Silenced, stigmatized and persecuted, a group of Senegalese migrants gathered around the Popular Union of Street Vendors, created in 2017 Top Manta, a clothing brand and a loudspeaker to denounce the violence suffered by those forced to live without papers, which has managed to get more than 120 manteros off the street. Many others, the majority, continue to be the object of raids by the police, but they are part of the here and now, and as such they will represent Catalonia and the Balearic Islands at the next Venice Architecture Biennale.

Catalonia in Venice_ Following the Fish (Following the Fish), the proposal of the Institut Ramon Llull to participate in an edition that for the first time will put Africa in the spotlight, part of Leve, a team made up of Daniel Cid, Eva Serrats and Francesc Pla , who understands architecture as the engine of social change. “The theme proposed by the curator Lesley Lokko is the laboratory of the future and we think that better than going to see what Catalan architects are doing in Africa, there is an Africa that has been here for a long time and that it was worth talking about the Catalan territory and shoot from that African perspective”, says Prats.

“We will find an Italy governed by a xenophobic party and experiencing a migratory emergency. It will be like a punch”, acknowledges the director of the Ramon Llull Pere Albareda, who puts the budget for the pavilion at around 500,000 euros. “When we contacted Top Manta, the first thing they told us was ‘we’re not here to integrate, we’re here to interact,'” recalls Serrats in one of the Can Batlló warehouses, where Top Manta makes the clothes that it later sells in a Raval store and which in the last nine months has served as the setting for a conversation in which more than 200 people have participated. “The challenge was how to turn those voices into images,” agrees Serrats.

Whoever enters the Cantieri Navali, the usual headquarters of the Catalan pavilion, from May 20, what they will find will be a market for blankets: nine sheets suspended from the ceiling and fifty centimeters from the ground, in which the blankets recount their hellish journey to reach Europe, the dead at sea or the sentence to live without papers, to be persecuted and punished, aid networks or social struggles. “The system tends to make us visible and it is only fair that the Biennale open the doors to racialized and historically excluded people,” says the spokesman for the collective Aziz Faye, who in collaboration with other migrant associations in Italy will stage a silent march on the day of opening of the Biennale, on May 20.

Back in the pavilion, a video will show the day-to-day wandering around the city of the cook from the Bineta Fall workshop. “It is a flexible space, where you work, eat in community, pray and serve as a place of welcome… This richness challenges the Western world, so individualistic and fragmented, which prevents, for example, social spaces from having a single function”, reflects Serrats.

Because, beyond giving migrants a voice so that they build their own story, Leve’s true objective is to “cause real changes.” And that is where what they call Repair Workshops come in, the other great leg of the project, in which a hundred students of 26 nationalities and different national and international architecture schools participate, who work to convert some of their homes into anti-racist restaurants or shelters. the 36 premises that Barcelona City Council has purchased within the Neighborhood Plan.