A week living in a shop window in the Raval, until today, between Paloma and Lleó streets, in a corner of Barcelona converted into a creative space.
These days the artist Andrea Roma eats cans of Litoral vegetables, drinks Don Simón fruit juices and reads an anthology of New York poets. The young woman has neither a cell phone nor the Internet, and she barely interacts with those who point at her from the street while they drink a can of beer. But the artist also looks at you, and she is not pleasant. Her ashtray is crammed with rolled cigarette butts, and next to it she has a pack of Lucky. Bored you smoke more…
Me dejo de mi invites us to reflect on intimacy, on the public and the private, and it does so from the tradition of urban art, questioning, without prior notice, the neighbor busy with his affairs, in the middle of the street, interrupting his daily thoughts.
And if you didn’t have the opportunity to go to this corner, you can go to the Rambla del Raval, very close by, where recently, in the central section, a young man lives in a cardboard box. He sometimes shows his head, and when he does it is super disturbing. He normally acts demure, but this weekend he was in a good mood and could be heard singing. Who has not been seen for a few days is the sub-Saharan who settled in the superblock of the Sant Antoni neighborhood, between Manso and Borrell, a very orderly and neat man who every night spread out the bed sheet on his bench without leaving wrinkles. below, the one above and a quilt “It seems strange to look at it,” three students from the Massana art school say in front of the window in question. It gives a bit of a bad vibe… like when you look at the people who live in Gardunya Square, the ones you see on your way to class. I still don’t know if I like it. I have to digest it.”
Yes, reality always surpasses everything else, and especially after the pandemic, many homeless people in Barcelona prepare their corners more carefully than ever, with mattresses, tents and nightstands. The thing is that your experience does not have such a clear expiration date. In any case, if listening to the lives of people who really lost their privacy a long time ago makes them hesitant, surely in this experimental corner they will soon propose another similar initiative.
