On Friday, November 7, 2014, in collaboration with the Asociación Lachó Bají Calí, we participated in the second edition of the
NIGHT
of the
MACBA
, which was entitled
The Sun When It Is Night
and was curated by the artist
Pedro G. Romero
.
Lachó bají (Good Luck)
was our proposal for this event, which we devised in collaboration with the Asociación Lachó Bají Calí (Gypsy Good Luck) after several meetings, interviews with local residents, etc. It consisted of a walk through the territory inhabited by the Roma community of the El Gornal neighborhood (L’Hospitalet) from the early 1960s to the early 1990s, living first in self-built shacks and later in prefabricated houses, in the informal settlement known as La Cadena or Polígono Pedrosa, located between the neighborhoods of Can Pi and La Bomba. A territory through which the Economic District-Gran Via of L’Hospitalet currently extends: a group of office buildings, shopping centers, and luxury hotels clustered around the activity of the Gran Via fairgrounds of the Fira Barcelona.
On our walk, we were accompanied by the group Los Barraconeros—formed by Juan Luís Fernández Gómez El Piki, Manuel Gómez Cortés El Sepo, and Lázaro Márquez Cortés El Negro, all three members of Lachó Bají Calí—, who performed songs and chants in the places linked to that past that we proposed to remember, evoking that time. Also, during the walk, we distributed among those who accompanied us various texts and images that collect testimonies from the former inhabitants of La Cadena, refer to the development of the current Economic District, or to the Lachó Bají school, which was the first official institution established in the place—you can see the cards at the end of the entry.
Almost nothing remains of that time; the memory of the Roma community that inhabited that territory then lacks material references, having been erased by a city model subject to the logic of economic flows. Still, we visited the minimal remains, the almost invisible traces of that memory: a farmhouse converted into the offices of the Consortium for the Reform of the Gran Via in L’Hospitalet; an empty lot that was once a passageway to the sites in which the city’s waste was selected and back to the shacks, of which now only a few tiles remain hidden by uncontrolled weeds, next to a four-star hotel; fenced vacant lots, owned by large investment groups that did not manage to build in time, before the real estate bubble burst; and the place where the Puente School was located, which was attended by several generations of inhabitants of the shacks—the Lachó Bají school—which was located at what is now the main entrance to the fairgrounds.
The name of the association: Lachó Bají Calí, those words, although incorporeal, are also a place of memory, perhaps the only one that explicitly unites the present of the Roma community of Gornal with its past.