Chalk

Drawing in Plaça de la Vila de Gràcia

The text written by some young anarchists this afternoon outside the Town Hall offices in Gràcia lasted no more than two hours, erased by some diligent public employees. The municipal organisation is astonishing when it comes to wiping out the traces of dissidence.

Instead of stubbornly persisting with supposedly permanent means, activists ought to look to the poetic serenity of a little girl drawing on the ground with her chalk, light and ephemeral: with it, so apparently harmless, so falsely innocent, her words would have passed by placidly over a festive Easter weekend.

We need imagination to find new other forms of communication and to break our mental habits. The world of technological devices and social networks makes us gregarious, conformist and devoid of imagination. But, at the same time, it creates new spaces of action where the poetic act can generate fractures, glitches in the perception of reality, because ours is a fragile reality.

(I remember that day of an opening at the FAD, shortly after the eviction of the camp in Plaça de Catalunya. To write about it.)