Waiting for the future

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.