Non-Fiction Feature Piece for BCN Week

G4 SUMMIT

Graffiti, Guns, Globalization and Ganas

If you ask somebody to define exactly what "subculture" means, they will probably look at you askance for proffering such a banal question, then promptly fail to give you anything like a substantial and well-defined answer. If you look it up online, you will come across a lot of waffle that ties itself up in knots by relying excessively on the word "culture". You will find words like subversion, Punks, ambivalent, non-domestic, Goths, negative, and tribes; and you will be a much better man than I if, from it all, you can derive any real meaning or significance.

When it's too difficult to decipher the meanings of words, it is often easier to take solace in images. As I walk through the streets of the city, I notice colours jumping out at me and dragging my attention away from the grey. The walls of the city are screaming out, looking for answers that I'm not sure I have. The walls are talking, and I think we ought to listen.

The images on the page opposite are all brought to you by Los Martinez, a group that lives and breathes on the same streets you traverse. But the identity of the group is less important than engaging with its discourse. If you look closely, you will see that their work has real content, something you won't find in "subcultures" defined largely by fads and pouty posturing. Interacting with Los Martinez, you are moved uncomfortably from your previous position of impassive alienation. The sharp nip of recognition you feel when you look at their work, particularly their hearts, makes you an active part of a systematic and structured opposition to the dominant culture you were ineffectually loving to hate. You have become a true outsider. You have moved away from subculture and joined the ranks of a counterculture.

One hundred years ago, the city of Barcelona and its people passed through a period of great poverty. A poor population struggled to live and, in extreme cases, starved to death. The ratio of food spending against housing spending was around 5:1. People lived in times of economic hardship and misery, but for the most part they could afford to pay for the roofs over their heads. In modern day Barcelona, the situation has been completely reversed. A normal person, earning 1000€ a month, could survive spending only 200€ a month on food, but would be very hard pushed to cover the cost of owning an apartment in the city with the remaining 800€. Most people won't starve in La Millor Botiga del Mon, but if you're not rich, you had better look for another place to rest your head at night. It is in the reality of this environment that Los Martinez are attempting to offer an alternative message to the people of the city.

Los Martinez are a group of like-minded individuals who found each other by chance as they worked individually on the streets, and who then joined together to produce work in which we find a seamless fusion of art and social commentary. They are social warriors, committed to reclaiming public space as our own by turning it into a free gallery. But the artistic beauty of their message should not fool you into taking their work lightly. This collective group of creative friends is not only fighting to reclaim the city's public spaces. In the barrios where speculation and big business are displacing residents, tearing down buildings, and trying to negate the rich history of the places they wish to reinvent in their own selfish image, Los Martinez are also out on the front lines alongside real people.

In Bon Pastor, Los Martinez painted walls alongside niños gitanos del barrio, in protest of the forceful eviction of families from the "casas baratas". In Barceloneta, they worked with the vecinos del barrio in their fight against the Ayuntamiento's Plan de Ascensores, a scheme that would see elderly people and families evicted from their homes. But it is perhaps in Los Martinez's old home of Poblenou where their fight has been the most intense, and it is this place that best highlights the unrelenting determination of their struggle and their continued belief in it. Nevertheless, it is here, too, where the odds against the success of their movement can seem largest.

In Can Ricart and Poblenou, Los Martinez were part of the group of 3,500 vecinos and friends of the neighbourhood that protested against the monster that is 22@. This privately-funded, local-government-supported venture has displaced the majority of Poblenou's artistic community, as well as many families who had lived for generations in what was tradit ional ly one of Barcelona's few authentic working-class neighbourhoods. It's an ugly thing in itself, and a pattern that's becoming all too familiar, but 22@ is made even uglier because many of the companies that operate out of this new state-of-the-art business park are ones that deal directly in, or have links to, the manufacture of arms. Indra, whose president heads the committee of 22@, is the world's biggest non-US supplier of military equipment to the world's largest military machine, the Army of the United States of America.

The protests in Poblenou, like so many others, were to no avail, and the pain felt in this particular defeat has been worsened recently by the attempted validation of 22@ and its presence in the neighbourhood through the three-day Inside22@ festival, run under the artistic direction of Niu and in direct collaboration with the 22@ committee. How is it possible that Niu, one of the groups that originally fought alongside residents and other artists against 22@, are now actively encouraging the presence of their conquerors in a celebration that is such an incredibly frivolous and insensitive rewriting of history?

But wait. It is too easy to point fingers at the speculators, propagators of war, and those who are completely consumed by the capitalist ethos of "More". If we look closely at the hands we point with, we might note, uncomfortably, that they too have a red tinge. As literate people living in a powerful Western democracy, we are all complicit in the ills of the world, and in one way or another there is undoubtedly blood spilled in our name every day. Maybe Niu, in the wake of 22@'s successful establishment, decided, as so many of us do, that this is the way things work in the world and there's nothing they can do about it.

Perhaps this elephant in the corner has allowed an overriding sense of apathy to fester within all of us; an apathy and a complacency that seem to have become the most prominent and bitter cultural capital of the day. We have been tricked into thinking that we are redundant and unable to offer any resistance to the forces of the world that shape and control our shadow lives. We have accepted our defeat and fallen out of love with the unfamiliar faces that stare back at us blankly from the other side of the mirror. Politicians don't listen to us. Wars are fought despite our Saturday afternoon marches against them. Nothing we do makes a difference, so why should we care? In discussions with members of Los Martinez, I saw that even they feel the weight of capitalism's demand for conformity. Though they fight for others selflessly, seeking no personal promotion through their acts, their lifestyle choice comes with the cost of being reminded every day that they don't own a house, or have 2.5 children, or a job that they can put on a resume. That they have chosen an "unconventional" life.

From what I see, Los Martinez keep doing what they do because they care, not only about making a stand against the violation of the city in which we live, but also about us. They could just as easily be called Los Rodriguez, or Los Smith. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Yet as we walk forward into what may be new times of hope, it was a member of Los Martinez who told me that, "We can't do everything". It is true: the wars won't stop overnight. The mobile phones in our pockets will still signal violence in Africa. The speculators and the greedy politicians won't desist from trying to fuck us over at every turn just because we ask them not to. In spite of this knowledge, or maybe because of it, the core message of Los Martinez is to look a little longer at ourselves in the mirror each day.

The feeling we are meant to experience when we look at the bright colours of their art, standing out against the backdrop of grey and greed that surrounds it, is that those colours are inside us. If we want to pay anything other than lip service to change, then it must start here: at home, in ourselves. The hearts on the wall are our own. It is up to us to rediscover them. And it is then our responsibility to let them sing, write, paint, shout or cry out in any way that affirms our collective struggle to remain part of the original and only truly abiding culture: humanity.

Que seamos más despiertos. Que seamos más conscientes.
Que seamos más vivos.
Más Amor.

Poetry: Red Fez

the coming insurrection

 Simon Friel

all my heroes are junkies.
visionaries,
holy and defrauded in rejection,
comatose on a lost highway to paradise.

sleeping dogs lie awake.
tempting night.
                mourning
knells at dawn:
automatic resurrection floods day into subjugation.

city is isolation peopled.
pre-paid advertisements of bought fears
moments
movements devoid of contemplation.

embryonic decimation of self.

silent bones of living dead chime in the half-light.
half-life.
this nirvana is a false and perishable commodity.
the ringing in your ears true;
a shrill echo from the abyss which has swallowed your soul.

open your eyes to the sky.

pale faced Selene draws brilliance from violet dusk to night.
howl at her.
hold her in the palm of your hand.
eat the sun.
beyond
within
whole worlds await
to devour you.

salute a single magpie.
you are privileged
a precious gift that can be beautiful.
shed doubt.
believe.
realise.

the new nature is green
brown purple
blue
and perfect.

we have surpassed our heroes.
the path before us is clear and determined.
small stones whisper entreaties as they scatter down from our mountain top.

the coming insurrection is now.

Fiction: Underground Voices

Rainbow's end 

Niente was a simple man. He lived alone in the middle of a place that had no name and 
which you would not be able to find on a map. For Niente, the question as to where he 
was was as irrelevant as to that which might have asked as to who he was. Questions 
like this, or of any other kind, never crossed his mind. 

He lived in a small, single floored, wooden house. He slept on a mattress on the floor, in 
a corner that was directly opposite the bare window from which the sun came each day. 
Outside and adjacent to the house was a garden in which he grew various fruits and 
vegetables. It never rained in this place, but Niente was able to tend to his garden by 
drawing water from a well on the opposite side of the house. 

In and around this place there was not any other person, or thing. The landscape was of 
an abject bleakness in all directions. The sky was a cloudless, pure, and relentless blue 
by day and by night there existed only a dead black, with neither moon nor stars, that 
enveloped all of the vast emptiness that could be seen by day into one whole, still, blind 
union by night. 

He took all of the things that he had for granted and never thought to ask himself how it 
was they were there, or how he had come to be using them. They were there and he used 
them in order to survive. That these things could one day disappear never entered his 
mind. Notions of any kind of lack were as alien to those of any sense of abundance. He 
was there as were his things, and this was how it would always be. Niente's world was 
fixed and in it there existed no possibilities of change, or surprises of any kind. 

Niente moved only between the house, the garden and the well. He never once thought 
to try and stretch the boundaries of his world and walk beyond the nothingness that 
surrounded him. He was, without any actual formal appreciation of the feeling, content 
with what he had. 

Whilst it was true that he never asked for or questioned anything, he was on occasions 
aware of a previous life that he had led before getting to this place.

From time to time, vague images and recollections of somewhere and some things, 
which were different to this place, would come to him as he carried out his daily tasks, 
haunting him like unobtrusive ghosts floating without direction through his windless 
sky. 

Once as he was leaving his house, the light from the sun - reflected of the glass window - 
had conjured up a dizzying vividness for him that was alien to the stoic life he lived on 
his small desolated spot of land. The outlines of new shapes formed, and bewitched him 
momentarily in a rainbow of colours that he sensed he knew, but whose names he had 
learned to forget. 

On another occasion he slipped and fell to the floor, while walking to his well, and 
became lost as he saw - in his wake - the dusty sand of the earth dance majestically from 
the floor, towards the empty sky, then fall back softly to the ground from which it came. 
This simple movement had pushed him back to a time where he had not been alone, and 
of another person who was not the one he knew himself to be. 

These reveries, or sporadic flights from reality, came and went without any regular 
frequency and possessed all of the significance that Niente attached to them, which was 
none. They were there whenever he wanted to notice them and would be lost, as quickly 
as they had come, as he looked around and was reminded of what he was supposed to 
be doing at the time. 

One day, while retrieving water from the well, he was distracted by one of these 
recollections of another history and walked absent-mindedly, in the opposite direction 
of the house and out into the vast expanse of the flat, arid land around it. A stray drop of 
water fell from his pail, onto the bare skin of his foot, and awoke him from his day-
dream. He looked around into the emptiness that surrounded him. Quickly realising his 
innocent mistake, he turned without a second thought towards the house and to his daily 
tasks. 

The next day, Niente awoke, lit up mechanically, as the sun's incessant rays rained 
down upon his face, bringing with them the first manifestation of life. He left the house 
to collect the water from the well, as he always did at this time, only to see that there 
was a man crouched beside the well. The stranger was replacing the earth over a point 
in the ground where it appeared he had just planted or buried something. Niente felt 
neither curiosity nor fear upon finding another man in what had always been, until this 
moment, this most solitary of places. He made his way towards the man only in order to 
carry out the task that he always did at this time. That the man was next to the well, and 
the well was the place from which he drew water, was the sole reason for Niente's 
movement towards him. 

Without any form of greeting or communication between the two, Niente proceeded to 
fill his pale. While doing so he noticed that this man's appearance was similar to the 
physical idea that he had of himself. However, as with the flashbacks of the forgotten 
past, this idea was soon displaced as he retrieved the now full pail from down the well. 
With his task complete, Niente turned his back to the stranger and walked to the garden 
in order to cultivate the crops. Later when he turned away from the sun, and as he knelt 
to take a tomato from the vine, he saw that the man was walking away, out into the 
barren desert. Upon returning to the well for more water, Niente failed to notice that the 
man had gone completely. 

The day continued as all of the others before it had done and with the swift 
disappearance of the sun, and the black enshrouding of the night, Niente slept. In his 
sleep he dreamt, if at all, of nothing more than the place in which he lived and the 
ascetic life he lived there. In his dreams he would see his hands pulling vegetables from 
the ground, or hear only the sound a rush of water would make as it fell from the pail 
onto the incredibly fecund earth of his garden. However, on the night that followed the 
day where the stranger had appeared, Niente was taken away by a dream that was not of 
the simple life that he lived alone on his empty plot of earth. 

He saw a new world grow up from the spot where he had seen the stranger covering the 
earth. A vast new world opened up to him, within his sleep, of vibrant colours, and it 
was filled with a cacophony of noise, and overwrought with the intoxicating smells of a 
pure nature. His stagnant land of sand and emptiness transformed before his eyes into a 
living place with fields full of the thickest deep green grass, which were surrounded by 
mountains and hills whose peaks and brows he felt compelled to climb and conquer, 
sure in the promise that on the other side he would find more of this new wonder. From 
above and behind came the onrushing of a roaring thunder, and under a thin veil of rain, 
he watched ferocious waves, from a great blue sea, crashing violently in white blasts of 
salty cloud onto the sandy shore. Wild animals ran freely through the forests and fields, 
and the laughter of little children could be heard as they played hide and seek behind the 
protection of the trees. 

Niente was lost in the feast of this new kingdom. Gasping for air, he awoke quickly 
before the morning light had the chance to come and force him to wake. He leapt from 
his bed into the void of darkness and ran to the door in furious anticipation of his dream 
having become a reality. Outside it would all be true, the stranger had sowed the seed, 
and the world he had dreamt would blossom into the most beautiful flower before his 
wild, ravenous eyes. He pulled open the door and tore towards the well and the spot 
where the stranger had been the day before. 

He had run for only a few metres when he stopped dead, under the blinding light of the 
instantly risen sun, in the realisation that all was the same and nothing was any different 
than it had ever been before. The only change being in himself and that his teary eyes 
were now unable to focus clearly upon the well and the spot where the stranger had 
stood, and nothing had grown. 

Niente fell to his knees and cupped his face in the hands he had only moments ago held 
outstretched to a future that he had already lost. The coarse sand offered little cushion to 
his knees and was now nothing more than ugly, yellow dust devoid forever more of any 
hidden significance or meaning. Now, he noticed for the first time that the hands that 
touched his face were wrinkled and old, and that the skin they touched was of the same 
weathered leathery texture. 

He stayed locked like this, frozen on his knees, and began to sob. The warm tears of 
sorrow flowed, searing into and tearing at his battered skin, as he slowly lifted his head 
up towards the reality of the irrevocable dead blue sky and screamed out into the callous 
void in which he was now forced to face his own solitary and simple desperation.