Remember when we were only allowed to stroll within one kilometre of our home, and when no bars, no restaurants and only a few shops were open? A beauty of being restricted to roaming nothing but the streets is that it led to one woman to documenting the open-air art gallery on her doorstep in the neighbourhood of Tetuán.
The Black Lives Matter movement has influenced the world and has taught us all how to use our voices to great effect. It’s taught non-marginalised groups not to step aside, but to step up to the challenge and fight for their neighbours. BLM has also taught those already fighting for change that the effort is worth it and to keep on fighting.
One hot summer night in 2015, protestors gathered outside Congress, quietly sitting cross-legged on the pavement with blue gags tied around their mouths and with their hands behind their backs. Their timing was key, protesting until the clock struck midnight on Wednesday 1 July – the moment their actions would suddenly become unlawful.
In early March, just two weeks before lockdown began, photojournalism student Tamar Shemesh took a trip to El Alamín, a tiny ghost town 70 kilometres west of Madrid. In this reportage, she tells us what she found and what she learned – all aided by hauntingly beautiful photographs – and how it reminded her of Israel, her home.
Becha opened up her Lavapiés tailor shop two years ago with a big ambition: to get Spanish people wearing African clothes. But what she never anticipated was that her workshop would become a small hub for African migrants and, further still: a food bank for the local community.
The same spotlights that once shone bright on the faces of Madrid’s rising stars now illuminate food parcels for victims of Lavapiés’ Covid-19 crisis.
I don’t use the word cool very often, but having your photographs turned into hand-drawn works of art? Now that’s cool. Welcome to my first ever art collection of local artists’ paintings and illustrations inspired by my photographs of Madrid.
Saturday 8pm, May 2, 2020 will be a moment I remember for the rest of my life as the night Madrid took back its city for the first time… in decades.
Forget the Alhambra. We’re here to explore those places that can’t be found in the guide books, those bars that can’t be found on pretty streets, and those fragments of history that haven’t been moved to a display cabinet but instead remain in situ for us all to see… if we know where to look.
Madrid-based writer and artist Lauren Klarfeld combines her love for the streets of Madrid with the people who walk them, and in this article, she reveals her secret project, Last Words For The Road.