Streets of Madrid: scaffolds and debris. Bags, ramps, an umbrella, clothes piling up in a dumpster. Displacements and dwellings. “The American myth of the immigrant in search of a new life and eager to leave origins behind still exists but it coexists alongside this other immigrant story whose project is sustaining the place of origin, often through processes of self-duplication […] Working abroad to sustain home often implies dual citizenship in both the literal sense (more and more countries are allowing it) and the existential sense of a kind of doubling of the self into parallel identities in one place and the other. This can be both a fragmenting and an empowering experience” (Mary Louise Pratt, “Why the Virgin of Zapopan went to Los Angeles”, 2005: 282-3). They ask time and time again: Where are you from? Do you go back home? Behind this scaffold one still can see pasteups by Are You Dead next to a graffiti whose author I don’t remember. Methods of street writers: moving about: inhabiting cities collectively: proliferating identifications. “Migration,” suggested Stuart Hall, “is a one-way trip. There’s no ‘home’ to go back to. There never was” (“Minimal Selves”, 1987).
Barrio de las Letras, Madrid, 26 de septiembre de 2014.
