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| [Pic: Reuters: Nacho Doce] |
Read more from ABC (Australia) here.
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today, Nov. 2021]
They are informal gatherings where we talk about death related topics. It is a space of complete trust. It’s non-therapeutic and we let our thoughts and emotions flow.
Q. This year is the tenth anniversary of Death Cafes at an international level, with the first one in London. How many have been held in Catalonia and when did they start?
It is my personal initiative. I started in February 2019 and we had 12 meetings up to March 2020, when we stopped due to the pandemic. Subsequently, I have held 7 more virtual meetings.
Q. Why did you decide to organise these meetings?
My personal story is that I’ve had several losses that have marked my vision of life and death. From 2007 to 2015, I’ve been attending oncology patients at the end of life in their homes. Then in 2015 I finished my Social Worker studies and later I did a Masters in palliative care. I am currently working in end of life care. My major concern is that this society does not talk about death. It’s a taboo and I want to break this taboo, inviting people to do that.
Q. What kind of people come to death cafes and for what reasons?
Usually the average age is 40 and up, but we have also had young people. There are many reasons, mainly just curiosity, but also there’s interest in talking about death and not being judged for it. It’s not a grief management group, but people find that they’re respected with the freedom to talk about death and everything related to it.
Q. How do you run your cafes?
As an organiser, you should have questions or topics prepared to be presented. That makes the session more dynamic. The role of the moderator is to ensure that the conversation is safe and that everyone can participate, and the most important thing is to never be judged for your thoughts or emotions.
Q. At last count there have been 13,099 Death Cafes in 80 countries, why do you think they have been so popular?
There is always an interest in everything to do with death, as the last taboo. It is true that in British and American culture, these encounters are easier. In Mediterranean culture I think there is much more reticence.
Q. One attendee at a meeting in the US said that "most of the sessions are full of people laughing and having fun.... You meet strangers and talk about an intimate topic that most people can't even talk about with their family." Do the meetings in Catalonia actually include fun?
There are moments of everything, of attentive listening, of seriousness, but there can also be moments of humour and positive expression. People also enjoy themselves and share joy as well as funny situations about death.
Q. In a broader context, what do you think have been the impacts of the pandemic on bereavement, grief and funerals, and the effect of these changes on mental health and well-being?
I think that not being able to say the usual goodbyes to our loved ones will make grieving more complicated to manage. Death has been visualised, but in the end if it hasn't happened to you, it will be statistics. I think it affects our mental health and wellbeing, but I think society penalises people who have suffered a loss and bereavement will be poorly managed.
Q. Do you think there’s really such a thing as the much-talked-about “closure” after death? Is a good death possible?
A good death is how you want it to happen, so it is important to think, talk and write down how you want it to be if the time comes (advance directives). It’s a very personal thing and can be confusing but for me it’s being able to be with my loved ones, to have them respect my decisions, to have control of the situation and to be able to leave with everything spoken about and with a lot of love. There is never closure if we truly have love for that person. At the beginning it is an intense pain but as time goes by, this person remains in our memory, not with pain but with gratitude for having known and enjoyed him or her.
I’m the last person in a queue.
There’s half a dozen people in front of me and we are waiting for the door to this electricity company to open. (Does it really matter which energy company? Is there any real difference between them?)
Finally, we are inside the tiny waiting room. The four seats are taken so I stand next to another customer. We are “esteemed clients” a sign on the wall says.
After 20 minutes I get a seat and after another 25 minutes I am sitting in front of a harassed employee named Xavier. We have come to know each other’s faces quite well over the last 6 weeks since I’ve had to persist in my visits there every week. He is always polite, sympathetic and vaguely sad. He shrugs a lot. I tap the bones under my eye. (They’re called sockets too aren’t they?)
November 2, 2010. The electricity in the house we bought (with a bank mortgage) in a small town near Vilafranca back in August is flicked into life. Here it’s called ‘la luce’ or ‘light.’ Let there be light. Please.
Fast forward almost a decade to May 4, 2020. A few months into the Covid emergency, this power company reports “a more than doubling of first-quarter net profit to 844 million euros compared with 363 million in the same period last year.”
January 2021. Media report: “Electricity bills increased by 26.7% in the first days of the year compared to the same period of 2020, according to consumers' rights association Facua.” This follows frequent power outages across Catalonia, with municipalities affected including Barcelona's lowest income neighbourhoods of Raval, Badalona and Torre Baró.
June 5, 2021. A demonstration in the Catalan capital’s Plaça de Catalunya is in full voice. The gathered are protesting what they say is clearly going to be a jump in electricity prices coming from a new peak and off-peak billing system. A media source says: “The increase could be 8.5% for some households but as high as 27.3% for others depending on the supplier.”
The Organization of Consumers and Users (OCU) is arguing that small households and businesses are likely to suffer the most. Those who work at home during the day (including this journalist) are also at risk of increased energy costs. Social media jokes about ironing after midnight don’t seem especially funny to me.
But a promise has been made. There will be “savings for 19 million consumers already on a plan without hourly rates.” To me, this is about as believable as their other promise. The 9 million customers who had hourly based pricing will supposedly now have their bills rise by only around €2 a month.
What seems more probable to me is that with the Covid 19 pandemic starting to show signs of fading, the three big energy companies are using this time as a good excuse to create a so-called “new normal.” Apparently, normal service (ie. poor quality service) is to be resumed as soon as possible, except at higher prices for millions of consumers who are unable to afford it.
There is of course a simple solution to the above. It’s called nationalisation. A government, elected by a majority of voters, runs an infrastructure system on behalf of all the population, for the populations’ sole benefit, not for investor profit. It would guarantee lower prices.
Radical? I don’t think so. It’s been done plenty of times before.
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, July 2021.]
publisher’s summary:
Catalonia is no longer a country of industry, but one of tourists.
The day that Barcelona was left without tourists [2020, Covid-19] felt strange to the locals, they were so used to them.
During the last 60 years, tourism has changed the country’s appearance.
It has urbanized half of the country, has damaged natural ressources, has transformed the economy and has created a lot of jobs… temporary jobs. Part of Catalonia’s identity was made up of industry, and now it is a country that fabricates tourists. During the pandemic we have discovered the cost of this bet, now full of uncertainties.
La fàbrica de turistes covers the creation of the myth of the Costa Brava, the birth of Port Aventura [amusement park], and the appearance of Barcelona as a big international tourist destination… and it stresses the urgency of finding a plan B for its economy."
Above text from Literary Rambles here.
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| [Photo: Oriol Duran, Barcelona.] |
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| [Photo: Eva Parey, from Expulsiones Anunciadas] |
From last summer until now, the Covid-19 pandemic was also the subject of an especially harrowing set of photos she took of life in Barcelona’s streets and treatment rooms. It has also meant that several of Eva’s recent exhibitions have had to move online.
I would say it’s near impossible to do justice to the best photography by attempting to use words to describe or comment on it. What I can express is how I’m taken in by her images because of the pure humanity that shines through them and how sensitively she frames her subjects.
The nucleus of her whole catalogue is people and the living environment but more particularly, people from minority groups or disadvantaged backgrounds.
These include children in Barcelona’s eviction-ravaged Meridiana, ethnic Kalash animists, slum-dwelling women in Mumbai, the victims of new segregation along the Slovak wall and Pakistani immigrants in Barcelona (including her photos of men at prayer in a mosque).
Much of Eva’s work can be viewed on her website (EvaParey.com). One project she talks about there that has been widely displayed in galleries across Catalonia is titled ‘East Winds.’
According to her it’s “a portrait of the Romani Diaspora [concentrating on a family headed by Ioana,] a matriarch whose 15 children are dispersed across Europe, between Romania, France, Germany and Spain.”
In the section of pictures called ‘Under a Hot Tin Roof’ she says that “After living for a while in Barcelona, Ioana decided to return to Romania, taking care of her grandchildren.”
In Eva’s opinion her children “aspire to be like their elders who are their role models, putting them in the same position as their predecessors once they become adults: at the mercy of political decisions, socio-economic ups and downs and socially at the back of the queue. Emigration is the only way out.”
Her skills are not restricted to fixed images though. Recently, Eva’s first documentary film became available through Filmin. Called ‘Arrels fondes’ (Deep roots) and jointly directed by Pep Martínez, it’s an hour length co-production with IB3 Television in Catalan with English or Castellano subtitles.
As a “journey through the branches of memory on the island of Formentera from the Franco regime to its opening to tourism, locals on the island of Formentera narrate how they survived the famine in the mid-1950s.
Through autumn to summer, the island's transformation is shown, “from tranquillity to tourist saturation with globalization causing the inevitable loss of certain ancestral customs, despite the retired peasants remaining rooted in land and sea; a deep bond that few young people inherit.”
Eva appears to not be content with her substantial creative output since 2006, sharing her knowledge by teaching photography at the Tecnocampus University of Mataró and photojournalism at the UPF in Barcelona. Her professional history also includes participation in collective and group shows such as ‘Photojournalists: looking at violence against women in the world,’ which was held in Barcelona’s Institut Català de la Dona in 2019.
In the summer of 2010 the French government ordered the mass expulsion of thousands of Roma during August and September after the riots in Saint-Aignan that were triggered by the death of a Roma at the hands of the police.
Some of Ioana’s children were living in camps on the outskirts of Lille in France. The police arrived with an expulsion order for everyone to leave within 24 hours. When the time was up they led them to the Belgian border or deported them by plane on the understanding that they would not return to French soil. Many left voluntarily in order to be able to return.
This happens every year to Roma people from Eastern Europe. The French government continues expelling Gypsies, nowadays offering no form of financial help.
"Xavier G-Solís held two exhibitions entitled ESTATAMBESTAT/ESTATCONTRAESTAT:
. 1 October - 8 November 2020, at Sala dels Trinitaris in Vilafranca del Penedès . 5 November - 5 December 2020, at Galeria Contrast in Barcelona
Covid-19, its development, impact and effects form the basis of most current debates in our media and politics, and the illness has therefore become a rich interface of conflict that exacerbates contemporary inequalities and creates new ones. Yet, polemic can also be the source of renovation and construction, and as such, Covid-19 needs and deserves to be discussed from a multidisciplinary, global perspective.
The Barcelona November 2021 seminar Australian and Transnational Studies Centre│Fac. of Philology│U of Barcelona│Gran Via, 585│08007 Barcelona, Spain
Pandemic as Polemic aims to provide such a floor for open-minded discussion.
We invite scholars to submit proposals for panels, posters and papers on the topic, from whatever point of view or discipline. • Submissions should include an abstract of 200-300 words in the language of the paper (choose one of the nine languages listed below) as well as in English, together with a brief biography in English. All should be sent to the scientific committee no later than 15 May. • Acceptation of proposals will be informed by 15 June.
The seminar will be held ON LINE on Thursday 4th and Friday 5th November, and is free of charge, but registration is needed at the e-mail address ceatubenrolment@gmail.com.
The CEAT will send the information and links for the Seminar to the registered participants. English, Catalan and Spanish will be the languages of the Seminar, but participants can submit ad give their communications in German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Galician and Basque as well. No translation will be provided.
For further information and submission of proposals contact us at ceatsubmissions@gmail.com Scientific committee: Dr. Isabel Alonso Breto, Dr. Montserrat Camps-Gaset, Dr. Maria Grau-Perejoan, and Dr. Martin Renes. "
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| [Colour-blind Covid warning] |
We are all scrabbling suddenly on the internet to buy "virus- safe" filters for the windows and air conditioners in our houses after another full lockdown/confinement/
Imagine...There's the above possibility (or "potential", the word I keep hearing everywhere on mainstream media and the Twittersphere.)
Somehow in my mind this is connected with a brilliant documentary I watched yesterday ("Listen to Me Marlon") on that most authentic of humans, Brando. He was one of the first males to use the power of suggestion in body and face language and movement, all coming from his harvesting and harnessing of childhood memory of his mother and a solitary upbringing in the open air and nature.
He realised the primacy and goodness of Tahitians, indigenous first nation Americans, and was one of the few celebrities who put his body on the line in the early proto-BlackLivesMatter public protests in the late 1960s.
He was with Martin Luther King around the time he was assassinated and years later still felt moved enough that he could still recall the sound of that brave soul's voice. Brando seemed to work and live his life as an expression of pure authenticity.
One of the few writers who is doing the same today is Suzanne Moore. She just reeks of it: the unabashed openness of being herself. In a highly unfashionable act, she wrote recently about the importance of Freud, remembering him as he understood the babyish primacy of memory, childhood, want and nakedness.
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| [Photo: Jeff Gilbert/Alamy] |
Almost a quarter of all household wealth in the UK is held by the richest 1% of the population, according to alarming new research that reveals a historic underestimation of inequality in the country.
The study found that the top 1% had almost £800bn more wealth than suggested by official statistics, meaning that inequality has been far higher than previously thought. Researchers said the extra billions was a conservative estimate and could well be more.'
Read more from source at The Guardian's Observer here.
I love the place and always get a thrill out of going there – we live on the edge of Barcelona province in a small town – but walking through crowds of people in the midst of a contagious pandemic, it was impossible to relax and enjoy myself as I’d always done before.
Yes, most people were wearing masks covering the nose and mouth but around 20 or 30 percent of those in the street were not. Plenty of them appeared to be tourists. The following day, regulations were changed so that it was compulsory to wear a mask in all public places across Catalonia.
I have to say though, the relief I felt when I escaped the absurdly narrow traffic lanes of Gran Via and got the car out near the space and mountains surrounding Josep Tarradellas Barcelona–El Prat Airport was a welcome one.
It seemed almost claustrophobic and unnatural to be in a city of 4.8 million on the day that a city with the same population (Melbourne in Australia) had just been locked down in Covid quarantine for six weeks.
It might also have been in my subconscious but in the days before my unusually disquieting visit, I’d read an article about Barcelona having Europe’s most densely populated square kilometre in Europe. More than 53,000 people inhabit this single 1km² area. (France also has a place with more than 50,000 people in a single km², in Paris.)
The urban zone that breaks this very dubious record lies just south of Barcelona Football Club’s Camp Nou stadium. Unlike older city locals who often refer to places (public squares) as reference points, for me as mainly a travelling teacher, I use Metro stations and recognised this ultra-dense area is between the Collblanc and Torrassa stations on one side. The other corners run along the old N340 national road to near Badal metro stop and down to Santa Eulalia station.
It’s true that technically speaking this compressed cube of humanity is in the “city” of L’Hospitalet de Llobregat but in reality it was originally agricultural land, subsumed by the Catalan capital and (as someone who has spent time working around there) it certainly feels to me like it’s a extension of Barcelona, being only eight stops on the Metro from Barcelona’s centre. When combined, the two “separate cities” make up the second most dense urban area in all of Europe.
It hardly needs saying but this particular part of Barcelona is one the poorest. It has a high number of low-income immigrants but residents say that renting an apartment can still cost 800 or 900 euros a month, which can only encourage overcrowding. This is made worse by the fact that a growing number of people living there are not registered with the local council. This leads to underfunding of social and other services.
Other problems in the area are a simple, natural result of this extreme density: major lack of parking, an almost complete lack of green spaces and related high levels of pollution. Recently, this square kilometre and surroundings have also been a centre of a wider outbreak of Covid-19 in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat.
As a result, I ask the question: If living in each others’ pockets is such a good thing then why aren’t the very richest in society doing it?
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, Sept. 2020.]
