>> a year ago, you were unfolding it on the ground(1). To be seen, to be read, to be heard, displayed in a circle very open and full, a long poem incorporating many different formats. It needed to be remembered and reshared, that’s why you are presenting it here now, in a more textual shape, but maintaining the same structure. 

 

The word cutting, stuttering provoking, the repetition indicating a certain emphasis, breaking the rhythm to introduce an opening(2).

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Babbling as a force triggering other words and images, adding more reality, more facts:

in the center of the penin sula the

caña(3) cane CAÑA

capi(4) tal almost blurs it all it is s-pain it is bread’s pain or better all the

homophobia remains the same

aggre sions 

in sults 

proli ferate 

one’d say that the

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Written a year ago from Madrid steaming rage at a policy that does not take responsibility, that harms and wants to harm, that distorts speech into dark places where any difference/dissidence is excluded and denied. Erasing more than declining. Today, your text is read with the same need for response, for the sake of not erasing anything, but rather showing it, presenting it all. 

 

Definitely…sometimes I feel so much rage, so helpless facing the indifference of Some Those Others that my speech starts losing consistency (as evaporated with the anxiety, you know?) and it starts breaking into syllables, sounds, onomatopoeia. Among these sequences another meaning arises that challenges the original one, sometimes reinforcing it, sometimes twisting it around, sometimes in a not very precise manner. Sometimes this/these other sense/senses that come up are better because they are cooler, (in the way that they are more fun)(5). They may take away from us the hearing with their indifference, they may gaslight us through their equidistance, but this other sense lasts, this other meaning, they can’t take it from us. That

desire to say something strong 

that in the face of the other’s silence fall

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This year, the feeling of double reality, the abyss between the popular feeling and the power, has continued to sharpen. Hence, the frustration and the rage, hence, then, the poe-m-ma-nifest. Hence, the need to reshare it now. Again, no pride in genocide. (6)

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(1)man if I esto, Barcelona (Casal de Barri Pau de la Figuera), 2024, Congreso de Diputades. 

(2)Due to the difficulty of translating either some Spanish words that don’t translate into English, as well as the puns, I’ve chosen to leave some of the Spanish, as well as continuing the word games freely in the English version. A more free-translation, re-enacting/re-producing the game rather than translating it word by word. 

(3)Spanish for the traditional small beer sized glass. Astonishing as it may be, it’s the epitome of Ayuso’s sense of freedom. “Irse de cañas” (to go out beer drinking) became the core of her neoliberal rhetoric. (In her own words…) “Because we do like drinking in Madrid, AND WHAT?”.

(4)In Spanish capi is short for capital, the country’s capital, as in “nos vamos pa la capi”, off to the capital we go.

(5)In Spanish “guay” sounds like gay it contains joy.

(6)Motto that led the festival.