About a year and a half ago, we organized the third
Rromano kidipen
(which we could translate from Romanó as Gypsy Cultural Encounter) at
La Virreina Centre de la Imatge
, together with the Lacho Baji Cali association from Gornal, a series of public events in which participants and collaborators were invited to learn the practice of basketry (closely linked to Gypsy culture) while socializing and expanding the stories about the Gypsy community of Gornal and the now-defunct neighborhood of La Cadena, south of the Gran Via.
We publicly share here the complete memory of that action, which we prepared for La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, for anyone who may be interested:
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Where we come from
Four years ago, we decided to settle down and opened a physical space in the semi-basement of one of the buildings in Bellvitge. The building in particular was managed by the Social Welfare services of the L’Hospitalet City Council and had previously been the Civil Guard’s housing.
Inhabiting a physical space has forced us to rethink our ways of doing things, relating them to an ecosystem located in a specific territory; an ecosystem to which we add ourselves by establishing links that go beyond the productivist logic of the institution’s own “project”. Remaining in the territory allows us to sustain times and opens up possibilities that are unfeasible from that logic.
LaFundició’s physical space has helped us to open up and explore other imaginaries in the field of art, thinking about contemporary artistic practices from and in the neighborhoods on the periphery of Barcelona.[1]
Numbers 11 and 13 of Prado Street are crossed by a strong systemic violence, a violence that is present in almost all the urban periphery, a violence that is close to us, and that in some places of the city, at certain moments, takes shape with greater crudeness.
Among our neighbors in Prado there is a Gypsy community. Inhabiting Prado 11 has made us meet and disagree, recognize and be surprised, transit codes and ways that are constantly in crisis. The children were the first to cross the threshold of the space and question us.
One of the first practices we shared with them was walking: they invited us to walk the distance between our block and their school, the Gornal School, on the other side of the train tracks. Thus we began to cross together that urban scar that separates the two neighborhoods of District VI of L’Hospitalet, Bellvitge and Gornal
The children of Prado 11 resist the literacy system and reading and writing, they resist the forms of knowledge that they associate with the paya culture and reproduce stereotypes in which they momentarily gain a space of power. They play at scaring to gain respect, they accentuate their ways of speaking to build a distinction with the payo, they reverse the stigmatization by demonizing the other as they are demonized by him. [3]
Faced with this landscape, we have tried to generate spaces with the community in which to trace and understand how we have constructed that reality, how we have naturalized it and how we want to perform and embody it.[4]
Implications and alliances, strategies and devices
Lacho Baji Cali is the Gypsy association of Gornal, it was created in the 90s by Gypsy women of the neighborhood; Lacho baji cali means in Caló “good Gypsy luck”. This name is the only trace of the Gypsy settlements south of the Gran Via, since Lacho Baji was the name of the school that was self-built in the neighborhood of La Cadena, on the land where the economic district of L’Hospitalet now stands. We began to ask ourselves about that school, about those settlements and about the ways of life they represented.
The
CICdB
(Center for the Interpretation of the City from the Shack) has been the instrument that we have promoted to bring into play a look at the informal city that is not limited to the restitution and recognition of the existence of “shantytowns” in the city. A look that understands and highlights that in this disappearance there is the will to erase the logics and practices of the shantytowns, models and practices that put in crisis those of the formal city.
The restitution does not involve a celebratory and nostalgic recognition of a past, but rather problematizing amnesia and disappearance, with a look that questions the present from the conflict.
The history workshop
In 2016 the History Workshop begins. The workshop tries to build a space and a time in the neighborhoods of Bellvitge and Gornal to think about their history, to be able to question some of the stories that are reproduced and circulated about these neighborhoods and that, in short, respond to a pacifying objective. [5]
Already in the very forms of doing history we have naturalized extractionist practices: faced with the figure of the expert, the popular classes believe ourselves incapable of constructing our own stories, of challenging the language and the norms that usurp our autonomy; incapable of restoring the capacity to construct imaginaries that challenge the dominant discourses.
The informal archive of the CICdB
Along this path we have proposed to think of an archive of the informal city,[6] an undertaking to which
Jorge Blasco
has joined, contributing his view of the amateur archive. The idea of an archive of the informal city often appears to us as the oxymoron of “decaffeinated coffee”, insofar as the archive is an intrinsically formal device, a structural part of the formal city. So we ask ourselves, what are the informal ways of preserving and guarding? Why do we need a table of classifications, files or categories that limit the access of the community to the sources of knowledge? What is the form of the informal?
With the History Workshop a slow process of deconstruction and exploration is developed; some people came to the workshop to give us materials or stories, placing us in the position of custodians; these are, in general, conventional stories that are repeated invariably: “We came from here or there, we went through many hardships but we were also very happy, we fought and got our apartments“, but that hide desires and doubts that did not find their place in that “official” story. The sessions of the History Workshop are organized weekly, every Thursday, in the Cultural Center of the neighborhood. With the passing of the sessions those stereotyped stories have been deforming week by week, and other paths, other stories, that remained hidden under the common place have been cleared. The History Workshop has been configured as a place in the neighborhood in which to think about all this and put into play other scaffolding with which to support other types of stories.
Routes and walks
One of those forms has been the walks in search of traces, sedimented and stratified remains in the territory, traces that allow different readings of the landscape. We have walked assiduously through the landscape that configures today the Economic District, sometimes those walks acquire a more public dimension and we invite people to accompany us and add new layers of reading, as in the Route of bubbles and commissions with
Rafa Burgos
[7]. This walk has been carried out in 2016 and 2017 towards January/February, becoming little by little from this periodicity in something like a ritual.
The CICdB newsletters
With the edition of the newsletters, the neighbors have become researchers of their own life stories, rescuing birth certificates, maternity cards, orders of execution… investigating the documents of the churches and town halls of the towns of origin of their parents, mothers, grandparents or grandmothers. At the same time they have written their stories outside the canon, performing all this process in a community making, and not as an individual and solitary activity. These investigations have been socialized in the presentations of the newsletters or in meetings such as
La Sardinada
.[8]
The Gypsy people, Lacho Baji Cali, the CICdB and LaFundició
The Gypsy community has only occasionally approached this space of the History Workshop. That space was uncomfortable for some people made us wonder why and what other ways of doing history, of questioning our present, of building contemporary thought from our neighborhoods, we should put into play.
Rromano kidipen (Gypsy Encounter) has been taking shape from an initial moment of conversations to agree on the common framework of work. We proposed to follow the one of the Gypsy community in the informal settlements of Gran Via Sud. To explore those past forms of resistance and see in what way they still occur in the present as a kind of footprint imprinted on the bodies. All this in order to build new frameworks of learning, stories and possibilities, and reactivate ways of doing that respect the worldview of the community.
Lachó Bají, action-walk carried out in 2014 within the framework of
The sun when it is night. The flamenco night of the MACBA
[9] was a first experience that allowed us to explore the possibilities and frictions that occur in the encounter with the institution. Already before, within our proposal for the cycle of exhibitions
Preventive archeology
curated by
Oriol Fontdevila
in the Espai 13 of the Fundació Miró. We then organized (2013) a cycle of film screenings and debates at the Institut Bellvitge, entitled The city won, the city lost,[10] in which, among others, the film
Gypsy without romance
, by Llorenç Soler (1976) was screened and debates were established around the construction of our habitats.
Rromano kidipen
On this occasion Lacho Baji Cali and LaFundició have sustained the research and creation process in the territory. We believe that these processes tend to overwhelm the times and resources of the institution, as well as the forms of visibility that an art center usually recognizes.
The Rromano kidipen process neither begins nor ends with the resources of La Virreina, nor do we know if the act of next Wednesday, November 29 in the center makes sense or simply stages and trivializes a situated way of doing that, suddenly, we take out of context and reproduce out of the field, and at the same time, paradoxically, within the framework of the institution. But we do know that we are concerned about a possible exoticization and that the visibility of the event may cloud the process; we have no answers, only doubts that accompany us. In the territory there are no public or creators, there is a doing that has been inserted into everyday life; the research and its socialization in a public space (the Rromano kidipen) are a continuum, only from outside the situation, from the artistic institution, are perceived as something differentiated.
One of the resistance strategies used by the Gypsy community of Bellvitge and Gornal against the colonization of their ways of thinking, feeling and being in the world, has been to feed and highlight the distinction between payos and gypsies. This payo/gypsy binomial has strained the whole process in the moment of giving a form to its material results (the edition of a fanzine that finally has taken the form of a series of posters). Sometimes we have marked the limit from LaFundició, sometimes from Lachó Bají Calí. This work from two different positions has been alternating the acts of resistance and reproduction.
Lacho Baji Cali questioned the fanzine and the authority of Marcos Prior to represent them while LaFundició tried to constantly open the black box that naturalizes the common places from which we speak. Lachó Bají Calí raised the possibility of writing the history of the Gypsy people in L’Hospitalet occupying the hegemonic forms, that is to say: writing a book in an expert language, constructing a truthful story supported by sources and documents. We, for our part, tried to problematize this option and ask ourselves where the daily stories, the orality and the ordinary doings that preserve something of a worldview, the Romani, that confronts the universe of neoliberal sense, were.
At one point it turned out that the poster format could reconcile positions: on one side the drawings of Marcos Prior in relation to four ideas (Landscape, School, Struggles and Baskets); on the reverse invoke the orality that houses and preserves other epistemic forms and show the traces of the materials that we had been finding.
There is a constant game between what the gypsies share or hide from the payos. The fear of losing their idiosyncrasy when showing it is very present in the gypsy people, as well as the power that grants a knowledge that only the community possesses. In the language this double movement occurs when shared codes and norms recognizable only to the gypsy community are activated.
Romani is shown as the language in which the different speeches of the Rom people converge and are standardized. Its Spanish variant, Caló, moves in the shadows. Spanish or Catalan borrow, without us knowing it, words from Caló: paripé, chaval, molar, camelar, chachi… Caló appears in Spanish and Catalan as colloquial jargon, forming part of the so-called “vulgar” language. (Perhaps because it was a persecuted language[11] since its origin is known (towards the 15th century), the gypsies have closed the access of other communities to Caló… At the end of the 18th century and during the 19th century appears the fascination of the romantics for flamenco and a different attention to the language; begin to appear treatises and dictionaries of Caló, in all of them is collected the occultism and distrust of the gypsy community towards the interest of the payos, all of them are full of errors and deceptions. Today a minority of the community preserves the Caló, words and phrases are used frequently to recognize each other, in prison the Caló is reactivated to hide.
The texts of the four edited posters have been translated into Romani. The language is thus situated as one of the places to pay attention to.
Gypsy basket makers. Cornichas, is a Caló word.
Basket maker is an attribute that added to gypsy, confers prestige in the community, because the gypsy basket maker preserves a doing linked to nomadism, to the river, to the transaction based on the use value. The basket maker defies the productivist times, recognizes an enjoyment in the work that questions the culture of effort and sacrifice that justifies and perpetuates the inequalities. The families that inhabited La Cadena were basket-making families, today only Rafi Fernández Santiago, one of the women who promoted Lachó Bají Calí, knows the trade.
The meeting was the form that was taking on meaning, that these meetings were articulated around a doing like basketry helped us to problematize questions such as work, art, crafts…
Rromano kidipen was activated in two specific territories: Carmen Amaya Avenue in Gornal and the Plaza de los Bloques in Florida. During the meetings, materials (photographs, plans, reports…) were shared as triggers for conversations; the radio set was activated as a resource to collect oral testimonies, while the street was occupied with a doing and knowledge that are victims of the same amnesia that crosses the entire territory of Gran Via Sud.
La Florida and el Gornal maintain an invisible link; the two housing complexes were built at different times and inhabitants of the informal city are relocated in them.
Los bloques of La Florida and el Gornal
The Onésimo Redondo complex, in La Florida, was built in 1955 and welcomes squatters from Somorrostro, Montjuïc and La Bomba. The “informality” of the settlements is still present today in “los bloques” of La Florida. There is a constant break with the regulation of the formal city that constantly makes the ghost of demolition loom over los bloques as the only way that the administration finds to regulate them.
In the 60s, a barracón was installed that would become the Pomezia school of los bloques. Maria Ventura will be the teacher of this center and the person to whom the city council turns to set up the Lachó Bají school in La Cadena. La Cadena was the gypsy settlement located between La Bomba and Can Pi. From 1929, when the Universal Exposition expelled the management of the waste produced by the city of Barcelona from the mountain of Montjuïc, the sites in which the entire process of separation and classification of garbage was carried out proliferated in the surroundings of the Gran Via (Can Pi, La Bomba, Santa Eulàlia…).
Around 1966, the Cooperativa de Viviendas de La Bomba was constituted, a group of neighbors left the barrida to settle in the Zeus and Neptuno blocks of the Bellvitge neighborhood.
In 1975 the Polígono Gornal was built, and in 1976 the demonstrations began against the possibility that the houses would not be for the families of La Bomba. Some people enter the apartments “de patada”, others are assigned and manage the mortgage; the demolition of La Bomba begins. The settlements of Can Pi and La Cadena will remain standing until the 90s, when the Olympic project accelerated the deterioration of the area and increased the pressure to execute the expropriations. The sitiales and the gypsies who returned to the barracones in the 70s because they could not access the apartments in the housing estates, were the last to resist the urban project of the Economic District. That key moment to understand the history of the city from a subaltern perspective, has since become the oblivion of oblivion: there are no images, there are no documents, only the testimony of those who lived those moments and, now, the illustration of Marcos Prior that we published in one of the edited posters.
The research and restitution phase of materials has forced us to understand the protocol for accessing institutional and domestic archives, in both cases establishing frameworks of trust to be able to share the materials and avoiding falling into extractivism, with the activation of mechanisms for restitution of the materials to the community being a priority.
Working with documents that had not been produced by the community, but that represented it (such as the images of the archives taken by the local administration or by the Church, or the photographs of the personal albums of the teachers); trying to respect stories in their form of oral transmission but fixing them in a written text; or even the fact that the illustrations were produced by someone emotionally detached from the community, are noises that are present at this moment of the process. We think that creating new images offered a field to explore, however the fact that Marcos Prior has produced these materials does not stop putting back on the table the roles and mechanisms by which certain groups are given the capacity to represent and is usurped to others.[12]
In this regard, the texts and research of the Peruvian writer and anthropologist José María Arguedas open up horizons of thought for us. in his work he follows and investigates the forms of creation of the original peoples of Peru and the paradigms and structures that ignore and despise them, leading them to disappear.
Why that shame? The wayno is art, as music and as poetry. It only remains to make this look good. The indigenous is not inferior. And the day that the same people from the mountains who are still ashamed of the indigenous, discover in themselves the great possibilities of creation of their indigenous spirit, that day, sure of their own values, the mestizo and indigenous people will be able to definitively demonstrate the equivalence of their creative capacity in relation to the European, which today displaces and shames them.”[13]
Part of Arguedas’ studies establish links between the community forms of Andean organization and those of rural Castile, which disappeared with the modernization process promoted by Francoism in the late 50s. There is an echo of that process that resonates in the city. A city that devours and annuls cultural manifestations, the diverse ways of seeing and understanding the world, the structures and universes of meaning, the imaginaries and the capacity to generate its representations of migrations from the countryside to the city, those that built and inhabited the informal city, those that were demonized first and domesticated later through the urban project of development that drew the topography of the housing estates such as Bellvitge, el Gornal, La Mina, Ciutat Badia, San Cosme…
We believe that it is necessary to understand the distance that exists between the institutions of the field of art that occupy the centrality and the cultural manifestations of these peripheries, as well as the tension that crosses this distance.
This aspect is something we will continue working on. The question in any case is not to place “popular practices” occupying the spaces of “the artistic practices of the sector” but to see to what extent the institutions can permeate cultural manifestations produced from popular, feminist, social and solidarity economies.
________________________
[1] 11 years ago we constituted ourselves as a cooperative, at that time this decision had a political dimension and responded to the existing tension between our academic training in art and the knowledge and practices that we learned growing up in working-class neighborhoods of the metropolitan area of Barcelona (with a charnega identity, typical of the sons and daughters of the migratory cycles from the countryside to the city, from the south to the north).
[2] The heirs. The students and the culture . Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron. Editorial: Siglo XXI. 1st Edition: 1964 – 2nd Edition: 2009.
[3] We have often heard in Prado 11, when the older children take care of the little ones: “Don’t go outside, a payo is coming and will take you”, a perfectly symmetrical specular reflection of the warnings that adults gave us when we were girls: “Don’t go outside, a gypsy is coming and will take you”.
[4] A reference for us are the texts of Iris Marion Young. In her book Justice and the Politics of Difference she defines justice as the capacity that people have to decide on the structures that we embody, putting in crisis the concept of justice built from an exclusively materialist and quantitative perspective. In this line we also have very present the thought of Judith Butler.
[5] The Andean Oral History Workshop/Qhip nayra uñtasa nayraqatar saraña (THOA), created in Bolivia in 1983, has been one of the experiences that has served as a reference for us. The THOA is made up of an indigenous working group that brings together Aymara-Qhichwas and Urus researchers with the aim of investigating, disseminating and revitalizing the culture, history and identity of the indigenous peoples of the Andes.
[6] In 2011 Oriol Fontdevila and the team of the archive of the Fundació Tàpies invited us to participate in the project Prototypes in open code. The interest of the Fundació Tapies in establishing new links with “the public” from opening access to the archive of the exhibitions. This made us wonder about the structure of the archive and its capacity to legitimize power. In 2015, as part of the activities of the History Workshop, the seminar Doing things with documents was proposed with the resources of Performing The museum (performingthemuseum.net/site/spip.php?article59). Even today we are still going around the informal archive.
[7] Journalist and author of books such as Crema Catalana and La Casta. Who they are and how they act .
[8] On Sunday, July 2, in the football field of the Unión Deportiva Gornal (L’Hospitalet) took place “La Sardinada”, an activity organized collectively by the participants in the History Workshop of the CICdB and LaFundició, in which all the former neighbors of La Bomba, Can Pi and La Cadena were invited to meet again.
From the History Workshop we invited to eat and drink in an act of celebration, but also to contribute testimonies, memories, photos and other documents for the future archive of the CICdB. The map of the neighborhoods was also socialized (in which we have been working since the beginning of the Workshop), a video set and another radio set in which interviews were conducted.
Both La Sardinada and the History Workshop itself cannot be understood as “information basins” for our use, but as spaces for neighborhood self-organization and collective creation.
[9] Lachó Bají (https://lafundicio.net/blog/2014/11/26/lacho-baji/) was the title of the action-walk developed in collaboration with the Lachó Bají Calí association within the framework of El sol cuando es de noche, an event halfway between the festival, the exhibition and the seminar, organized by Pedro G. Romero at the MACBA (http://www.macba.cat/es/nit-flamenca/1/actividades/activ)
[10] See https://lafundicio.net/blog/2014/04/24/algunas-reflexiones-sobre-el-ciclo-la-ciudad-ganada-la-ciudad-perdida/ and https://lafundicio.net/blog/2014/03/26/la-ciudad-ganada-la-ciudad-perdida/
[11] There are different sides where there is evidence of the persecution of the language:
“Go to reside in the places where you are neighbors… And that none of those who call themselves gypsies speak a particular language but the common and ordinary one with the warning that for the same case even if they are neighbors and have dealings and trades they will be punished as vagabonds… with lashes and banishment” (June 1592, edict against the poor and beggars of the Sala de Alcaldes de Madrid, cited by Gómez Alfaro 2009: 84).
… and that they do not return to it, under penalty of death, and those who wish to remain, be settling in places, towns, and cities of these kingdoms of a thousand neighbors above, and that they cannot use the dress, language and name of gypsies, and gypsies, but since they are not of nation, let this name and use be perpetually confused and forgotten. And that under no circumstances may they deal in purchases or sales of livestock, which they must keep, under penalty of death” (Royal Decrees and Cedulas published in Madrid in 1619 by Felipe III, cited by Gómez Alfaro 2009: 102-103).
“I declare that those who call themselves gypsies are not such either by origin or by nature, nor do they come from any infected root… Therefore I order that they and any of them do not use the language, dress and method of vagrant life that they have used until the present, under the penalties contained below…” (Royal Pragmatic in force of law, September 1783, article V by Carlos III. Cited by Gómez Alfaro 2009: 280).
[12] To approach these materials we have been very mindful of the work of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Sociology of the image and her concept of “internal colonialism”. Faced with the rhetorical ways of communicating, the image helps us to glimpse critical interpretations of reality.
[13] “ José María Argueda, Canto Keckwa. Editorial Horizonte. Lima, 1938. p. 19.