cause and a deserved punishment. In the painstaking detail of the figures, we can see that the condemned man being led to the stake, rope about his neck, has curly hair and a hooked nose, features then indisputably associated with Jews and false converts. Today, Auto-da-fé has outgrown the self-interested ideology of its commissioner and has instead become a testimony of cruel events. The panel has lost its original exemplary function, blatantly and irrefutably bearing witness to the brutal actions of the Spanish Inquisition and its violent justice. That is what makes it art.

At the end of World War II, the United States launched the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe. The Marshall Plan offered aid, but there were strings attached, including restrictions on European cinema to benefit the American film industry and measures designed to fill Europe’s leading galleries with American art. Abstract Expressionists, especially Pollock, held major touring shows in which European audiences were able to appreciate not only the quality of their art, but also the fact that a new era was dawning in the United States, a time in which space was expanding and action was bursting out of the confines of the frame. These presentations of the best American art coincided with the proposals put forward by the United States government, eager to wield its economic, political and cultural influence and might beyond its borders.

The woven textiles made by nomadic peoples transmit art and culture while also meeting basic needs: haimas (nomad tents) provide shelter for herders and their families; rugs serve as both sleeping mats and flooring, protecting people from the winter cold; and handiras and haiks are mantles, as well as tribal and social symbols. In the Western world, utility is usually at odds with art, but imposing limitations such as the incompatibility of art with practical usage contradicts the universality of art and its history, which shows us that means and functions have changed over the centuries. Is it not unreasonable to deny the creativity of people who have little to spare and whose art contributes to their subsistence?

Time and hours

How many hours does a rug ‘have’? How many hours did a woman spend making it? How many hours was she paid for her work? What needs can she meet by selling her rugs? Women weavers are crushed by a comfortable demand that shatters the unitary time of their lives, turning it into working hours torn out of existence itself.

These stolen hours scratch away at time, rendering it useless. They are gnawing hours of detachment; hours of exploitation, of injustice. Rugs, capes and cushions – some of them very simple and modest – are created in arid zones of extreme heat or in high mountain regions with incredibly harsh winters. They are proof that there, in the midst of that impressive, unforgiving landscape, live the female guardians and conveyors of a unique, peculiar, autonomous, secretive language, the language of textiles, which speaks of a community, a culture and a form of art. Today, these women weavers await the return of the children and grandchildren that have headed to the big cities and foreign lands. I think of those women dealing with life’s difficulties, with problems that at times are triumphantly overcome and at others result in humiliating defeat.

Thank you

The beauty of these woven creations constantly reminds me that a balance has been upset. These women whose survival is conditioned by nature, with all the grandeur and overwhelming difficulties of an environment that determines their every act, these women have made art. On the periphery of peripheries, they have made art – useful art, an art for life – and all I can say to them is ‘thank you’.

Bob Marley’s first words at the Prince of Asturias Awards ceremony were dedicated to the gitanos and gitanas who had won the previous year. The audience reacted with enthusiasm, recalling that group of men and women, some of them heaven-sent, who had sung and danced, and stolen the hearts of everyone present. Moments before handing out the awards, the organisers felt a twinge of fear and more than a little regret as they witnessed the disproportionate ruckus raised, without rhyme or reason, by the gitanos and gitanas as they prepared to enter the hall: the women, chattering loudly, adjusted their bras and sandal straps, while the men checked their clothes for even the smallest wrinkle, warmed up their voices, tapped their heels and clapped their hands. Once inside the theatre, the buzzing swarm calmed down and walked along the aisle with decorum, but as they approached the stage they broke into chatter, nervous, joking to attract the audience’s gaze; for despite belonging to a people who prize family and collective identity above all else, individuals still vie to stand out above the rest. By the time they reached the stage, nervousness had segregated the youngest members of the group, who laughed among themselves. A few of them plucked at their guitars. On television it was a sight to behold.

To be fair, flamenco is a shared world heritage, and although it is less widely known than reggae, both types of music have the power to break hearts outside their respective worlds. Flamenco is an inner anguish of extraordinary magnitude, an infinite longing. When collective art allows its individual components to express themselves, it becomes great.

When it was their turn to speak, after being introduced by the Prince of Asturias, the gitanos and gitanas – La Niña de los Peines, her brother Tomás, La Fernanda, Melchor de Marchena, El Terremoto, El Borrico – expressed themselves as best they knew how, through song and dance. That was when the people in the audience and those glued to their TV screens understood that the award was rightly bestowed and richly deserved, and although the troupe had completely taken over the stage, not one of them was superfluous – in fact, one felt the neighbour- hoods of Santiago, Triana and Utrera should have been there as well.

BETWEEN RUGS AND FABRICS

The father

She knew there was something very wrong, a great sorrow. Her father was grimly serious. He did not come out to speak. A curtain of silence fell.

The mother

Her mother, she and one of her sisters strode along at a very fast pace. The mother’s attitude did not encourage conversation. They walked for a long time until they came to where some of their relatives lived. She didn’t know what they talked about, but the walk back was much more leisurely and her mother seemed calmer.

The father’s brother

She remembers that one night one of her father’s brothers arrived. He didn’t even come inside, and she never knew if he had come to say goodbye for good or if he had asked to stay with them and been refused. She never knew what his offence had been. She never knew the reason for this silence.

Cherries

She placed the cherries in her sister’s lap and they began to eat them. Although they offered to share, none of us wanted to interrupt the dance of their hands as they gradually ate them up, one by one. Later she got up and divided some among us. No cherry was ever redder or sweeter than the ones she gave us at her parting.

Downhill

Her feet were neither cloven hooves that clung to the rock nor suction cups that gripped the sand, as the children used to tell her in their games. When her husband died, she was seized with a desire to run downhill, to hurtle down the steepest slopes and feel, as shen used to feel, the air holding her upright.

The icy wind, the daughter

Again the icy wind and the homeward journey.
When you left, she hugged the trees and pressed her face against the trunk until she could hear your voice and feel your breath.

Azrou, the loveliest cedar forest. The old cedar

For my brother

Cedar trees can live two thousand years. He only lived fifty.
The brother watched the flock from the old cedar. He was irresistibly drawn to the irregular pattern of its branches. That morning he noticed the clustering of its leaves, persistent and needle-sharp, like his feelings ever since he had learned that the animals were falling sick.

The rug

It was impressive and spectacular. It was very beautiful – deliberately and necessarily so. The mother, and now the daughters, not only wanted to prove how industrious they were, how efficiently they worked with the livestock, in the fields and on their daily tasks; they also wanted to express the intelligence, the grace and genius that characterises works of extraordinary quality and renown.

Her niece and daughter-in-law

Her niece, who was now her daughter-in-law, surprised her. She had completely transformed the rug that her aunt and mother-in-law had been making and had passed on to her when she married her son. Back then, rugs took many years to make, and, although each generation added new knowledge and variations to them, they tended towards uniformity. But this girl made radical changes to her part of the rug: she completely eradicated its complexity, giving the pattern an extraordinarily light, airy feel. This sharp contrast lent a surprising grace to the composition as a whole, clearly illustrating how intelligently this girl would fend for herself in life. The mother-in-law thought it a very smart decision on her daughterin-law’s part because she accepted the responsibility of continuing the rug but was transforming its design and even succeeding in surpassing it. That was what the part of the rug that her niece had made conveyed.

Gold

It was just like a pendant of her mother’s that had belonged to her grand- mother, but it wasn’t the same colour and the feeling was completely different. She knew it was made of gold because she hid it immediately. Her reaction put her somewhere she had never been before, in a position of non-innocence. It was a constant burden, having to conceal the pendant so her mother and siblings wouldn’t see it. She had to change the hiding place constantly, until one day it disappeared from where she had concealed it, and she never saw it again. Perhaps the burden had shifted to one of her siblings or neighbours. She will never know, because undoubtedly whoever found it also hid it immediately, and so knew that it was made of gold.

The grandchildren of Salt

The two siblings were very, very cheerful. With their good cheer and their novelties, they invaded people’s minds and opened their hearts to desires they had never suspected could burn so fiercely, so much so they were wounded to the quick.

These adolescents did not feel longing but desire. Longing was reserved for their parents, who had known the mountains, the trees. For them, whose sky was a screen, nostalgia did not exist. Their world was a present that reinstated a mystery filled with hope.

The grandchildren of Quebec

Taninya had looked at one of her cousins and that cousin had looked at her, but they knew nothing would bring them together because everything separated them. Quebec was the female cousin’s red jumper that looked so lovely on her. Quebec was a lake. Quebec was something very distant. Quebec was the school where they learned computer science, which had replaced the mountains with striking suddenness.

WARPS, KNOTS AND WEFTS

Every knot is a thought. After that day, it was always the same.

*

If she made a wish at the precise instant when a chickpea swelled and bounced off the pot, it would come true, but she could never be quick enough, no matter how hard she tried.

*

They sent some boys – two brothers and a cousin – to a nearby village to collect some goods. ‘Go quickly, don’t dawdle’, said the mother. But they never arrived. The father and uncle were waiting for them round a bend in the road. As soon as they saw them, the boys understood what was about to happen to them. With the switches they used to punish the livestock, the adults beat them. It wasn’t the slaughter and sale of a wild boar to outsiders that had earned them so many blows, but the fact that the village had learned of the transaction. And where was the money?

*

She works in the fields, tends the livestock and the bees, grinds the wheat, makes the bread, cooks the food, brings water from the well, spins, weaves and also cares for the children and helps the old ones. This woman, toujours malade, is a beloved daughter, although her slant- ing eyes, awkward speech and clumsy gait set her apart from her sisters and from the still remembered beauty of her mother.

*

She dropped it again and again, so often that, by the time she angrily tossed it into the ravine, it was no longer good for anything. With her action she wanted to disprove the notion that the vessel had rebelled against her.

*

The donkey trotted gladly to the spring. On the way back, with the drums filled with water and retracing his steps along a steep, stony path, the animal slipped and twisted his legs, but either he didn’t mind, or he retained no memory of it, because he always hastened eagerly back to the water, as if the return journey did not exist.

The girls also went willingly, happily traipsing under the awning of the sky, hoping to meet someone along that path. Afterwards, when they grew older, their happiness subsided. Later on, they would leave.

*

She heard stories of lions that had attacked some children.

*

Thoughts are the teacher’s consolation in his loneliness.

*

When the wind blew strongly in winter, the scar screamed louder than she had screamed on the day of the accident.

*

In the late afternoon a neighbour, shut up in his house, let out a cry, a single scream, long and strangled. Was the cry more piercing with the full moon? She didn’t think so. It always had the same tone and issued the same prophetic warning: that night was falling.

*

No one said it out loud or in the light of day, but at night, huddled close round the fire, they passed on the warning: children had disappeared in the vicinity of the great souk. This time, no one spoke of witchcraft or women’s spells. Some whispered: ‘corruption kills.

*

‘Four daughters are not four wives’, she said.

*

A lack of timidity set her apart, though she tried to fake it.

*

And the blood gushed forth...

*

The clumsiness, arrogance and abuse of the siblings ruined the family. The mother was sacrificed.

*

She can’t stop thinking about why she was so inflexible with her father, how she reproached him for his distress at a time when fear clouded his future and prevented him from defending himself.

*

She was the queen of the streets. Shunned by relatives and neighbours, furtively she was well loved – even by her husband, who lived comfortably off the hidden desires of men.

*

A disturbing, devastating rumour was circulating: a strange disease had taken hold of young people in contact with certain foreigners. There was no reprieve for those who contracted it. Doctors did their best to avoid treating them, and some hospitals turned them away. Suffering and death. A cursed ailment against which many mothers had raised their voices, demanding justice.

*

Two brothers went to Rabat, and one came home to marry.

*

His wife told him, ‘The abandonment that is my lot and which you will experience when you leave is so great that I cannot help but be afraid’.

*

‘We’ll see each other every year!’ became every two years. A year is a long time, but that was the timeframe. Later, it became ‘whenever I can’.

*

Two children had come from Madrid, but the woman only bathed one. The reason could be read in the nakedness of the other: he was not her grandson.

*

Farewell to wicker and wool. Farewell to weaving, to combining colours and tying swift knots, farewell to decorating a wall or fashioning an intricate carved ceiling. Farewell to sowing and harvest times, farewell to chiselling iron and making bread. Now they learn quickly as they discover the habits, oddities and customs of their bosses, who express themselves clearly and peremptorily. Their orders aren’t very complicated and barely require instructions. Nothing more difficult than ‘Don’t mix the detergents and clean behind the appliances’, ‘Helmets are mandatory when unloading material’, or ‘The faster you work, the less insecticide you’ll inhale’. That’s just the way they are.

*

Farewell to the rhombus, farewell to innocence.

*

She moved through the darkness, searching for garish colours and sour smells. There was joy and celebration, but also despair, injustice and abandonment.

WHITE ROSES

Nothing shows off the red of blood more gloriously than white roses.

The son’s mother

The son’s mother is not the same as the daughter’s mother.

Macaque or hyena?

The fact that her brother would be the one to determine her future filled the young girl with anxiety. This constant undercurrent of fear diminished when she went with her friends to find firewood or to gather fodder for the livestock. On the way, they talked and played at comparing their neighbours with certain animals. One was a goat: ‘don’t you see his chin?’ The gaze of another marked him as a lamb. Her brother was a macaque, her girlfriends suggested, based on his agile movements, his constant restlessness and how funny he was. She never contradicted them, but when the other girls said macaque, she heard laughing hyena.

Or...

‘Either you do what he says or...’ She could never tell if it was a choice or a threat, because the second alternative was dissolved in the conjunction that preceded it, and to her it sounded like a butcher’s knife sliding across a lamb’s throat.

Tazzayt-Tazzayt

We focus our attention on the processes and trust them to handle the changes and the outcome, but then, suddenly, that instant appears when everything is definitively defined.

Her name had to be repeated twice before she would answer when called. The girl’s stubborn insistence on multiplying her name amused everyone, and it wasn’t long before they acquired the habit of calling her Tazzayt-Tazzayt, which stuck with her for many years.

The split-second delay between saying a name and repeating it was the interval that the husband used to hand the girl a brazier. Catching her off guard, the coals spilled onto her hands and dress. In this way, he wielded his arbitrary authority over the girl, and her name was forever divided in two.

Seven years waiting

Seven years waiting. ‘That’s emigration for you’, they said. Seven years under the mother-in-law’s scrutiny and charity, because it was she, her husband’s mother, who received the funds that eventually – though somewhat depleted – reached the wife and daughter. Seven years waiting to be reunited with him. Seven years to complete the journey that brought her back to her husband’s side. Seven years isn’t all that long when you arrive in the promised (longed-for) land. But when you arrive at a house where there is another woman and another daughter...

The butcher

With the knife he used to ritually slaughter lambs, he sliced open the woman’s chest, belly and back. When the screams subsided to death rattles, he left. The three girls, aged six and five and the youngest barely days old, accompanied their mother in silence and stillness throughout the night. The next morning, the telephone rang insistently but no one answered. Later the aunt, alerted, came to rescue the girls.

No one in Taza remembered them, but the news reached an internet café and spread by word of mouth over the next several days. It was said that they came from the mountains south of town, and it was probably there that the woman, and years later the man, had obtained the papers they needed to go abroad.

A tragic event in a far-off place that awakened hidden fears. At night, more than one woman mistook glints of light for the bright blade of the knife brandished in Madrid, and something that had never existed hidden in words was given a name: murder.

Paths and roads

Margallo War (1893–94) / Melilla War (1909) / Rif War (1911–27) / Tragic Week of Barcelona (1909) / Battle of Annual (1921) / Spanish Civil War (1936–39).

He was missing a leg. A huge rock had fallen on the leg while he was digging a well. They waited for the doctor but when he lapsed into unconsciousness and the leg became gangrenous, the brother decided to amputate it. Eventually he got used to the crutches and continued to care for the livestock The accident brought back memories of the relatives and neighbours who, years before, had been killed or horribly mutilated by shrapnel. Men who worked during the day crossed the River Moulouya at night and, under cover of darkness, attacked the camps of the soldiers brought over from France to protect the road and railway that were being built to connect the north with Algeria. These foreign interests hindered the free movement of flocks and brought about the ruin of entire families. Peasants and herders defended their lands, which were snatched from them time after time. These peasants and herders, young men, heads of households, were not unlike the conscripts forcibly recruited in Spain to kill and die: the former fought for their lands, and the latter for the interests of others.

Roads, railways, power lines, reservoirs, mines, growing urban centres and privatised lands shaped, among other things, the face of modernity. And from that they could not escape. On maps they are lines and tiny icons superimposed on the rivers and natural contours of the terrain, creating a more complex and varied landscape. But this new panorama was not made without tremendous sacrifices and lucrative profits: profits for a few and sacrifices for a large part of society, who would not reap even the slightest benefit from those changes for years to come.

‘The afternoon has been magnificent, serene, resplendent and, even without reckoning the infinite number of curious objects I have found along the way, this ride would still be one of the most delightful of my entire life, given the graciousness and beauty of the land I have crossed. The objects of which I speak were for the most part Moroccan plunder from yesterday’s action: spurs, munition bags, dead horses, saddles, corpses, bloodied garments and a few weapons of little worth. All around and in every direction, the fresh footprints of broad Moorish slippers and of horses, oxen, camels and goats. The appearance of our company had sent men and herds running from that place. All had fled before us... except the land, grim and mute like the fearsome spectre of defeat.’⁸ ‘Yes, they’re fierce, but they bleed. They hide, but not behind a cannon. They know a terrain that aeroplanes discover. They are strong, but hunger and shrapnel will prove stronger still.’ With these words, the French or Spanish captain harangued them. ‘Ah! Truly war has a poetry which, at certain moments, surpasses all the inspirations of art and of nature.’⁹

Years Later...

Upon hearing the news, she removed the scarf from her head and pulled her hair hard, very hard, until it stopped her wailing.

The men came to the house. They wanted to hear the news from a neighbour who had arrived the night before from a nearby village, where he had done some livestock deals. He told them that from the souk drifted the sounds of a party underway, when suddenly the music and singing turned to screaming and weeping: a raft full of immigrants had sunk, and everyone on board had drowned. Twenty people from the village. Twenty.

They remember him as a boy who played in the village streets for a summer or two. Those were the days of plenty, a time now past. His name is not spoken, and it’s the women who mostly talk about him; the men do it in hushed, cautious tones, although some only bring him up to relive a tale that takes them back again and again to the litany of the sundrenched summer days of their childhood. Then smiling, now gutted.

Going back is not possible for a youth raised in a fast-paced, multiplying era, full of what might be and is not. An emptiness that could hold so many things! That strip of separation we can’t always conceal but which outlines the contours.

The longer the wait, the stronger the hope. But that is not how things work. Not at all. Time exacerbates problems. Stagnation and stillness are not for the living, who slip on the slopes of pretence and concealment.

They could not distance themselves. They knew the mother. They were too close: they were the same. The question hung like a cloud over the woman they had run into several times at the doctor’s office, and with whom they had exchanged a few words, even about the children. For things had also gotten worse for her. Her heart had frozen solid. Her feelings were expressed so briefly that they failed to realise that nothing was or ever would be the same again. Did what she had hoped for have anything to do with what happened?

What gardens were they talking about? So that was the journey they were discussing, the reason why their horizons had been stripped of the rushing meltwater rivers they once bathed in as youngsters, and the longing of grandparents, parents and children who grew up in summer frolicking on the steep mountains of ancient cedar forests. No one spoke of all that anymore and, what was more disheartening, no one even desired it anymore. Now they dreamed of dangerous deserts. Being part of the destruction, clinging to hope when none remained – that is what death talks about.

To kill and to die: what facile, commonplace verbs. She thought of her daughter rather than of her grandson or the pain he had caused her. First the drugs that dazed so many, later the night and the neon lights, and finally, the sibylline words they whispered in their cars. One of them was identified by a chunk of finger whose prints were still intact. She remembered that boy who fell down a cliff on Bou Naceur, tumbling head over heels, striking the stones until his body was dismembered, and how the echo kept him alive after death.

IN SEARCH OF THE FUTURE

To be something in life

‘My grandmother jokingly says, “God doesn’t have time for you. He’s busy. Do right and make the most of it.’¹⁰

Interviews conducted in Fez, Morocco, in 2010

Souad

‘My name is S. b. H. I’m twenty-two years old. I study Spanish at the university in Fez, and I’m also a basketball player. I like everything to do with sport and theatre. My hometown is Errachidia: I’m a desert girl, by birth and by principle. I left Errachidia and moved to Fez to complete my studies, to become an educated girl, to earn a living and be self-reliant and not be a burden to my family or to society, though it’s very hard to live far away from my family on a scholar- ship that’s only enough for me to buy one book... I left Errachidia and the desert because I didn’t want to be like my grandmother and my mother, who spend their lives weaving. That doesn’t mean I don’t like woven fabrics, but nowadays everything is already on the market, so what’s the point of me weaving? What I need is money, and to get it I’m not going to weave like my grandmother.’

Ayyûb Aït Oumagha

‘I have four siblings. One brother is in Casablanca, working for a company. Another is in Spain. My sister is studying for her baccalaureate and the youngest boy is in school. I want to study Spanish so I can have a very good future, unlike my parents. I want to study Spanish to be a teacher. My parents don’t want to be weavers anymore. I want to be something in life and not a burden on my parents.’

Nawal Arfi

‘I hope you understand my words. My mother and grandmother make rugs; it’s something within their culture that they have to preserve. They also sell them and earn money to live. They can’t give it up, it’s very important for them. In my house there are antique rugs. My father is dead. I only have my mother, who earns a mere pittance from the rugs. I am studying in Fez on a scholarship and living in a student residence, but it’s hard to study because I can’t make ends meet. But despite the difficulties, I try to press on, to have a future and get my degree in biology.’

Interviews conducted in Alicante, Spain, in 2012

Amal El Mouloudia

‘It’s the men who take the woven goods from the house to the market. Some are for selling and others for the house. There are some people, a handful, who only weave for their homes, because they lack the strength to work more.

‘Inherited items are not for sale. Heirlooms are kept for the home. But we sold everything. They come directly to the houses, looking for them. They like antiques, old things. People from the Arabian Peninsula.

‘In Morocco, customers come and show us a photo, and we work to order. We have to sell so we can buy more material and keep producing. We don’t keep what we make. It depends on the order. Some people work to export, making things for Rabat or Casablanca, but in Spain, even if you bring the material, who are you going to sell to? Here you need to pay Social Security. If you have workers, you have to spend money, and how would we find buyers?

‘Women want something to fill their time. Instead of just sitting in front of the television... they want to do something.’

In search of a decent life and future

‘As for my sister Fatima, before she had even turned fourteen, she began working as a “maid” in the home of a wealthy family, where she had to do all the housework and also care for six children, working thirteen hours a day or more with one day off a week, and all for a miserable salary of 300 dirhams (approximately thirty euros). At fifteen, her hands were cracked and covered with sores.

‘Another of my sisters, Ikran, got a job with a foreign-owned company in the textile industry when she was sixteen; those factories mostly hired women because they knew that, given their submissive attitude, they wouldn’t make trouble for the owners. They also knew that jobs were in high demand and took advantage of that fact to exploit the women, making them work more than twelve hours a day for a salary of 650 dirhams (sixty-five euros). And they did all this with the consent of the top government officials, most of them corrupt, who protected the employers in exchange for substantial benefits.’

*

‘The sea was growing more and more dangerous, becoming increasingly turbulent. As the boat went under and resurfaced amid the roiling waves, the panic grew. Prayers, wails and cries rang out. Even the ra’is [ship cap- tain] was scared, but we had come more than halfway and “the die had been cast”. In other words, going back would have been just as dangerous as pressing on.’¹¹

*

Oh, distant husband of mine, emigrant!
Two years now have passed
since your sad departure for France,
in search of work,
in search of money.
Two years now...
Bread in our country is an impossible thing.
Bread is a constant drama.

Oh, distant husband of mine, emigrant!
And I am here:
Gnawing on my desires
licking my frost.
The narrowing horizons press in on me.
Two years without your tender love,
without feeling your embrace,
without your shower of kisses.
Suddenly you vanish
amid mines of iron and lead,
to make a lovely future
for the rest...
You are murdering
the best of your precious youth
too soon.
You send me sacks of longing and nostalgia,
of shivers uglier
than the chill of tombs.

Ahmed Hanawi in ‘Poemas crucificados de versos para la buena gente’

*

‘Won’t it be lonely to die among strangers in a land that’s not your own? I don’t want to die in a land of strangers. I need to know you.’¹²

Farewell to the rhombus.

¹ Leonardo da Vinci, Lady with an Ermine, c. 1490.

² La dama de armiño (1947). Directed by Eusebio Fernandez Ardavin, produced by Suevia Peliculas, starring Lina Yegros and Jorge Mistral.

³ The Lady in Ermine (1948). Directed by Ernst Lubitsch and Otto Preminger, produced by 20th Century Fox, starring Betty Grable and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

⁴ Elizabeth (1998). Directed by Shepar Kapur, produced by Polygram Filmed Entertainment, starring Cate Blanchett and Ralph Fiennes.

⁵ Mars Attacks! (1996). Directed by Tim Burton, produced by Tim Burton Productions, starring Jack Nicholson and Glenn Close.

⁶ Teresa Lanceta: ‘Lived Cities’, Luis Claramunt. El viatge vertical. Barcelona, MACBA, p. 265.

⁷ Pedro Berruguete, Museo del Prado, 1493–99.

⁸ Pedro Antonio de Alarcón: Diario de un testigo de la guerra de África. Barcelona: Gaspar i Roig, 1880.

⁹ Ibíd.

¹⁰ Quotation by Salim Bayri. https://www.salimbayri.com.

¹¹ Mohamed El Gheryb, in Ofrim/Suplementos, no. 8 (Historias de vida e inmigración). Madrid: Consejería de Servicios Sociales, 2001

¹² Zienab Abdelgany, Passing the Baton, 2012. Ted X Talks.
The fifteenth-century spanish rug - Nuria Enguita, Laura Vallés Vílchez & Teresa Lanceta
The fifteenth-century spanish rug

Conversation between Teresa Lanceta, Nuria Enguita and Laura Vallés Vílchez.

NE-LV The Spanish word for rug, alfombra, comes from the Arabic al-khumra, meaning ‘mat’. Rugs were highly valued goods, and the Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula facilitated their development significantly. After the expulsion of the Moors, Muslim craftsmen continued to work on Christian soil for royalty, aristocracy and the Church. The wealthy were admirers and patrons of an art and culture that they also harassed and persecuted. Once again, objects and art are valued but people are repudiated. In your writings you comment on the closed structure of these rugs (in contrast with the open, borderless rugs of the Middle Atlas).

TL Textiles not only serve a function, they are a language. We see how this is so in the patterns of nomadic weavings which generally present diamond or triangular shapes and nets that can extend outwards on any side without altering the overall expression, and indeed the fragment already conveys the whole. The rhombuses suggest a space in movement, whereas the quadrangular net, border and centre illustrate the concept of space held by settled, hierarchical and structured peoples, like those that made the fifteenth-century Spanish rugs. These costly items requiring specialist craftsmanship denote an urban culture and powerful beneficiaries.

The now Christian territories of Albacete and Cuenca enjoyed a flourishing industry of splendid Islamic-inspired and -executed rugs which powerful Christian warlords bought from the Mudejars as they pursued the reconquista of land and the expulsion of the Moors. These rugs had bold borders and featured Christian coats of arms, which demonstrates the subjugation of the weavers and their culture. And yet, although Muslim, these weavers and their forebears had been born in the territory later called Spain.

These Spanish rugs are patterned with octagons, reflecting their medieval milieu, and the Mudejar style reveals their singularity within Islamic art. In contrast to the ‘expanded field’ of Persian or rural rugs, Spanish carpets have a small central area delimited by several heavy borders, although these are sometimes interrupted by the coats of arms of the Christian overlords who purchased them. The compositions and patterns reflect the spirit of the time.

NE-LV Like much of your work, the patterns and tapestries in La alfombra española del siglo XV draw on life and incite a political, social and historical reflection while simultaneously recovering a memory. Constant themes in your work are heterochrony, permanence and the memory of others, whether this be in the life you shared with the gitanos in Barcelona, the women weavers of the Middle Atlas, the threatened Muslim artisans of the fifteenth century or, nowadays, the migrants. It’s as if you have felt an underlying urge to bring to light through your work all that we have not been able to deal with either humanely or politically in history – a history that never tires of trying to eject ‘the other’ from our lives. We lack true politics, a sense of the ethical obligation, skill and responsibility to unite worlds. This reflection is very present in your work and is poignantly expressed in your text, El sueño de Bob Marley (Bob Marley’s Dream): ‘Yesterday I had a dream. Bob Marley was walking down the aisle of the Campoamor Theatre in Oviedo: he had received the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts. He was not alone. His fellow band members and some Jamaican children accompanied him’ (p. 183). It’s as if all of a sudden it were evident that the prize is the people who are not there, all those other neighbourhoods... And that is the definition of collectiveness.

Again, La alfombra española serves as both a sort of register and a statement, human and symbolic: life is in the centre and is accentuated by the metaphorical shift towards religious scenes that are almost unnoticeable among the ornamental motifs: Mary Magdalene, the Flight into Egypt and so on.

TL In the paintings of Hans Holbein, Jan van Eyck and Giovanni Bellini we can see so-called ‘Oriental’ rugs, whereas in those of the Spanish painters of the period – Pedro Berruguete, Diego de la Cruz, Jorge Inglés and a long etcetera – we see Spanish rugs. In the latter, the ornamental language is clearly dominated by Christian symbols, but nevertheless, it is universal. Today we can equate Flight into Egypt with the plight of so many migrants and refugees fleeing with their children, and Massacre of the Innocents with the tragedies that occur all over the world.

These scenes are in my work but only minimally, and in some cases, they barely feature at all, whereas ornamentation occupies the entire space, in a nod to the fact that fifteenth-century Spanish rugs were testimony to a culture that was defeated, but which, while it lasted, shone bright.

The pre-eminence of ornamentation in this work is also an attempt to encourage its use as a language, especially as a collective artistic language, which is typically used as a way of protecting, reinforcing or extending the life of a material through embroidery, particularly when there is an emotional attachment to this material, such as a piece of fabric or leather.

NE-LV Painted on black paper, the patterns in this series allow us to talk about the importance of ornamentation within a wider revision of classical art history spanning the last five decades, which has seen a reconsideration of ornamentation as a non-descriptive, non-naturalistic and non-abstract art form, albeit fundamental in the artistic practice of times past. Woven fabrics also serve to critically dissect the Renaissance perspective and release the ornamental, which is used in your work as an element of structure.

TL I immerse myself in these rugs via their ornamentation as a way of expressing the relationship among the elements and creating a network that sets the knots communicating in a system of repetition.

It is not about isolating the patterns or modules, but of connecting them in a whole that can be extended beyond its limits. The themes are drawn using coloured pencils on black paper to draw out the darkness from the background. The canvases are painted in encaustic with a touch of oil, borrowing techniques that faithfully convey how things were done at a time when artisanal processes were as present as thought. I have wanted to retain within me and extend through my drawings the feeling and the knowledge that they still deliver after so many centuries.
Las cigarreras - Nuria Enguita, Laura Vallés Vílchez & Teresa Lanceta
Las cigarreras

Conversation between Teresa Lanceta, Nuria Enguita and Laura Vallés Vílchez.

NE-LV Many different voices come together in this publication, as befits a work and a life in which orality has been so important: the gitanas, with their stories and song; the women weavers of the Middle Atlas, guardians of a tradition; the forgotten voices of the Moriscos in the Spanish rug... In the video, Cierre es la respuesta (2011), you capture the voices of the women who worked in the tobacco factory in Alicante. How did you approach them? How did you decide the structure of the film?

TL Before the factory closed and was converted into a culture centre, the city council of Alicante commissioned me to make a visual document that gathered testimonies of the factory while it was still functioning. I saw it as a great opportunity to shed light on an area of industry, peopled by women, that was not being talked about enough. And what was to be but a brief enquiry into the subject, lasting two or three months, turned into a profound exploration of these women’s lived experiences that took a year and a half of intense work.

Las cigarreras is a compilation of the memories, stories and feelings of the women who worked in that Alicante tobacco factory, which I am now editing for the exhibition with the help of the filmmaker Virginia García del Pino. I recorded voices, not images, so that the women could talk more freely, because they were excited to tell the stories of their youth. Images would have brought it into the present, whereas voices are timeless. When the tobacco factory opened in 1801, Alicante was a walled city with a small port. Situated outside these walls, the factory was staffed by women from poor neighbourhoods and nearby farming villages. Those women, through their labour and dexterity, sustained this industry for two centuries, working very long hours. At first, they handrolled the cigarettes on a piecework basis, seated around a table; and then, when industrialisation took over, they operated the machines.

A census from the end of the nineteenth century shows that when Alicante totalled some 23,000 inhabitants, there were over 3,000 women working in the factory, a number that contrasts with the approximately hundred men, junior hands and mechanics. The data suggest that these women’s wages helped to support a large part of the city’s households and that they contributed to the city’s considerable economic growth, which saw the demolition of the city walls, the enlargement of the port and the construction of new neighbourhoods.

So much time spent together meant that the women shared experiences, broadened their horizons and made friendships. Being a cigarrera was not only a job, it was a way of life, rooted in the women’s shared sense of belonging and self-identity. The cigarrera legend was forged by strong characters, hard work and deep solidarity.

‘Working gives you independence; you finance yourself. You have more freedom to do things and you make friends. It was a very good thing, really good. It gave you another perspective on the world. Yes, because it wasn’t just you; it was other things too. Something would happen to someone, and you compared your lot with theirs. I made my best friends there.’

‘The general attitude among the cigarette girls was that you went into work wearing your best outfit and looking great, even if you couldn’t afford to eat. The world was yours! Oh, the power of money! Yes, yes, yes and yes! It was a bit like women’s liberation, except that once inside, behind closed doors, you had to change into one of those boilersuits and then you ceased to be you; you became just another ant. You had to fit in and bow down.’

‘I’ve always said: nobody gave me anything. I’ve worked hard, and so have my closest workmates.’

‘“Doesn’t your mother know there’s a strike today?” All this would happen inside the factory because no one was allowed out until the job was done. They were demanding their rights.’

‘Don’t think they were oppressed because they weren’t. They would lock themselves in there, in Tabacalera, and not come out.’

‘Toniqueta, make sure the kids look nice, we’re on strike today!’

‘For me it was a lovely experience, especially because of the bond amongst the girls. You went to work and whatever they told you to do, you did; but there was real camaraderie, and it was a case of “OK, if a machine is playing up and yours is going fine and you can lend your co-worker a hand, you go down and help her”. Sometimes you would get told off because you weren’t supposed to leave your spot, but all the same we did and we’d help each other out. And if everything was running as it should, it was a shared source of pride; but if something went wrong, we’d buckle down and get through it.’

‘I got my fighting spirit and my social and working-class consciousness from my mother.’

‘When we went to demonstrations or were preparing for one the night before, my son and my daughter would say, “We always have lentils when there’s a demonstration the next day!”’
As if it were a harp - Laura Vallés Vílchez
As if it were a harp

As I write these words, I am watching Urdimbre (2008) and Tramas (2008)¹, two videos by Teresa Lanceta in which images of her loom succeed one another, rhythmically, willing to build a picture.

A warp is a set of yarns into which weft threads are carefully entwined. But instead of a cloth, what we see here is a projection in the making on a loom. While this is happening, a sound exercise in percussion is playing out.

We also see the artist’s hands, which hint at the peaceful body of one engrossed in the repetitive gesture that anticipates representation and exercises the imagination. In Tramas, representation is defined by flowers, fleeting nuances and flashes of light; in Urdimbre, by a succession of colours that inverts the roles of patterning: the weft tinges white and from the warp emerges colour.

Then comes the gaze and, with it, the confabulation – that which describes another kind of weave: the interpretation. What does this representation reveal? Teresa says, ‘For a botanist, trama means “flowering”’, and ‘for a writer, it is a storyline’.² But for a weaver like herself, this crossover gives rise not only to a utilitarian object, but going further still, it becomes a ‘standard of culture’.³ Whether weavers, writers or botanists, we are all ultimately in thrall to composition.

In conversation with a student, Teresa said that ‘weaving is like life: you have to live with your mistakes and build on them and create something you didn’t anticipate.’⁴

Weaving is an open code from which one reads, transforms and transmits a knowledge that is always complex and circumstantial. Time becomes a unit of life experience, a measured choreography.

And so, as Lanceta approaches weaving, without a plan and embracing error, I write these lines, consciously resisting argumentation. What drives me is admiration and intuition. And first-hand experience. I mean, I have recourse to knowledge gained from mounting an exhibition. My intuition grows with the words, the sound of the keys tapping in truncated melody, the heavy silences that fold into the sonorities at the frontiers of our bodies – keys and strings – doubling as soundtrack.

‘I long for a voice that sings. Writing is the closest I get to fulfilling this desire I am denied.’⁵ This remark gives us clues as to why in Tramas and Urdimbre we can hear the sounds of fingers, needle and comb working. As if the loom were a harp, and written words a voice. At the keys, meanwhile, another composition awaits. Because in Lanceta’s work orality begets a story, and Teresa knows well that a storyline conspires to the detriment of memory.

So, let us cast our minds back. These two videos were made in 2008 following the financial blackout that opened the austerity gap, the same gap that two years later crept into article 135 of our Constitution during the hot August holidays. For during that summer of 2011, we were ‘sold out’, as Lanceta says, in the great bank bailout: ‘All levels of Public Administration will adapt their actions to the principle of budgetary stability. The State and the Autonomous Communities shall not incur a structural deficit that exceeds the margins established, as the case may be, by the European Union for its Member States.’⁶

It is, however, an altogether different European story that this loom is weaving: that of the industrial restructuring of the mid-1980s, when Spain joined the European Economic Community, and I was born, ignorant to how this story would define an entire generation. Like so many others, my maternal family was part of the great rural exodus of people forced to leave Andalusia. My grandmother sewed, and my grandfather, with his bare hands too, built the railway for a train that years later would take us away. When my mother was only ten years old, she was put in charge of an orange warehouse and made to travel, while my Mediterranean father, the son of an espardenyera (an espadrille maker) and a boat repairman, pedalled thirty kilometres a day to learn the trade of carpentry.

The suburbs (ravals) were rife with stories such as mine in the lead-up to democracy. Outside the walls and far from the centre, these areas, with their centripetal force, were magnets for those lured by an ideal of progress, a longing, a desire – though these were met with varying degrees of good fortune – that would replicate elsewhere in connivance with the emancipating promises of the new technologies. The gap between wages and salaries would grow. These stories progressed even as the conditions governing territorial access were being redefined. With trains and planes, new holiday periods began.

The touristification of the common experience features regularly in Lanceta’s work. Tramas includes pictures taken by the artist on the flanks of the iconic Step Pyramid of Djoser, in Saqqara (Egypt), where, during her participation in the Eleventh Cairo Biennale, Teresa had the opportunity to visit an orphanage. The children in this orphanage wove non-stop, and those pictures provide one of the few occasions in which Lanceta illustrates otherness. Her work, which spans decades, has skirted representation. For, as indigenous peoples know full well, you don’t remain in an image. The rugs of the Berber communities, from whom Lanceta has learned so much, reflect this belief; indeed, it is well known that historically barbarians were wary of having their photograph taken for fear their soul might be ‘captured’. Perhaps that is why, as the pages of this publication show, faces tend to escape their stories and leave the door open to confabulation.

Tramas, however, is an exception. The 1980s was a decade of widespread industrial re-structuring. New models of competition and exchange were imposed in what amounted to an intensive shock treatment calculated to balance the ratio of supply and demand that would lead to plant closures, redundancies and early retirements. A new post-Fordist system of organisation and management based on services and tourism brought about the destruction of countless appliances, among them many looms.

Luckily, one of them had the good fortune to fall into Teresa’s hands. It turned into a harp and from it emerged another story that arose from the blackout – not the financial one, but the artist’s own personal obfuscation in a period of transition: Teresa stopped weaving, although she did not stop connecting threads of another kind. In those years of industrial change and disenchantment, Teresa turned her creative attention elsewhere. The moving image gave continuity to a narrative that embraced another discipline, one in which orality and ethnography approached the demise of work as the epicentre of reciprocal recognition and social relations.

Cierre es la respuesta(2011) is a plurivocal chronicle that Lanceta made the same year that the principle of budgetary stability was imposed on and over social spending. The closure of a tobacco factory in Alicante is related via the experiences of an affective community, reminding us that individualities are always shaped by multiplicities.

The women, the cigarette-makers, the protagonists of this other video, made of loaned video materials and oral accounts, were characters in a story about skill and loyalty – a story about an industry established in our country in the seventeenth century which in its early days enacted a tacit – and extraordinary – agreement between employers and employees that facilitated the reconciliation of childrearing and caregiving with work.

Such craftwork required skills and experience. Seated around a large table, the women hand-rolled cigarettes non-stop; and when industrialisation took over, they carried on much the same but with machines. From artisans to machine workers, they personified the dangers of mounting alienation, prompting the women to form a social collective founded on principles of solidarity that would transform the factory into a public space where they could talk, compare experiences, disagree and let off steam.

Mothers, sisters, cousins and friends. New hierarchies in the workplace brought new enemies, as managers were told to ‘divide and rule’ to improve productivity. ‘I got my fighting, working-class spirit from my mother’,⁷ says Carmen in a shaky voice, the daughter, niece, granddaughter and great-granddaughter of cigarette makers. This is the legacy of a manufacturing community dispersed by closures and relocations to other regions, mainly Morocco and Eastern Europe, a legacy whose processes had sedimented for three centuries, gathering voices at the frontiers of their machinist hands, and which Teresa recorded to commemorate collective work as life experiences.

As happens in Tramas, in which the learning processes in Saqqara reveal the uses and abuses of rising touristification,Cierre es la respuesta shows how one can approach inheritance as a vector of experience of a present perfect facing a future perfect. In short, a legacy tinged not with blame, rejection or unease (colonial, racist, debtor), but with a power capable of linking temporalities. A legacy, finally, that serves as a sediment of reciprocities and co-responsibilities.

Laura Vallés Vílchez is an editor, curator and lecturer, and director at Concreta publishing house.

¹ Translator’s Note:The word ‘trama’ can be translated into English as ‘weft’, ‘weave’, ‘plot’ (both storyline and conspiracy) and ‘in blossom’, definitions that the artist plays with and connects.

² Teresa Lanceta, https://www.teresalanceta.com/es/Sakkara. php [access 10.12.2021].

³ Ibid.

⁴ Teresa Lanceta in an unpublished interview (teaching material).

⁵ Teresa Lanceta in conversation with Ángel Calvo Ulloa, ‘Una búsqueda. Tan inadvertida que pueda confundirse con el azar o la fortuna’, Dardo Magazine, no. 37, 2021.

⁶ Amendment to article 135 of the Constitution, 2011.

⁷ Teresa Lanceta: De mi madre he heredado. Mujeres e industria tabaquera en Alicante, Fourteenth Bernat Capó Award, 2011.
The crossing of the Ebro - Nuria Enguita, Laura Vallés Vílchez & Teresa Lanceta
The crossing of the Ebro

Conversation between Teresa Lanceta, Nuria Enguita and Laura Vallés Vílchez.

NE-LV Your project El paso del Ebro (2013–15) articulates an experience that once again merges collective memory and personal adventure through heterochrony: the Battle of the Ebro, in 1938, one of the bloodiest of the Civil War; memories of your mother’s family, who hailed from there; and your weekly train journeys between Alicante and Barcelona, from 2013 to 2020, when you were a teacher at the Escola Massana. Consisting of diary entries written while on the train, some photographs, a video and five weavings in hues of blue and red, this work shows the rupture of everyday life. The first fabric, a piece of cloth your grandmother used to keep bread, denotes the fear and violence of a war whose aftermath and relics can be seen in the permanent exhibition in La Trinxera in Corbera d’Ebre: objects retrieved from the trenches of the Ebro and domestic objects repurposed from war materials, demonstrating the resourcefulness and imagination that can keep one alive in times of dire need.

TL Twice a week, as I sat on the train, I would anticipate the moment we crossed the Ebro River. In the distance was La Terra Alta, and beyond, somewhere lost on the horizon, Horta de Sant Joan, where my grandmother is from and where we used to spend our holidays. Now my nieces and nephews do, and soon their children will too. As a child, I heard stories around the fire, often about the Battle of the Ebro, and I would piece these together in my mind as the train approached the river and revealed the riverbed, the waterlogged rice fields and the mountains, where soldiers defending the Republic and Catalonia crossed the river on the night of 25 July 1938 and were discovered and killed. Unlike other works of mine that have tended to go on in time, this one is concise, and I do not know if I will continue it. I stopped working on it because imagining all that suffering, during and after the battle, filled me with anguish and sadness. I was only able to carry on in the form of a journal, which would be published. I recently learned that the cloth that inspired my series of weavings (in which red makes a reappearance, muddying the waters, so to speak) was used by my grandmother to wrap the dough, once she had mixed the flour and the sourdough, and let it ferment a while before turning it into bread.

‘The countryside begins to signal the proximity of the Ebro. Suddenly, the river, the flooded rice fields and the canals that supply water to the neighbouring fields. Small rice shoots show where not so long ago a tractor ploughed. A lorry crosses the bridge over the A-7 just as the train crosses the river upstream, near the spot where a group of civilian-soldiers waded into the Ebro on the night of 25 July 1938.’¹

¹ https://www.teresalanceta.com (My writings).
Shared authorship - Nuria Enguita, Laura Vallés Vílchez & Teresa Lanceta
Shared authorship

Conversation between Teresa Lanceta, Nuria Enguita and Laura Vallés Vílchez.

NE-LV During lockdown, you created the Raval canvases we discussed in the first chapter and developed the idea for a participative and transgenerational project on the Raval’s trades, which materialised in a series of co-authorships included in this exhibition. Community and collaboration go hand in hand with creation. As an aside, it’s worth mentioning that these co-authorships have been legally recognised, meaning questions such as ownership and rights are protected. It is also explicitly stated that there has been no subordination during the co-authored projects, so that how they are used subsequently is a matter for each participant to freely decide on.

TL I have always been curious about other people’s work practices, which is why I studied Middle Atlas textiles and fifteenth-century Spanish rugs, and sought to complement this with invitations, collaborations and co-authorships that have proved to be a great gift for me.

In the exhibition Adiós al rombo I invited five artists to each exhibit a work in a common space and add two collaborations. In Notificaciones, a show put on at the Centre del Carme de Cultura Contemporània in Valencia, the invited artists were students; and, on this occasion, I invited Isabel Carballo, Paula Crespo, Virginia García del Pino and La Trinxera.

I recently started a new type of working relationship that takes collaboration a step further. We are calling it ‘co-authorship’ or ‘shared authorship’: two or more people work together without subordination or loss of creative identity on any part. It may seem clichéd and simple, but it is actually very hard to maintain one’s creativity in a group, and no one should have to relinquish even the tiniest bit of it.

The co-authorships with Pedro G. Romero, Olga Diego and Leire Vergara, Xabier Salaberria and Miquel Tarradell Secondary School (teachers and pupils) and MACBA staff members, with Nicolas Malevé, all yielded very diverse experiences. Even the achievements have been different. I’m friends with all of them and in most cases we go back many years, and yet each project saw a unique relationship develop between us, with some being more fluid and on a similar wavelength, and others more challenging and even argumentative. But all experiences, including this most recent one, have been fun and have brought us closer together. The results are all excellent, as I hope this publication shows, because we have really tried to translate the processes into a format that works not only in an exhibition setting, but also in a book.
Chicken Coop - Pedro G. Romero & Teresa Lanceta
Chicken Coop

The starting point can be found in a story recounted by the Byzantine historian Procopius of Caesarea in his bookDe Bello Vandalico (The Vandal), which goes like this:

‘... they say that the Emperor Honorius in Ravenna received the message from one of the eunuchs, evidently a keeper of the poultry, that Rome had perished. And he cried out and said, “And yet it has just eaten from my hands!” For he had a very large cock, Rome by name; and the eunuch comprehending his words said that it was the city of Rome which had perished at the hands of Alaric, and the emperor with a sigh of relief answered quickly: “But I thought that my fowl Rome had perished.” So great, they say, was the folly with which this emperor was possessed.’

Procopius was talking about the famous Sack of Rome by the Visigoths led by King Alaric. The eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon was already sceptical about this literal ‘anecdote’ that portrays the Christian emperor Honorius as a weak, extravagant fool hanging on to old pagan customs and unconcerned with Rome, its Senate and its enemy Alaric. But as Vinciane Despret would say, the right question is: why chickens?

For our purposes, it was interesting to read about the political awareness of space in the chickens described by Giorgio Vallortigara in his book Cervello di gallina (2005), literally ‘hen’s brain’, an Italian euphemism equivalent to ‘birdbrain’. The dimension of space is linked to the perception of com - munity: the movement of the group, the distribution of food and the place where eggs are laid all determine chickens’ distinctive angular path, a bit like a knight in a game of chess. The animot, said Derrida, should combine the zoology and the cultural significance of animals.

The invitation to collaborate on this work concerns Teresa Lanceta in various ways: there is of course the carpet in the painting by British artist John W. Waterhouse, The Favourites of the Emperor Honorius (1883), but there is also her interest in Martin Kippenberger’s Disco Chicken (1988), and the gift of Bert Flint’s adage at the Tiskiwin Museum in Marrakesh, ‘donning feathers is a form of decolonisation’. And there is of course her memorable statement: ‘my political consciousness was born when El Lute was arrested and his first charge was stealing chickens’. I think that Teresa Lanceta’s carpets and wall hangings, her tapestries, have always explored a different way of understanding space physically and symbolically, always aware of the need for a new distribution, which is essentially what we are attempting.

The tapestry that Lanceta has made with the old items of clothing and leftover wool offered by friends and neighbours is woven with different techniques, but mainly jarapa, which is crafted from scraps and offcuts. The pattern is based on some of the geometric floors on which chickens performed their legislative duties in ancient Rome. The Romans gave us the legal system, but their laws often had to be ratified by the movements of a group of chickens observed and interpreted by the augur-priests. From the mosaics of Villa of Livia Ad Gallina Albas to the floor of the Curia Julia – the seat of the Roman Senate during the reign of Honorius – chickens also stood for plebiscitary democracy: over these old practices of Etruscan divination, the emperor preferred the modern augury of the sacrificed rooster, which allowed its liver to be examined, always in private. Chickens represented contradictory pairs: archaic religion and the modern plebs, the prudence of the old senators and the crazy extravagance of the emperor, secular paganism and the weakness of the Christians. But the important thing for us is the floor that these contradictions trod.

Our chicken coops are full of politicians, philosophers and fools: of chickens, that is. As in Luigi Malerba’s Le galline pensierose (2008), a chicken is supposedly the model fool. María Zambrano gave a good account of that gait in which there are no straight lines, that constant dancing around something, that pendulous swaying of the head saying something or other, and that expression, which is often interpreted as foolishness or idiocy and is only akin to the joy of a living being who has found love and freedom at the same time. It is always a hypnotic pleasure to watch chickens.

Our tapestry is only intended as a kind of magnifying glass, an optical instrument to enhance the pleasure of those who stop and look. We also offer a few texts and pages of notes in which to keep adding to the almost infinite number of observations.

Hens’ Assembly

HOUELLEBECQ HEN

‘[...] It isn’t just about our extermination. When the description is cruel, and one senses that a certain pleasure in horror drives the denunciation. A fascination with evil. Michel, who acts as a kind of Woody Allen of the sinister, gives an enthralled description of our extermination – fascination being related to fascism not only in the etymological sense. The industrialisation of our death. Crammed into farms to either produce eggs or be turned into cheap meat, eating poultry feed like animals next to our dead companions. I know it’s hard to denounce this without infusing language with death, with a fascination for things sinister. But that’s what we’re here to do, isn’t it?’

EL PRAT HEN

‘[...] Orwell’s treatment of us in Animal Farm is unfair, isn’t it? Such contempt for hens, it’s not right, it really isn’t... George, Georges, or Jordi drew on his experiences in Catalonia when Communists, Catalan Nationalists and Republicans quelled the revolution that anarchists and the POUM had started following the coup d’état by the Spanish Catholics, Nationalists and Fascists... And where does that leave us, then, us hens? The sheep, it seems, are the peasants of the Pyrenean hinterland, towing the line any pig sets down. But what about the hens? As we walk on two legs, like humans, we are under suspicion; but no, we are not just underlings or rowdy spectators...’

CHICKENS WE ARE (ON THE INTERNET)

‘Elegant, proud, light and vigorous, black. Smooth, soft, delicate, brown. Deepchested, broad, muscular, white. Docile and affectionate, there are white ones and black ones. Round, vivacious, familiar, dark brown. Longbodied, slightly squat, golden. Harmonious and vigorous in deportment, reddish. Composed, well-sized, blonde. Serious, responsible, pleasant, good with people, honest and hard-working. Timewasters need not apply.’

WHITE-BLONDE EMPORDANESA HEN

‘It’s true, we have market value. We are bought and sold. Not only as food, but also as egg layers, whores, kellys [hotel room at - tendants] and as skin from which our feathers are plucked to write these lines. And the fact is, not only do we have language, but we also have things to say, demands to make and opinions on how our coop should be run. When I see the original hens, the daughters of the oldest hens in the place, carry on as if they were the owners of this yard, it makes me want to laugh. Of course, their clucking is different from our clucking, no one’s doubting that or asking for anything but naturalness. But a cluck cannot establish dominion. And just look at them, removing their feathers and walking like men, almost without bending their legs, all high and mighty. Not Primo de Rivera or the Civil War or anything ever managed to crush us; and now, Lord knows, we may have to go back to the Penedès.’

PENEDÈS HEN

‘We are a hopeless case! Anyone would think bird flu had eaten our brains! But that flu, disease, plague or epidemic seems to have panicked humans especially because they brought in experts to manage it. Might they have forgotten about us? Could this be endemic?’

LEGANÉS HEN

‘Life is one long reason to be cheerful’, mused the fox as he entered the coop, stuffed in his white doctor’s coat, to tend to the sick hens. It’s an adage you also hear on the lips of many a politician and bigwig as they make their chauffeur-driven ways to the courts to deliberate on their embezzlements, their 1% or 3% taken in bribes, their cronyism... in short, on their multiple profiteering schemes. Like the fox, they smile with wily satisfaction and throw seductive and defiant glances at the crowd as they proceed with shameless poise. But the confidence of the corrupt should not surprise us because we have seen how their culpability often gets diluted in legal cosmogonies, and irrefutable proof of their criminality is ‘punished’ with a slap on the wrist and a ‘you pay us back what you can, when you can’... In short, like us the hens can tell something is up. They regard with suspicion and horror this bogus doctor who is specifically trained to eat them, because their usual doctor, the one who used to look after them, has been devoured by this vicious world.

THE RUDE HEN

‘What about the boy whose deranged mother cut him up and stewed him in honour of a saint and was then put back together again by this same saint and brought back to life?¹ What was his first reaction? Did he sympathise with the chicken that had taken his place in the pot and go down as some late medieval precursor of the Anti-Oedipus theory?’

PENEDÈS HEN

‘But sisters and brothers, we can use violence! We have no choice. It’s a dangerous path, but... We know that many of our chickens have been re-educated: the whitefaces of Seville have been turned into Jerezanos or Canarians, and Malaya, Sweater and Shamo into fighting cocks! What a family, yes, our very own... Like a pack of dogs, we are! They say they’re coming to defend us, but they’ll eliminate not only the fox and the farmer, but us too! How are we going to stop these people who say they are one of us? Is it enough just to remove their spurs? Clip their combs? Fire rubber bullets at them?’

VICENTA HEN

‘My husband used to kill them, but he doesn’t want to do that anymore, and my daughter shudders when I do it, but then I say to them: “So what shall we do – eat live chicken?”’

JAPANESE PHOENIX HEN

‘There has to be a way. A way of talking about the cruelty of the world without it obscuring our words. Reality – birth, death, being eaten – can’t be solved with some quack remedy. The bain-marie is our gas chamber. They often pluck us alive! Between ending up in a fricassee or in a mass grave, which do we choose? Do we settle for black humour?’

GUILLERMO THE COCK IN AN ERMINE CAPE

‘“Hen, hen, hen! whooped a pack of wolf cubs dressed in their finest clothes, knife and fork at the ready. Their mother, the shewolf Máxima, was stewing a Jærhøns cock and stirring the pot with loving devotion. The cock had been a magnificent specimen, with a superb crest and feathers, and its eyes shed tears like diamonds. The scene was extraordinarily beautiful; the sentiments depicted both opposing and truthful”. Excerpt of an investiture speech delivered in the European Parliament. There was much applause and some booing.’

BURUNDI HEN

‘For those who don’t have access to it, food is a basic need; for those who do, it is a responsibility. From necessity to debit, from consumer to participant. We are fields of almond trees, cherry orchards, kitchen gardens and vineyards. And chickens and copper.’

BERGISCHE KRÄHER CHICKEN

‘It’s true, a hen is not the sum of its dismembered limbs... Breast, thighs, wings, livers, heart... they don’t make up a chicken. The truth is that our species, harassed by predators of all kinds, owes its survival to domestication. We are hundreds of species and millions of individuals thanks to this process of civilisation that has spread us all across the world. Scientists say we are a success as a species. Heaven, our paradise, is being on display in kosher butchers, delicatessens and supermarkets. But we are not idiots! Or rather: it is our right to be idiots, to live the joy of the moment, to delight in the countryside... Our right to be unproductive. And what about our song? Is my song not appreciated?’

¹ In the heroic city of Morella there is a beautiful mosaic on the façade of a building that commemorates this miracle attributed to San Vicent Ferrer.
The Circle and the Flower - Olga Diego
The Circle and the Flower

A wooden box used to ship a delicate consignment from Brazil turned out to be just what we needed to make a small theatre we called El círculo y la flor (2021). The box’s exterior still bears the marks of the journey it made, but the ceramic-lined interior is a now a place where life unfolds and art flows around characters that move as if they were alive, and indeed alive they are, for they dance, fly, hang and wander about from one spot to another. The door has opened and turned into a great wheel of fortune, revealing a room containing innumerable depictions of everyday life. Beneath this great plaza is an underworld of mechanisms powered by exhausted workers.

We took the title and idea from Leonardo, as the image displayed shows. Look for it. The brushstrokes from Van Gogh; the flow of the characters from Beatus codices; the dog from Goya; a posture from the wounded lioness; from the East, luxury; and from the popular, the earth. From the news, tragedy; from our memories, a scene, even a tribute. Everything has a place in this wheel of fortune, where characters float about, looking for their lucky break. Offerings given to us by the street, by others, by art.

Games are revealed and riddles conveyed, the value of which lies not in the answer but in the statement. Look for them, there are still many more. Windows that open, balconies that weep. Create your own conundrums from what you see and appreciate the queried illusions you may have to reformulate.

Much handiwork and effort has gone into achieving all this. Every day we looked at the idea from different angles before putting it in the oven and then taking it to its destination.

Ceramic – fragility and strength – has shown us the alchemy of the saying that true gold is that which beats in the heart. This is what we have discovered; perhaps you will too.
The Battle of Wad-Ras and the Handira - Leire Vergara
The Battle of Wad-Ras and the Handira

Conversation between Leire Vergara and Teresa Lanceta.

Work Study, session 13
Thursday 19 November 2020, 11 am

L: [...] We were saying that you spent some time in Morocco...

T: Yes, between 1985 and 1990 I lived in Marrakesh for half the year.

L: Well, about Morocco, I would like to show you this painting. It’s called Episodio de la Guerra de Africa en 1860 and belongs to the Spanish Senate’s collection of historical paintings, which was started in 1882 with the aim of projecting a sovereign, national and patriotic consciousness. This painting is by César Álvarez Dumont and depicts the battle of Wad-Ras in the Spanish-Moroccan War. Dumont painted it in 1899, almost forty years after the battle – in other words, it is totally anachronistic. Marià Fortuny, on the other hand, had witnessed the battle first-hand and his extraordinary account of it is kept in the Prado. (Coincidentally, César Álvarez Dumont spent four years in residence at the Academia de España en Roma, where I am now, and Fortuny’s artistic training is also linked to Rome...) While in Rome, Dumont requested permission to travel to Tangiers to paint the picture, and the Academy’s archive holds a description of the project and the motivation for this work, which, incidentally, the Senate has two paintings of: the large original and a very small replica. Fortuny’s rendered his sketches of the battle into a painting between 1860 and 1861. From what I have read, the painting alludes to the military role of the Catalan volunteers: the Catalan presence is part of an idea of a compact nation facing an enemy that must be colonised. Dumont’s painting, on the other hand, is anachronistic in several ways. While history painting had ceased to be relevant in art, Orientalism was still very much a modern theme and it is in that context that Dumont’s canvas situates the colonial project: the government, or rather the institution of government, was keen to revive the subject of this battle following recent revolts in Melilla. I happened to come across an image of Dumont’s painting in a book in the library of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía when I was in Madrid to give some lectures. I had always viewed it from the perspective of Bilbao (which maintained industrial connections with Morocco through the exploitation of resources, coal, etc) and London. I wanted to use this image to talk about the notion of governmental art collections – in this case the Senate’s – and how they serve an idea of nation, of modern-day colonialism in Africa. It’s something that has been largely ignored in Spanish art history. When I started my thesis (and things haven’t changed much since then) the subject of Spain’s colonial past in Africa was barely discussed, even though it wasn’t so long ago and is fundamental to the idea of the modern nation. Spain’s colonial link with Latin America, however, has been studied more, perhaps because its imperialist roots are still alive today in the form of the Spanish language – language being one of the vehicles that perpetuate colonialism beyond exploitation.

T: In this type of painting, Orientalism uses a tone of admiration to gloss over colonialism. Here you don’t see a Spaniard on horseback leading the battle, but a splendidly attired sheik brandishing decorated weapons, a ruler mounted on a thoroughbred trampling the fallen. In fact, you don’t see any Spaniard at all in this painting, which is another misrepresentation. Colonialism is portrayed differently depending on whether a territory is being conquered for the first time or whether it is a conquered territory being defended. The conquest is presented as a promising event to be proud of, when in fact the Moroccan soldiers who fought in this war were neither opulent nor ‘Orientalist’ in aspect, as Dumont depicts them, but poor shepherds, hardened by years of territorial struggles. We see no dead Spaniards, only the Spanish flag. The painting is deceitful because it presents the battle as if it were being fought between friendly and enemy tribes.

L: Yes, and it falsifies history for propagandist purposes: the Orientalist attires seem to suggest that it is worth going to Africa because there is heritage and wealth to be conquered. This is the message the Orientalism of this painting sends: the promise that something of value will be gained for killing Africans and that therefore the sacrifice is worthwhile. What this painting doesn’t tell us is that the Tragic Week of Barcelona, when churches and convents were burnt down, was triggered by young people protesting about being sent to Africa to die; young people whose families couldn’t survive without their income. In that war, lowly peasants and workers were sent to fight in a deadly war dressed in nothing but their own clothes and espadrilles, deprived of much needed income and work. They were sent to fight to defend the interests of the country’s wealthy colonialists, among them Basque and Catalan families, but their sons could avoid being drafted by paying a conscription fee. The Tragic Week was in fact an uprising against the Spanish-Moroccan War, and therefore also an act of anti-colonial protest. Many anti-colonial events in history have been treated as isolated events and not as a whole, making it impossible to build a specific anticolonial history.

T: Yes... In fact, Africa is directly linked to the Spanish Civil War, because that’s where it started – in Morocco. The Spanish military in Africa behaved like nasty power-hungry strategists.

L: This other painting is by Marià Fortuny. What differences do you see? Fortuny actually witnessed the battle whereas César Álvarez Dumont produced his painting while at the Academy in Rome, some forty years after the event.

T: But Fortuny was the better artist: there is art in his painting. With Dumont, it’s obvious it was a commission. Fortuny’s painting conveys a drama that is absent in Dumont’s. Colour and beauty do not eclipse the tragedy – and this is why it is in the Prado. It shows the cruelty of war, regardless of which side is fighting. Like Goya, Fortuny holds the weapon bearer responsible, because he who wields the weapon kills the man.

L: Fortuny did not let the commission get to him.

T: Both these paintings seem to suggest that it’s in Rome that Tangiers is best studied... but also in those places where migrant boats depart from... But to go back to the paintings, Fortuny’s battle plays out horizontally, it’s as if he wanted to warn everyone equally of the dangers of war. But with Dumont, the message seems to be more that the observer is safe, because he makes them identify with the man on horseback and not with the fallen. Fortuny’s painting is horizontal, and Dumont’s vertical and pyramidal. By the way, the women’s prison in Barcelona is popularly known as the Wad-Ras.

L: Changing the subject, Teresa, I would like to tell you something: I have to turn my thesis into a book, and I plan on doing this during my time here in Rome. I’m thinking of devoting each chapter to an occupied territory (in today’s world too) and pairing it with a concept specific to my practice as a curator. And one of the concepts is touch, which relates to your fabrics...

T: Yes, sure. And I would like to show you a handira. Because if anything important happened to me between 1985 and 1990, it was the acquisition of this handira. Can you see it?

L: Yes, perfectly.

T: This object conveys its geographical and social origins as well as the artistry of its weaver, whose use of ornament seems to refute Adolf Loos: its ornamentation protects the material. The more elaborate the pattern, the less wear and tear the fibre will suffer. The weaver may have wanted to make it quickly because she needed to sell it, which would explain the numerous white strips which are slightly wider than the older ones. But as she wants to make it stand out, she adds some coloured lines.

L: That’s a nice reference you make to Loos... You probably mean that from a functional point of view, this piece refutes what Loos says in his work Ornament and Crime¹.

T: Yes, that’s right. I know this handira is relatively recent because the coloured threads are made of acrylic. How has the weaver managed to make us not notice that she was in a hurry to get it finished or not care if we do? She creates perpendicular lines of yellow and red. And do you see how she introduces an upward movement that breaks the horizontality of the strips? In this handira you discover a woman who wanted to speed up the fabrication and achieve a greater expressiveness than that traditionally found in handiras. In fact, when I first saw it, I imagined the weaver to have been the same age as me. I felt she was a real person; I sensed an existence, an individualisation, and I felt that this woven object connected us somehow.

¹ Adolf Loos: Ornament and Crime, lecture first delivered in 1910 in the Academic Association for Literature and Music in Vienna.
The Trades in the Raval - IES Miquel Tarradell & Nicolas Malevé
The Trades in the Raval

An unforgettable experience

‘We carried out a lot of activities with the MACBA and at school. Through these projects we discovered new places in the neighbourhood, we got to see different professions from the inside, we learnt to structure an argument and express ourselves through photography.’

‘I plan to search the Raval for computer shops or look up “elec - tronic shops” on Google Maps and then go there and ask a couple of questions about components, and also ask if they can help me to build my own computer.’ ‘We’ll need Google Maps to help us find it on the map. We’ll have a look at coworking websites, and for extra help, we’ll go to the ‘Diàlegs de Dona’ Association and ask them about these places.’

‘We have all really enjoyed this project, as it’s exposed us to new things. We’ve been able to go outside the classroom and into different environ - ments. The workplan included trips, talks, a range of activities, and home - work which we could do either alone or in a group.’

The memory of objects

‘One of the first activities was to choose an object and describe what it meant to you personally.’ ‘We never thought that one day we would have to share a part of our past through something which for us was just an object. An object which had many memories associated with it, and which we had to share with the rest of the group: rings, necklaces, our first dress, etc. We have learned to value the objects that accompany us through life.’ ‘We all presented an object that unites us sentimentally with our loved ones and with our past.’

The trades in the Raval

‘More than a year has passed since the pandemic started. Since Teresa couldn’t come in to school, we came up with the idea of doing video calls with her to keep the project going.’

‘We chose glass because it’s a very difficult material to work with and you can make so many different shapes and figures with it.’

‘Those video calls were very helpful: she suggested we look for shops that sell handmade things and do interviews.’

‘It’s a shop where they also teach you how to design, sew and make garments. Fashion design professionals work there and they design clothes and show others how to do it.’

It wasn’t easy because sometimes the Wi-Fi failed and we would have to go and look for another classroom. But it also fun because the idea was original and creative.’ ‘These conversations increased our self-esteem and also calmed us down because it was the first time we’d had the chance to participate in a project of this scale. This first experience was amazing.’ ‘Teresa Lanceta has taught us how to get more out of our neighbourhood.’

‘My mother loves this park and she used to take me there. It has a very urban feel and it felt safe because you always saw the same people and you could make friends.’

‘Thanks to her and the project, we have discovered that, despite being small, our neighbourhood has a lot of outlets for different cultures and languages. Our neighbourhood has a personality of its own.’

‘What colours a neighbourhood are the people who live in it. The Raval often gets negative press because of its past and its current circumstances. People from lower and middle classes live there, which brings problems such as evictions, robberies, drugs, etc. But if you take the time to really discover it, you realise that it’s only a few individuals that blot the canvas that all of us residents paint together.’

With the MACBA team

‘We met some amazing people. There were archivists, photographers, conservators, curators... All of them essential for keeping the MACBA alive and vibrant.’ ‘At first we were nervous and excited, which is normal because it was the first time we’d ever faced the challenge of conducting real interviews with museum professionals and we didn’t know how well it would go. We were also apprehensive because we were recording it and we didn’t want to get our words wrong.’ ‘We didn’t know what questions to ask or how many... We also had some technical doubts.’ ‘It was really nice meeting them because they treated us so well. They even gave us water and showed us their offices.’ ‘We were impressed by the way they confided in us and shared details that weren’t known to the public.’

Mobile in hand, camera, and action!

‘One of the projects was on photography. We had to work as a group. We were caught by surprise.’ ‘One of the photographs was a selfie; another, an object we always carry around with us; another was of a characteristic gesture or pose taken by a classmate. It was great fun and we all felt a mixture of joy, awkwardness and embarrassment.’ ‘We realised that the important thing about a photograph is not whether you look good in it, but what it says about you. You have to listen to it, read it and see what it wants to convey.’ ‘Although we may have spent years studying and hanging out together, we don’t always take the time to look closer and try and understand how someone feels.’

End of the academic year 2020–21

‘Before the end of the school year, we divided into groups and each group chose a theme for a panel we would work on: the work of homemakers, street art, video games, etc. The panels were richly decorated, but what stood out the most were the photographs.’

‘Traditionally, women stayed at home to look after the children. Men would go and work in the workshop because apparently it is a night job and women had to stay at home.’ ‘Workers from other countries are not given permission to live or work legally. This means they go into low-paid jobs with very harsh working conditions. They face possible abuse at work and are forced to work very long hours.’ ‘Some artists have no other way of earning a living with their art but by selling it on the streets as they are ignored by galleries. They are brave to keep at it.’

‘The last thing we did in this project was to mount an exhibition of the panels which also included pieces of writing and our family trees showing our ancestors and their trades.’

Learnings

‘In the last three years of ESO (compulsory secondary education), while working with the MACBA on the various projects, we discovered that we all have an artistic side, it’s just that we hadn’t realised.’ ‘The work we did over the year gave us useful knowledge, valuable skills, a new appreciation of our surroundings and a more critical view of the world.’ ‘Through this experience we gained self-confidence, we came together as a group much more and we carried out tasks we thought impossible, such as the panels and the interviews.’ ‘We would like to say how satisfied we feel at having done this project, at having made the effort and planned it properly. It has made us grow and we’ve enjoyed every moment of it.’ ‘This project has helped us reflect on our surroundings. The different cultures and atmospheres make the place livelier and transport you around the world and open your eyes.’

‘To sum up, we would like to thank the teaching staff, the MACBA and Teresa Lanceta for having given us this wonderful opportunity, and we would also like to thank our classmates for actively collaborating in this project and making it an unforgettable experience.

Maps with Nicolas Malevé

‘Open a map, unfold it, follow its lines with your finger; trace, compare, look closely, search, describe, photograph, join or separate words, lines, spots, pixels... Look at the maps that sell us things, that organise our environment, that plan, predict, fly above. They’re trying to tell us something, they want us to do something, or to prevent us from doing it. They show us how to move about and how to stand still. Maps that insist, highlight. The chain stores that are descending on every big city around the country. Maps made for shopkeepers, administrations... Maps made for pleasure or as a statement. We look to see where we are and for others to see where we are. We look with a bird’s-eye view, or from a satellite. We draw with a pencil, a GPS, a mouse or just with our fingertips. We see the sediments of the city, the trenches, the traces of siege. And the insistence on roads... Roads built by public administrations and travelled by postmen, dustmen, cleaners, cyclists delivering groceries and ready-made meals. And then, of course, the movements that tell us how we got here and where we want to go... and, with each movement, the question of what we take with us as knowledge, as know-how, as skill, as occupation. And as all this is lost and gained, it acquires another meaning and value, and is forgotten or renegotiated.’

Nicolas Malevé is a visual artist, programmer and data activist.

Publications

Teresa Lanceta. Weaving As Open Source

Writings

1

2

3

4

5

6

Life, and Now Too, Life

Because we live in homes…

Lugubrious

Cripples

Early seventies: heroin and company

U

Pressing desires

Oblique streets

31 August 2016: the Investiture

Patrons of the night

The neighbours

El Tronío

Jerusalem, 8

La Charo

Marina

Rocío

Juan

The seducer

Valentín

Julián

White roses in the Rubió i Lluch Gardens

Rain

Winter

Life, and now too, life.And Ch. without teeth

Fabrics

All That Magic. All that Magic: Teresa Lanceta Through the Radical Sonic Prism of Lester Bowie’s All the Magic.

Act I: ‘For Louie’. La red de San Luis

Act II: ‘Spacehead’. Jacob soñó. ‘Down Home’

Act III: ‘Ghosts’. Magdalena. Magdalena (multiplicada). Domingo. Última copa

Act IV: ‘Trans Traditional Suite’. Navajo I

Act V: ‘Organic Echo 1, 2’. Subían y bajaban

Don’t buy the hours

The Aït Ouarherda Weavers

I

II

White roses

THE BENI OUARAIN HANDIRA

Capes or handiras in the Middle Atlas

The ermine cape, a symbol of royalty. The body as a usurped, vacant public space

WEAVING WOMAN, WOMAN WEAVER. IN THE HIGH MOUNTAINS

The handira

Skin

Curiosity

Face to face

The colour black

TEXTILE TRADITIONS

The model or the beauty of difference

Time and hours

Thank you

BETWEEN RUGS AND FABRICS

The father

The mother

The father’s brother

Cherries

Downhill

The icy wind, the daughter

Azrou, the loveliest cedar forest. The old cedar

The rug

Her niece and daughter-in-law

Gold

The grandchildren of Salt

The grandchildren of Quebec

WARPS, KNOTS AND WEFTS

WHITE ROSES

The son’s mother

Macaque or hyena?

Or...

Tazzayt-Tazzayt

Seven years waiting

The butcher

Paths and roads

Life, and now too, life.
And Ch. without teeth