Make Your Mark

As I said a couple of days ago, the people of Barcelona have a lot to say, and sometimes in a uniquely artistic way.  In Barrio Gotico, tucked back into the streets is this chalkboard.  People can write anything they want (and they definitely do).  Sometimes there is even chalk provided to write with...or I guess you could just bring your own.  I love checking out messages and the doodles whenever I'm down in the Gotico and need to get away from the crowd.

Sadie also liked the flowers out front and 'made her mark' as soon as we were done with the pics.

Cement Jungle

Barcelona is a cement jungle, much like New York or San Francisco.  Sure there are parks strewn about, but the majority of land is taken up by sidewalk, street, and buildings.  Yesterday we were walking near where Passeig de Colom meets the Rambla.  Tucked into the corners of the Delegación de Defensa En Cataluña building was this tree.  It is such a stark contrast between the grayness of the cement and the old dirt.  I love finding these spots of natural beauty in this city, where life is finding a way despite our best efforts.

Protest

Barcelona is a culture that has something to say.  It knows how to protest.  The graffiti contains political or life messages.


Large corporations such as Citibank, El Corte Inglés, and Starbucks paid dearly in property damage on the day of the General Protests due to their involvement in economical collapse as well as their unwillingness to close their doors while the rest of Barcelona was at war against the system.

What I'm learning, though, that while Barcelona has a lot to say and be angry about, as do many other cultures, countries, etc, the people aren't offering solutions.  Yeah, we understand that you don't want cuts to education, but how do you get out of deficit without some sort of sacrifice?  Surely there is some misappropriation of funds, etc., that leads to cutting valuable programs.  And some politicians (if not all) are protecting their own interests rather than those of the people.  But, how do we fix these issues?  Causing property damage costs the taxpayer and the consumer more in the end.  It's not a great solution.

We saw this last photo on a walk today.  What a reminder on how to live your life.  The acquisition of wealth does not exempt one from death.  It's all temporary.  But, as poignant as this is, it doesn't answer the question: "If I'm still going to die…then what?"  What do you do with this information?  OK, so you've called us out, but what's the alternative.  Where do we go from here.

I'm not going to attempt to answer these questions here, especially the political ones.  We all have things we can be angry about, but rather than just trying to rip the system apart, how do we move to positive change?  That's the challenge.

Making Memories

One of the things I've been particularly bad about in the past is finding creative things to do with pictures we take or videos of our lives.  I end up with gigabites of unused media, although it is fun to look back every now and again.  Tracy and I were walking the streets a couple of weeks ago and I saw what looked like the perfect canvas.  It's just particle board on a wooden frame, which almost looks like a stretched canvas.  I thought it would be a perfect surface to decoupage and hang on the wall.  

The hard part was figuring out what to put on it.  For the past 2 weeks, it's been used as a barrier to keep Kitty out of certain areas of the apartment, then Tracy challenged me to put some photography to work.  

I started with a copy of La Vanguardia that I purchase for 1,20€ and covered the whole surface.

Then I combed through our pictures and printed photos of our time in Barcelona.  I printed until I ran out of ink. 

Here is the final product…so far.  

We intend to continue adding photos as we make more memories and buy more ink. 

A Texas-Shaped Table

We took a walk two weeks ago at trash night.  As we were contemplating turning back towards home, we ran across this odd, Texas-shaped table.  Tracy could immediately see potential in it, but I was completely against taking it home.  As soon as we turned to walk away, I changed my mind and we picked it up.  We managed to get it home and not do any damage to it on the way.  We toyed with different ideas on how to utilize it and what to do with it, but after careful analysis, we decided to decoupage it.  Of course, Tracy was completely right about this table's potential. Here is the process.

The Original felt covers, or what was left over after I started taking it apart.  There were 3 layers of felt (2 maroon and one mustardy yellow), full of dust, each individually stapled to the table.  I had to pull hundreds of staples out of every surface of the table, with pliers.  

The Table with the felt cover removed.

After all the staples were removed, the surface of the table was largely destroyed.  There were also half staple sticking up out of the wood, which I could not remove with pliers, so I hammered them back into the table to avoid tetanus scratches. 

Me looking at pictures and pages to cut out.  A couple of the legs had Carcoma (wood worm), so I had to do some injections of Matacarcoma (a clear chemical used to treat wood) before I could start on resurfacing.

What to use, what to use.  So many fun pictorial history books I found late one night while Sadie was going potty.

Getting started

It's always hard to decide where to put my favorite images.

An hour in.

A different angle.

Getting close to finishing...Sadie is bored.

Almost done...just missing a couple edges.

The Final Project

Another Angle of the table.

Thanks to Tracy for taking the great pictures of me hard at work.

Identity…what's that?

Identity. It's who I am.  But who am I?  Over that last two years I have entrenched myself in fundraising and moving to Europe, but I only conceptually knew what that meant.  Now that we're here, the support raising has wound down, we have our residency handled, and an apartment, I don't know what to do.  I wake up in the morning and I don't have that one thing in my day that will make me feel like I've accomplished something.  We have been meeting new friends, and building other relationships and getting into a rhythm.  I personally just feel a need to make something happen, to get down and dirty, to create.
I was speaking with someone the other day about restorative art and all I could think of was making new art out of old, thrown away, street stuff.  We found a chest of drawers and I worked to inject each little woodworm hole with a syringe to kill the infestation.  I did the same with some chairs that we bought cheaply.
The most recent project, though, is taking a very basic IKEA bookshelf that we found on the street and making a sort of collage out of it.  I used pages from books from the 50's - 70's that no longer had covers, just pages (and were destined for the recycle bin), and newspapers from the late 70's. Here is how the project panned out.  I'm not going to do captions because it's self explanatory.  The best part about it, though, is due to the time period of the papers I was using, the bookshelf took a conspiratorial theme.  Good times.